Jonny Day from Discount Home Store is now the proud owner of a shiny new Apple iPad 2.0 courtesy of iContact, the email marketing and social media marketing company for small and medium sized businesses.
Jonny’s winning entry in our email marketing competition was selected by iContact’s judges for its good use of a free and customizable email design template, uncluttered use of text and messaging that established the recipient as a valued customer and reconfirmed Home Discount Store’s value proposition – huge savings on home and garden products.
We’d like to congratulate Jonny on his winning entry. His use of a pre-designed template shows that even small businesses with limited design resources can produce professional looking email campaigns that yield fantastic results.
John Hayes, iContact UK
Jonny was also kind enough to share the initial results from his email marketing campaign with us. With an open rate of 16.5% and a click through rate of 2.0% his first campaign was not too far off industry averages for the retail sector and could easily be improved with a little tweaking to the subject line and additional focus on segmenting his list and targeting with appropriate offers.
Andrew Penchuck, iContact’s marketing guru told us “We picked Discount Home Store as the winner because the results from their first campaign were so encouraging. With a little development, Discount Home Store could easily be exceeding industry averages in the online retail sector whilst significantly boosting their brand awareness and driving additional revenues. This could be improved further with the addition of iContact’s new social media tools helping spread the message to potentially much wider audience.”
Ten Golden Rules for Email Marketing
Email marketing is a long-term, low cost investment and should constantly be assessed and developed to ensure greater penetration and return on investment.
Together with iContact competition judges we have compiled a 10 point checklist to help you maximise the return from your email marketing campaigns:
Sender Info
1. Is the “from” name the business name or a person the recipient would recognize?
Pre-header
2. Is there a call-to-action pre-header?
Subject Line
3. Is it compelling?
4. Is there a sense of urgency?
Message Body
5. Is there a call-to-action?
6. Is there a link to landing page?
7. Is there a clear offer?
8. Is there incentive?
9. Is there a sense of urgency in the call-to-action?
Testing
10. What is being tested? – Subject line, length of copy, use of images and how will you use these test results in future campaigns.
2 Responses
Well done Jonny.
Nice prize.
Great looking eBay store you have Jonny, that’s the first time I’ve ever been impressed by a Frooition design.