Email marketing can be an overwhelming choice for many and can make people look the other way. If you really put the time and effort into learning how to market your business, you will soon realize the importance of email marketing.
Ask permission before sending emails to customers. When people receive unwanted emails, they consider them to be spam which they ignore or delete. Recipients never even glance at their contents. You could also violate your ISP’s policies by sending mass emails to consumers who do not want to receive them.
Try to get the permission of a potential customer before sending them an email. If you are cold calling or emailing your clients, they will feel annoyed. Your customers could opt out of your mailing list, but an even worse scenario is if they report you as a spammer and you end up blacklisted.
Make sure that everything you mail out has been proofread. You have to make sure all your newsletters and emails are letter perfect. Prior to message distribution, test email layouts so you know for sure that all the text and elements show up in your preferred way. Don’t forget, if you have embedded links, to check the links to be sure they function properly.
Make sure to choose the sending day wisely and according to your readers’ schedules. Most statistics show that emails sent during business hours are most likely to be opened and read. Mail leisure or family related newsletters on weekends.
Make sure you have a person’s full permission before adding them to your mailing list. If you send unsolicited messages, at best recipients will unsubscribe or trash them, and at worst, they will report them as spam. Your email provider may suspend your account if they receive numerous complaints from those who never wanted to receive your messages in the first place.
A great hint for following up with clients is to send a freebie through an email. Add a statement that urges them to take advantage of this offer, in full. The end of the email should explain that they need to act quickly before your limited numbers of freebies are gone.
If you have already branded your business, incorporate your branding into your new email marketing campaign. Keep the same color scheme every time, and don’t forget to incorporate your company’s logo in each message. If your brand is trusted prior to sending out emails, the messages will look good and appear reputable.
Graphics can be used in email marketing, but only sparingly. Not everyone uses the same email client. These pictures may not even show up in many cases. If the images do not display automatically, you messages can be unreadable. Always use clear text for your most critical information, and be sure to use descriptive alt tags for any images that you include.
Write in a way that will affect your audience, not in a way that allows you to get around the spam filters. When a message is written normally without the use of excess sales talk, you’ll be able to avoid spam filters with ease. Modern spam filters are adaptive, so using convoluted languages to avoid saying thing like “free” will not only annoy readers, but also won’t reduce the chance of getting caught by spam filters.
Remember to send birthday greetings to your subscribers. Allow your subscribers to include their birth date on the sign up form, then follow up with an automatic email on the big day. This will endear your customer to you, and it might even increase your sales if you send them a birthday discount code!
Resist the urge to send your customers more than a single marketing email each week. Most of your customer base probably has to tend to many other email messages each day. If you start sending more than one email a week, customers might stop paying attention to them or unsubscribe altogether, which wastes the great content you spent your time and effort assembling.
Establish consistent branding for all outgoing email marketing transmissions. This can be done on a small scale with just a business name and subject, but can extend all the way into complex business-specific email layouts. Whatever you do, keep it consistent over multiple emails. If your emails are all completely different, people will not remember your company from one mailing to the next.
Use passive and active feedback to improve your email marketing strategy. Active feedback is rather obvious: ask for opinions and suggestions from your readers. Passive feedback is less obvious, or sometimes non-existent, to readers. Utilize software programs or tools to evaluate what links are used most frequently.
Include more than a simple sales pitch in your mailings. Your messages might serve as informational newsletters containing industry specific knowledge and insight. People will not find your sales pitch interesting and will more than likely unsubscribe from your list. So, even though your emails are created to sell product, be sure they include valuable, interesting information to keep readers interested.
Take advantage of preheaders and make email previews work to your advantage. A pre-header is the highlighted initial text of the email body, positioned at the top of the email. Gmail and many other email platforms show this first line right after the subject line, so that is one easy way to get the attention of a subscriber.
Stay away from including emails on your emailing database that have not been directly opted-in by the specific subscriber. Don’t alienate potential customers by sending unsolicited emails. Nothing positive can result from such actions. You could also face penalties from the provider of your email services if you violate their rules regarding spamming.
Each email should have one clear message. You should avoid boring or overwhelming customers with marketing emails which contain excessive content. Focus on one topic per email and go straight to the point. Your customer base will greatly appreciate not being perplexed by too much unnecessary information.
Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, you should have a grasp of how building an email list can work for you. Go ahead, add what you’ve learned today to your strategies and see the results that come from it.