When you are trying to market your business, it can be hard to know which marketing techniques to focus on. Email marketing can be a strong, fundamental part of any marketing plan. Here are some useful email marketing tips to strengthen your overall marketing strategy, and to build your bottom line.
The beginning and conclusion of your marketing email should include a call to action for your customers. Be clear about what you want your customer to do, and include at least two obvious links to your site. Use clear suggestions that direct your customers to the offer your email is promoting.
Find out who your competitors are and sign up to their emails. You will be able to see what content, they are sending to their subscribers and figure out what aspects to use and which to stay away from. Just be sure not to steal their content, as this could constitute plagiarism.
Make sure that you have an unsubscribe link that is easily visible within your emails. Avoid not having an unsubscribe link or burying it within your email to the point where it is hard to find. Make your customers feel that you value their participation and not as though they have been roped in unwillingly and unable to escape.
Test sending your email marketing on different days of the week and at various times during the day. You’ll find that different times and dates will increase or decrease your open rates to your emails. Note the best time/day of the week mixtures and plan your most important email marketing campaigns to be released during those windows.
Let customers know how to add your email address to their “safe sender list”. Many people do not know how to prevent certain emails from being sent to their spam folder. Inform them of how to prevent this from happening and encourage them to add you to their address book.
Build your own custom templates. Avoid just sending out generic emails, be creative with them. Try to get your messages to reflect aspects of your business’s branding, such as color palettes and fonts. If you include any images, make sure you include a link to a plain text version so that those with images disabled can read your messages.
Make sure your email campaign matches your brand. Use the same logos, fonts, colors as well as a similar messaging style to what your readers could find on your website. This helps the receivers of your email feel comfortable with the content and makes them more likely to open it.
While extra graphics and other things that can easily be blocked by filters are unnecessary and detrimental to your campaign, your company logo does need to be included in order to make things’ consistent, familiar, and professional when you are in contact with prospective customers. Failure to do this will harm your email marketing campaign immensely.
Offer your customers a chance to sign up for your special email promotions. This way, they will have voluntarily signed up to be receiving your emails and the messages and promotions will not come across to them as spam. Gaining the permission of your customers to email them with offers will help keep your customer’s trust intact.
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.
If there are images in your emails, use Alt tags. These are just in case an image is unable to load. Make sure the text in the
Make use of pre-headers in your marketing emails. Certain email clients – the more advanced web-based ones in particular – display a short summary for each email in the inbox. This is the pre-header. It is easy to set up. Clients generate pre-headers from the first line of text in the message. Compose your emails accordingly!
Write your message copy with benefits in mind, but not yours. Make sure your messages reflect the benefits that your content, products or services are offering your subscribers and readers. They want to know what is in it for them before they commit to the call to action, which is where your benefit happens.
Don’t send out your email messages during major sales holidays. While this may seem counter-intuitive, unless you are selling consumer products, your customers just aren’t interested in your product that time of year. In addition, it is likely to get buried in all of the other marketing messages they are receiving.
Show your subscribers respect by not sending them tons of unwanted emails. Two or three email messages a month should be all that they receive from you. If you are flooding their email boxes, not only it will not be appreciated, but it will be highly unlikely they will buy anything that you are selling.
Try using holidays and important events to your advantage in your email marketing campaigns. For instance, if it’s Valentine’s Day, try incorporating things like candy, flowers, hearts and other related imagery or designs. Your readers should enjoy the creativity and festiveness of your messages around special times of the year.
You should use feedback to improve your email marketing campaign, indirectly as well as directly. How your subscribers respond – or don’t – is valuable data, too. You can categorize your subscribers based on what links they’ve clicked, what purchases they’ve made, and when and how they’ve communicated with you. Tailor your subsequent emails to fit your different subscriber categories.
Email marketing can be an effective, smart way to promote your business. You have to know what to do. Just apply the tips laid out here so your email marketing plan goes well. Learn as much as you can about email marketing so that you only improve as your business grows.
