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5 Ways to Create an Effective Email Campaign

Email marketing can be beneficial, effective and profitable—if you execute a thorough plan with thought. Read the following tips for ways you can increase conversions with your email marketing campaign.

Planning: For an email campaign to be successful this needs to be planned well ahead the send date. Make sure you have enough time to make the campaign as good as it can be. The following points need to be considered:
• Objectives – What is the aim of the campaign? Do you want to recruit new players, make players aware of the features and promotions you offer, or improve player retention?
• Budget – Plan beforehand what you want to spend on the campaign itself, and what return you are predicting to receive as a result of the campaign. Most importantly, stick to the budget to prevent costs escalating
• Implementation and tracking – How are you going to send and track the campaign? Are you going to use an in-house solution, or work with a third party company who can design and build your email and/or send and track it for you?

Subject Line: The subject line is the first thing players are going to see when receiving your email, and it is what helps them decide whether to open the email or discard it as junk. The subject line needs to be simple and to the point, letting the recipient know what to expect inside. Avoid using certain words that might trigger spam filters like “free” and “bonus”. If possible, personalise the subject line with the recipient’s name to encourage opening.

Design: When designing your email, consider the following tips:
• Create both HTML and text versions of your email.
• Make sure your logo is in a prominent place, and make good use of the top 5 – 10 cm of your email.
• Keep your message short to avoid scrolling, and avoid using a lot of different fonts and colours
• Ensure that your call to action is prominent and clear.
• Avoid using items that may stop the email from getting to the recipient – using just one image, without any text may flag the email as spam, whilst embedded Flash might trigger some anti-virus programs.
• Always include an unsubscribe link.

Testing: It is very important to test your campaign before sending as you do not want anything to go wrong. Send a number of test emails to yourself on different mail accounts before sending out to players. Always test what the email will look like on various clients and email services, make sure that images are displayed correctly, that the email does not get marked as spam, and finally, that your unsubscribe link works.

Analyze Campaign Results: It is important to measure the results of all email campaign. Using either your in-house solution or a third-party one, you can monitor the number of delivered emails, opened emails, click-throughs generated, and unsubscribe requests. The number of bounced and undelivered emails is an indication of how accurate your mailing list is, whilst a high unsubscribe rate means that the emails you are sending are not relevant to the players you are targeting.

About the Author:

Carmel Said has been involved in the gaming industry for the 7 years, focusing on Affiliate Marketing for the past 5. At the moment he is working on an exciting new project at Club Gold Casino, where he forms part of the Club Gold marketing team. In this article, he outlines the few simple but important steps for a successful email campaign.