No one wants their email box to be cluttered up with advertising, so it’s your job as an email marketer to send your reader something they actually want. Informative, interesting and even entertaining emails should be your goal, but how do you achieve that? Continue reading to find some excellent tips from experts in the field.
Only send your emails to clients and people that you know. People who you have not built a relationship with will look at your unwanted email intrusion as spam. They won’t know if they know who you are, and then they will think about whether they care at all about the actual content or your email. Their lack of care towards you and your business will most likely cause them to just mark it as spam, which just made your effort pointless.
To get people to opt-in and give permission for you to send email marketing messages to them, offer an incentive. Offer a discount or a coupon on one of your products or services. Include a whitepaper or newsletter about your niche or market. Give your prospect something in return for access to their inbox.
Stay consistent. Make certain that your emails consistently utilize your company’s logo and colors. See to it that the font you’re using is readable. Soon, your readers will recognize the emails you send out and look forward to reading them. Familiarity is vital to the success of any business, and that also greatly applies to email marketing.
Avoid using a lot of graphics in your e-mails. Graphics can be easily blocked by email providers and your message can be distorted because of this. Additionally, the overuse of graphics will likely prompt email-readers to automatically toss your emails into the spam folder.
An email marketing campaign needs a design and testing phase, just like anything else. Plan on putting in time making sure that your messages get past all techniques used for fighting spam, from content filters to image blocking and java-script suppression. You can send out a million messages blindly and not ever know if they are even seen.
Be prepared to respond to emails if your email marketing is done properly. If you take too long to respond, you may miss a bunch of opportunities. If you provide good content that is free, be prepared to get responses to it from your recipients. You must be prepared and available as much as you can.
Try to make it as easy as possible for customers to unsubscribe from your emails. By not making it simple, they will feel like you are being too pushy and may be turned off from your product or business. Give them the option to opt out from some of your emails or all of them.
Automatically unsubscribe customers who don’t respond to your marketing materials after a certain number of emails. If your customers aren’t responding to your emails anymore, they most likely have lost interest in your newsletter but aren’t annoyed enough by it yet to unsubscribe. By unsubscribing them, you avoid generating bad feelings that could hurt your business.
Rather than purchasing or renting a mailing list, build your own from the ground up. You can do this by including opt-in forms on your website, gathering business cards at conventions or other industry events, and encouraging your subscribers to share your emails with others, which can garner even more subscribers.
Try to keep your email subject lines short. Try keeping them around 60 characters or so. Depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to get away with a longer one as long as you put your most important information first. That said, it’s better for the average consumer to keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
Compile an email list that is highly targeted. To do this, you must convince your best customers, as well as their friends and contacts, to join your mailing list. One way to target your list while also giving your messages more weight is to give your emails the feel of insider, exclusive information available only to subscribers.
Include an audit memo on the follow-up emails that you send to your clients. Paste a link on your message that tells them to download this right now. The ending postscript could convince these clients that now is the time for them to experience success, and they can do so by following the link provided.
If one of your customers is not happy with your products or services, you could send a follow-up email to this person that apologizes to them. Include a link on the email that tells this person to click on it in order to listen to the apology with their own ears. The concluding postscript could inform them that they can get a free sample by clicking on the provided link.
Use email marketing with a select group of valued customers. This way, you can create an elite list of customers who can feel valued that they are receiving special offers and promotions from you. It may even motivate people who are not part of your email club to make more purchases in order to receive these special promotions.
When relevant to your business, develop campaigns that correspond with major holidays or other events. Make your business promotion plan to include a schedule for the entire year. Use shopping holidays as an opportunity to develop targeted campaigns. Good times to do this would be Christmas or Valentine’s Day. You can increase sales if you do heavy marketing during the times of the year that business is slower.
Someday you too may be an expert in your field, but for now you need to learn as much as you can to hone your skills and provide you with new ideas. This article is a great stepping stone, but don’t stop here – practice what you’ve learned and continue reading and success will be within your reach!
