Just in case you haven’t heard, there’s a lot you can do with “web 2.0” in your email marketing. It’s not just about text, photos/graphics and links.
Today you have a range of possibilities where interactive and multimedia is concerned.
Video
If you’ve got good, relevant and engaging video content (for example product demos) then you can definitely use these in your email marketing. Use YouTube or Vimeo to host your video and link to it from the newsletter. You should have a channel for your company on YouTube and you should be uploading videos there and embedding them on your website. In fact, I would suggest creating a video landing page on your website and linking to it from your newsletter.
Make sure you have descriptive text for the video in your email. Don’t count on people clicking on the video just because you put a screen capture image in there. And make sure it’s more than just a simple caption. Tell them what the video is about, who’s in it and why it’s relevant. If it’s a how-to or something along those lines, include some points about what viewers of the video can expect to learn from it. Also, tell them how long the video is.
Polls
Polls are a great way to initiate feedback with your subscribers about issues which are important to them. Heck, a poll is a great way for you to find out what issues even exist. Polls are not about you or your product. Opinion polls should be about your subscribers and be a conduit for them to share their opinions directly with you.
You can create a poll landing page on your site if you like. I personally think that any kind of interactive feature should be embedded on the corporate site and not be located off site. Why would you want to send people any where else but to your website from your newsletter? The landing page can also be an archive where people can view results from old polls.
You can share the results in real time in the newsletter or drive them back to the landing page for the results. I suggest using a combination where you drive people back to the poll landing page if they want real time results and feature the results of the previous poll along with the new poll each within the newsletter. Include an optional comment field with polls so you can share those in your newsletter too.
Your Email Service Provider may offer polls as a feature you can easily incorporate in your email marketing or you can use one of many online poll services such as Survey Monkey.
RSS
RSS is a powerful and too often overlooked information feature. If you aren’t offering a RSS feed at your website you should and you should be promoting the feed in your newsletter. RSS is especially good if you offer frequent product updates or other information which will enhance the user experience.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are critical for conversions. Don’t drive people from your newsletter to a cluttered page! Make sure the page your links go to are optimized to be relevant and engaging to the user and why they clicked. If your CTA in your newsletter was about juicers then the subscriber shouldn’t have to go hunting for that information on the landing page you linked to – the page should be just about the juicer your NL talked about. Keep landing pages clean and optimized for each conversion path.
