If you think that email can no longer be used as an effective marketing tool, think again! Email marketing is almost as old as email itself, but it is still a vital method. New methods and ideas are continuously being generated that make marketing emails unique and interesting. Use the ideas below to see how you can use email for yourself.
If you plan on utilizing email marketing as a promotional strategy, it is crucial that everyone on your subscriber list has authorized you to send them emails. If not, you will be looking at many spam complaints and loss of customers.
Only make one clear message for each email you send. Customers will be quickly overwhelmed if you are trying to cover too much material in one email. Develop one key message and ensure it’s short and brief. Audiences are sure to appreciate your willingness to limit the message to just the most relevant material.
Use A/B testing strategies when sending emails. Choose one email, randomly split the mailing list in two and send each half the same email with different subject lines. You will be able to see which subject lines encourage people to open your emails and which ones you should avoid.
The primary reason to develop your email marketing strategy is to compel your customers to buy your product or services. Your emails should make your readers want to buy your products. Do this by creating emails that offer product information – new and old – as well as information on special discounts.
Keep the graphics to a minimum in your emails. Many email clients don’t allow images to load, so sending a highly graphic-dependent message is useless, as many of your subscribers will be unable to make sense of it. Additionally, several email programs tend to send graphic-laden emails to a recipient’s junk folder.
The greater number of choices you give your subscribers, the greater impact your email marketing is going to have on your profit. This can include how much mail they will receive, how frequently your newsletter will be sent, and how much of their personal information they want you to have. Being able to control their experience will make them more comfortable with your brand and your emails.
Teach yourself what not to do by scoping out some spam. Create a free email address and post it publicly online; the spam should appear quickly. Educate yourself on how these spammers are incorrectly using email marketing and go your own way. Going the extra mile to distinguish yourself from spammers is a great way to build brand respectability.
While it will take hard work and persistence, building an email marketing strategy is key to success. Persistence is a good thing in general, but it is best when it is exercised on a receptive audience. Persistence with the incorrect audience can annoy them and waste your time.
Use preheader material as a way to boost your email marketing. The very first line of the email is typically called the preheader. Gmail and various other email providers use that line of text after the subject line, so it will grab the reader’s attention.
Although this may seem obvious, making sure that the addresses on your campaign list are accurate is something that is often overlooked, so make sure they are all correct! You don’t want to waste precious time hunting down addresses and resending e-mails after getting dozens of bounced back messages from invalid addresses. You have better things to do!
Use a personal tone in all email marketing campaigns. Customers are more positive to these kinds of messages than impersonal or bland ones. Try to send emails from recognizable figures within your company, like the CEO or President.
Getting the visitors who come to your website to sign up for your mailing lists is an excellent way to build up your subscription list. You can garner some enthusiastic, entirely voluntary subscribers simply by making the option to sign up prominently available on your website.
Try testing the layouts of your messages on various platforms. Once you create a template that looks perfect from where you are, try it on a variety of browsers, operating systems and email clients. Emails can vary on how they appear in different email clients, such as Linux Gmail or Windows Hotmail.
Be sure the emails you send are short and to the point. Keep your language as direct as you can. This will show that you value the time of your readers. Doing so ensures that readers actually read your whole message. Your messages will have important content, even at the end, so this is a necessary step.
Give your customers the feeling that you care about them personally by adding some kind of individual touch to your emails. If they believe that they are being treated as “customer #13992”, rather than someone with specific interests and desires, they’ll just delete your email and unsubscribe from your list. Putting in their name is simple, but take it one step further. Figure out why and when they subscribed to your emails. Use this information to customize the message for that person.
Being pegged as a “spammer” is not something that is good for a business and it is important to take precautions against being labeled as such. This amounts to sending new subscribers a validation email that aims to confirm that the right email address is subscribing to the list. You should put two links into the email, one that allows them to confirm and the other that allows them to refute their subscription. Your subscribers will like the extra security measure, and you will have extra proof that you are not spamming your email recipients.
Email marketing has changed over the years, but it is still an effective tool for reaching your customers. If you implement the advice found in this article and continue to find ways to better your email marketing campaigns, this strategy can work well for you for quite some time.