5 Ways You Can Earn a Better ROI with Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following excerpt is from Susan Gunelius’ book Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound

Whether you’re marketing to consumers or other businesses, and regardless of the industry you’re in, these five key email marketing best practices have a direct effect on the success rates of your email marketing efforts.

1. Timing

Email marketing funnels include a sequence of messages that are automatically sent out (or “dripped”) at specific times. You set this timing up when you create the automation in your email marketing tool. Since the power of email conversion funnels is in their ability to remind, engage and persuade contacts to take specific actions, the timing of when people receive your messages matters a lot.

If you were speaking with someone, would you tell them something and then continue to remind them every five minutes? If you needed to call a prospect to close a sale, would you call them twice a day, every day, or every other day? How often is too often?

Most email recipients act on a message within 24 hours. Therefore, an automated sequence of messages should be configured to send messages every two days unless there is a deadline or other urgent reason that requires messages in your funnel to be sent more frequently. You can extend the number of days between messages when you reach the third message in a sequence so it doesn’t seem like you’re spamming people with too many messages. Your goal is to find the right balance that your audience will accept between staying in front of your contacts and looking like a spammer.

2. Offer

The heart of every email conversion funnel is the offer to your target audience—what they’ll get in exchange for taking the action you want. Your offer must be extremely relevant to the target audience and highly desirable, or they won’t be motivated to act. In other words, your email conversion funnel won’t convert. Therefore, spend time researching what your audience wants and needs. Search Google, online forums, question…