If your business is not yet using email as a central part of its marketing strategy, you are missing out on one of the most effective forms of marketing there is. Email lets you reach a wide audience of potential customers for very little cost. Read the following article to learn more.
Don’t send unsolicited email marketing messages out. If you send marketing materials to people who didn’t ask for them, they may mark your marketing messages as spam. This is not only harmful to your reputation, but it can actually cause your ISP to block you or your email service provider to suspend your account.
Slowly build your contact list. Start with those who have already appreciated what you offer and then move on to areas where you can engage your prospects. It can take a while to pick whom should be receiving your emails, but it’ll be worth it in the end to build a reliable contact list.
Even though it should be obvious, it is important enough to state over and over: Never send unsolicited emails. You should have explicit permission from everyone you send marketing emails to. This is about more than trying not to upset them; a recipient who considers your email spam can cause trouble for you with your service provider.
Try engaging the customer using the subject line of the email. Your email must grab your reader’s attention the minute it lands inside of their inbox, otherwise it may go into their trash. If you have a weak or uninteresting subject line, that is exactly what will happen. So try spicing up your subject line with some creativity.
Your email marketing campaign will be more effective if you make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. This may seem paradoxical, but people will tend to trust you more if you make them feel as if they are in control. Post the unsubscribe link in an obvious place so they can find it easily.
Consider using text emails instead of graphically intense HTML emails for your campaign. You may be thinking that the graphics will engage your reader more, but it’s usually not the case. Many people today have trained themselves to delete emails with lots of imagery, assuming they are spam. As well, those images often trigger spam filters, meaning your message is never received by some people on your email list!
If you use images in your email newsletters, put text to the right of the images. Research shows that customers are far more likely to click on a link or button that is placed to the left of an image than one that is placed anywhere else on the page.
One great way to increase the success of your email marketing campaigns is to give your customers choices. Customers should be able to select the frequency with which they receive messages and what personal information they want to disclose to the business. They will be increasingly comfortable when you give them more control over the entire process.
Make sure you are working off of a clean list. This keeps the time you spend directed towards targeted customers. Targeting the wrong customers will not help you, and a clean list can get you to more of the right customers much faster. Clean up your list, and get to the right customers!
Encourage customers to leave active, as well as passive feedback, in your marketing campaigns via email. Active feedback can be gained by asking your readers for suggestions. Passive feedback is very subtle and may not even be obvious to your customers. Try many techniques and use the software available to determine which method yields you the most reads and/or clicks.
You should try and build an email list the best that you can from networking in person as well as on the Internet. You should not buy or rent lists of names that you will email to drum up business. There is no guarantee that any of the people you contact will be interested and you may even end up getting reported to your email service provider.
Diamonds may be forever, but permission is not. Even after you have subscriber permission, renew it somehow after around nine months, since that is the typical expiration date of permissions given. Not only will prospects feel respected by your polite behavior, you will rapidly identify who is really interested in your material.
Tell a story with your email marketing campaign. You must think about how to grab the readers’ attention. How better to grab their attention than to tell a story that involves success in your business niche. This gets them intrigued, and it gives you an opportunity to get new customers.
Don’t get yourself in trouble by not getting permission. This is spamming and you could be penalized for it as well as having all your mail refused, which could damage your business irrevocably. By getting permission to use email marketing, you will be creating positive relationships with customers who will keep coming back.
Getting permission to send emails is not difficult to get. You can use discounts, coupons, special offers and even flyers given out in trade shows to get customers interested enough to receive your emails. They can sign up on your website among other methods. By being friendly and offering a good incentive to sign up, customers may even give you access to personal information and their personal preferences.
Research shows that there are three emails that are the most important. The first offers an introduction and invitation to sign up and give permission to receive further communication. The second presents the customer with specific expectations such as coupons, discount offers or newsletters. The third email would deliver those expectations in the form of the discounts and other incentives.
The more you learn about email marketing, the more you should realize just how effective a marketing technique it can be. Once you start using email to promote your business, you will never turn back.
Just remember the techniques you have learned from this article, and your marketing campaign will yield great results.
