Email marketing anyone?

Producing, high quality, mobile-ready email templates just got a whole lot easier, thanks to the folks over at Campaignmonitor.

While email has come in for a lot of negative press (primarily due to the abuse of said tool by spammers), email marketing, if planned and executed well, still represents one of the most cost-effective means of communications with your existing customers and prospects.

And it can be used at any stage of the marketing funnel.

It’s never been easier to engage customers, even if your organisation doesn’t have dedicated marketing resources.  The development team at Campaignmonitor, one of the world’s leaders in hosted email distribution platforms has been busy creating ‘Canvas’ – a drag and drop-based email template tool, which allows you to custom-build templates in minutes.

The big plus for ‘Canvas’ is it delivers responsive design – guaranteed.  That means your email will dynamically render to the size of the device it’s being viewed on, without the need to struggle with HTML or CSS code.

Choose the email layout you want

Here’s what I really like about ‘Canvas’.  You can pick and choose the layout you want.  So whether you’re creating a content-heavy newsletter or a picture gallery with less text, there are options for almost any layout.

Screenshot from Campaignmonitor’s template builder, ‘Canvas’

All it takes is a click of the mouse to drag and drop content blocks and images and you have a beautiful, responsive email ready to engage your customers and communicate the qualities of professionalism that your brand deserves.

So why use email?  Well, there are many reasons, but here are just a few:

• Through the facility to embed links and other multi-media, email marketing can be very effective in explaining more complex concepts or technologies to potential customers and lends itself well to the technology industry.
• Email is far more measureable than traditional advertising or direct mail.  Email marketing platforms such as CampaignMonitor provide a wealth of statistics on open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes and of course the rate of social shares.
• Email allows for A/B testing so marketers can refine their message at the start of the campaign.  Campaign learning doesn’t have to take place at the end but can occur at a much earlier stage, helping the marketer to really maximise the opportunity at hand.A/B testing is most famously demonstrated by Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, which made widespread use of email marketing as part of its fundraising efforts.  For example, in one test on subject lines, the campaign team found that the most effective iteration would raise $2.5m in donations, while the worst performing subject line would bring in less than $500,000.  Similarly, the team achieved a 5pc uplift in conversions by A/B testing a long online donation form against a sequential format that asks for a little bit of information at a time, with the latter proving to be more effective.

So what are you waiting for?  Log onto Campaignmonitor and start communicating with professional, responsive email designs today.