If you think email marketing as a tool is a worn out concept, give it a second chance! It’s true that email was probably the first channels used by Internet marketers, but that doesn’t mean that there still isn’t a lot of money to be made from email marketing. New email marketing strategies and methods are constantly being developed to keep the medium fresh. This article provides several tips that can help you utilize email to fulfill your goals.
Be persistent with your email marketing messages. It can take as many as twenty emails to one prospect before you routinely have their attention. Try telling a good story through your messages. Hook them with a few messages and let it unfold over a series. Running contests that span several weeks are good way to do this.
Don’t include the use of newsletters in your email marketing campaign. You can send the people on your opt-in list relevant emails about particular topics instead. You will attract more people when they know that they will only be receiving information that they are interested in, and that they will not have to sift through an entire newsletter to get it.
Even though you may be tempted, do not fix email addresses that appear misspelled or mistyped. Given the sensitive nature of email, it is important that you do not tinker with what a person typed while opting in. If your attempts to reach a particular address continually bounce, remove it from your database and move on.
You may find that it is a good idea to devote a small portion of every marketing email you send out to briefly reviewing what your subscribers can expect from you. By demonstrating that you have a plan for your emails and you are sticking to it, you can encourage your readers’ trust and make them less likely to grow tired of your messages.
Build your mailing list one person at a time. Start by asking your largest customers to sign up and recommend you to their friends. Word of mouth is the best form of recommendation and you will gain much more business this way as well as have a larger, targeted email list to market your products to.
Use multi-part emails to ensure that your reader is able to see the content. These messages have both plain text and HTML content, and that way they can be read regardless of what option the reader has chosen. The time spent doing this, is well worth it if it stops a non-HTML-reading subscriber from dropping out of the list.
Be honest and upfront when your readers subscribe. Let them know how often to expect emails from you, and what type of information will be contained in them. It is important to be truthful here, you don’t want your customers to be annoyed if they end up with more emails from you than they expected.
Keep your email content fresh. Don’t start repeating old information or re-using anything that you have previously written about in your emails. Your readers know when you’ve already said something and when you’re out of ideas. Furthermore, if you notice that something in your emails, like templates, images, etc. just aren’t garnering attention anymore, don’t fear changing things around.
When developing your emails, remember to make the best use of your subject lines. This is what will capture a reader’s attention and give a first impression that will encourage them to read on. Your subject lines should be the most well thought-out part of your email, so investing time in them will never be wasted.
Leverage tracking data to send emails to small, targeted groups of your email subscribers. You can track what links or emails are especially interesting to your readers and use that knowledge to send them only the stuff that they might like. Doing this will not only keep them happy, but it can also substantially increase your sales.
You should test your email template in all the popular email providers, like Google and Yahoo. Make certain that the content is easy to open and read in them before you send out your messages. This helps to ensure that recipients can access your content, even if they use a different provider than you.
Keep your messages simple and to the point when using email marketing. People are very busy and do not have time to read through more than a couple paragraphs to figure out what you are trying to say. Condense your message to a few short paragraphs, and stay focused on your main message.
If you must have a sense of urgency in your email, don’t pester your recipients with too many blasts about it. You don’t need to send an email warning that there’s a sale in 24 hours, then another after 12 hours, etc. This can make your messages look like spam.
Make subscribing to your email list as easy as it can possibly be. You should use well placed noticeable forms that ask them to enter their email addresses if they would like to receive information about upcoming specials or coupons. Make it clear that you will not ever sell their personal information.
Brand your emails with the same font, logo and colors that your website has. This way, someone reading your email will recognize you as soon as they start reading. This provides consistency in all of your materials, which is good to do because people would rather do business with someone they have come to recognize and trust.
By now, it is hopefully clear to you that marketing through email can still be a very effective technique. If you use what you’ve learned here and continue to come up with new email marketing strategies, you should see profits from your email marketing program for years to come.
