May the odds be ever in your favor

With the recent box office success of “The Hunger Games,” I’ve been thinking about how to apply the games’ slogan to the world of email marketing. “May the odds be ever in your favor” of…. what exactly? Well, there’s plenty that we’d like to be to our advantage as we manage our email and social media programs. Let’s look at a some examples:

The odds of: inbox placement
I work with a lot of small business owners and it has been my experience that not everyone knows a message isn’t automatically going straight to the recipient’s inbox. If you want to increase the chances that your campaign doesn’t land in the spam folder, start with a list of contacts who have given you their permission to send them marketing emails. After that, it’s about relevancy, good message design and readability.

The odds of: successful metrics
More relevancy = more engagement = more opens and clicks. The formula really is that simple.

The odds of: social media engagement with your campaign
More relevancy + the tools to share your message = more shares within a recipient’s network. By giving someone content that resonates and the means to easily pass it along, the more likely it is that they’ll actually share it on Facebook or tweet about it.

What other odds does an email marketer want to be in their favor? Having a message that’s readable is one, as is a good subject line. Knowing how your recipients like to read their messages and what subject lines generate the most action will come over time. But once that knowledge is obtained, it’s important to remember to use it.

The topic of email deliverability is worth a deeper dive than I’ve given above. Here are a few blog posts in the that are worth a read:
15 best practice tips for improving email deliverability
Five Ways to Improve Email Deliverability with Gmail
Understanding and Improving Email Deliverability

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