Email campaigns and newsletters are still important and cost-effective. However, today, email campaigns must be targeted, relevant, and break through the noise and hurdles of our inboxes. Gone are the days of effectively reaching your audience with mass emails.  To be effective, with everything that everyone is receiving, you need to really answer the following questions:

1. Did you find the right contacts?

Before you even start the email process, you must find the right contacts for outreach. It’s crucial that you identify your desired audiences.

2. Are the email addresses accurate?

An email will not be received unless you have the right data. Therefore, you must have strong data and find any that may be missing. This will ensure the right email gets to the right contact; simple human error can switch letters in an address.

3. Will your email be viewed or put into spam?

If your email went to the correct address, did it hit their inbox or their spam? Check your emails against an email spam system before you hit send. New email spam systems pop up all the time, so go online and search for tools that can check to see if the email that you’re sending looks like spam.

If it does look like spam, then it gets scored like spam and it’s never going to be seen. Email spam systems break your email down, telling you what’s wrong, and allowing you to fix it.

4. Will your emails be read?

Spam emails can also be uncovered by simply reading them. It’s fairly obvious when an email looks like spam. During a webinar with Cirrus Insight, RingLead CEO Donato Diorio did a spam test, where he showed four emails and asked the audience for the one that wasn’t spam. He displayed each email on screen for 10 seconds. More than 50% found the non-spam email. As humans, we’re able to determine whether an email is spam by the visual structure … in seconds.

5. Is the email well written?

Writing emails to potential customers can be one of the most difficult tasks for any marketer. Remember grammar is important and always be professional.

6. Did you grab their attention?

Now we shift our focus to the content of the email. It’s reaching your audience, but is it interesting? Should they care? Are you targeting the right demographic? The message, audience, and content need to grab attention.

7. When do you plan to send the email?

There really is a right and wrong time to send an email. Sometimes, the timing doesn’t matter. But do you know the difference? A detail as seemingly trivial as the timing of an email can determine whether a lead responds. Take a few minutes to do some research and it may make all the difference.

8. Do you have tracking in place and are you going to look at it?

We’re in an age where sending emails blindly will no longer cut it. In order to thrive, you need to know which email strategies are most effective. The way to do that is through analytics. Create dashboards showing email opens and customer engagement and check it often.  Only then will you be able to correctly follow-up.