Take advantage of special holidays and events to push your email marketing efforts. Consider upcoming holidays far in advance and prepare your email marketing campaigns to take advantage of them. You should have your holiday campaigns planned for well in advance, and include all of those potentially relevant to your business. You can increase sales if you do heavy marketing during the times of the year that business is slower.
Allow people who visit your website to subscribe in a variety of different ways, but don’t ever pressure them to sign up. Make your customers aware that their information is safe with you, and explain how they can benefit from signing up. Your success in attaining customer information has a direct bearing on the success you can achieve with your email marketing campaign.
Be sure that you have a reader’s permission prior to adding them to your mailing list. Without this, your messages may be flagged as spam. This puts you in risk of harming your reputation. In addition, you could get yourself on some ISP’s back list, which could cause your emails to be blocked.
Utilize all the subscription information that you gather in order to ease the shopping experience of your customers. When someone clicks a link in your email to them, use their subscription information to auto-fill relevant parts of a purchasing form. This makes the sales process go much smoother and encourages them to buy.
Getting permission before sending emails to someone, is of utmost importance to doing good business. Otherwise, people may consider you a spammer and delete your emails or unsubscribe from your list. If your ISP gets many complaints, they could block you from sending emails because you can be viewed as a spammer.
Make sure your email marketing campaign has an exit sign for those that want to opt out or unsubscribe. There is a cost to sending email, even if it is small. Not only can being considered a spammer hurt your business, but you could even be blocked by your provider.
To cover all your bases, try using multi-part messages in your campaign. These emails include both plain and HTML texts, so they will be displayed no matter the option your recipient favors. This is well worth the extra effort, because a plain-text subscriber will not stay subscribed to an HTML-only list for long.
Grab people’s attention with your subject line. Using incentive offers as your subject line may make the recipient more enticed to read the email. This promotion could be any number of things, but the most common such offers are free or discounted products, especially those offered only to list subscribers. A well-written subject line can make it far more likely that readers will open your email and consume your overall message.
Write concise subject lines. Shorter subjects catch the viewers’ eye, leading to a greater read rate than a longer subject. If you absolutely have to use a longer subject line, place the most valuable info at the very beginning of the sentence so it will not disappear when the subject is shortened.
Keep subject lines to a minimum of 60 characters. Most email platforms will cut subject lines to that length. Some others can’t display beyond this length. Regardless, 60 characters is more than enough for readers to decide whether they want to read the email more or simply delete it.
Make sure your customers opt in before sending them an email. When you send out unsolicited emails, you risk receiving mass amounts of complaints and becoming known as a spammer. This will result in unread emails and wasted marketing dollars. Not only that, but a lot of people will choose to opt-out, which means they will not get anymore emails from you. You also run the risk of violating your ISP policy if you are called a spammer.
Make sure you are writing something for people to read, not just to bypass the spam bots. If you create a good message and do not include too much sales talk, you will avoid spam filters. Using evasive language to avoid using sales talk might get you past the spam blockers, but it may also annoy your customers as well.
Use a personal tone in all email marketing campaigns. Customers are much more likely to respond positively to emails that feel personal and are not bland. To make an even better impression on customers, have the email come from your company’s CEO.
Create a highly targeted sales list. You can achieve this by having your best customers tell whoever they know to join your mailing list. If you make it out to seem that those who receive your mailing list also receive exclusive tips on your particular topic, then your mailing list will be more targeted while at the same time make your mailings appear to be more authoritative.
Remember the importance of consistency. Stay with the same logo and color scheme in your email. The font you choose should be something that everyone can clearly see. Once you have sent a few emails, your recipients will be able to immediately recognize them, and will start to take notice. When your customers are familiar with your emails, it makes the marketing more effective.
When considering which day to send your email in a given week, consider both the content of your message and your subscribers’ schedules. Newsletters that pertain to business, as you may expect, are most effective if mailed between Monday and Thursday. However, if your newsletter concerns family or leisure information, interested people would rather read it on the weekend.
With the information you have learned, you have armed yourself with the right tools at your disposal to understand the basics of a successful email marketing strategy. Study the information again before you begin, and then use what you’ve learned to create a successful campaign.