Marketing your company means investigating all avenues of media, including social media, article marketing and even email marketing. Since you have to take one step at a time, today let’s begin by learning all we can about email marketing and how to create an effective campaign that increases your websites’ profit.
Before using email marketing, create a test email and send it to a friend or family member. Your loved one can see how the email looks and give you feedback. This way, if any changes need to be made, you can do it before sending the emails out to customers.
Follow up with contacts you meet at trade shows. Collect people’s phone numbers when they stop by your table and call them within a couple of weeks of meeting them. Use the follow-up call to check in with your contact and ask him if he would like to receive your marketing newsletter by email.
If you buy a list of emails to send to, check and make sure it is up to date. Sometimes lists for sail might match your target demographics but be woefully out of date. The number of addresses now defunct can be as high as 25% of the overall list.
Try following up an email to your customers with a notice that tells them not to procrastinate. Insert a suggestion that tells them to purchase now onto the reply. The ending could tell them not to miss this incredible opportunity by waiting. Instead, they should act now to reap the full benefits.
Do what you can to make your email go into your customers’ inboxes. You must work to get your email to pass ISPs and not get tagged as spam messages. If they get tagged as spam messages, your recipient may never see them. Check with customers to see if they are getting your emails, or if they’re no longer interested.
Put real consideration into where you place links in your marketing newsletters. For example, you don’t want to send readers away from your email before you give them their call to action. You also don’t want to put your priority links at the end of an email where they may be overlooked.
When someone subscribes to your email marketing list, confirm that this is what they really intended to do. Implementing this double opt-in strategy will make it much less likely that your email provider will receive spam complaints about you. Also, you will be assured that the people receiving your emails are actually interested in what you are sending them.
Never add emails to your email list without permission from the subscriber. If you have an email list with customers that don’t want to receive emails from you, it can hurt your business. You also run the risk of being barred by your service provider for violation of their rules.
You might want to consider following up to your clients with some type of surprise bonus that you are providing them. Include a link on your email that tells them to click on it. The concluding postscript could inform them that they can get all the details on this by clicking on the provided link.
Be sure to ask permission to be able to send information to someone’s email. When asking, be sure to offer something in return. Turn it into something that your customers will look forward to checking instead of dreading it. This will keep your emails from looking and feeling like spam.
When you’ve determined your email’s frequency, make it into a schedule. Set the times and dates of when you have to send your recipients your emails. It doesn’t matter if you send an email daily or monthly, sticking to a schedule can keep you organized and can allow your recipients to know when they can receive your emails.
You might need to try following up to your customers with an alert on a price increase. The email could include a link that says to act now in order to avoid this increase. The ending of the message could convince them to click on the link in order to understand all the details.
Try to keep your email subject lines short. Try keeping them around 60 characters or so. Depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to get away with a longer one as long as you put your most important information first. That said, it’s better for the average consumer to keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
To successfully grow your email marketing campaign, try combining your emails with social networking, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Let customers share your info with friends, and this will increase the subscribers that want to read your content.
Plan out your emails in advance. Take into account that you are human, and that you will make mistakes when creating an email. With this realization in mind, allow enough time to review, revise and edit your emails before sending them out to your subscribers. This can help you avoid many mistakes in your emails.
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.
Take precautions to avoid having your emailed flagged as spam by major internet service providers. Many ISPs have strict security measures in place to detect spam before it is delivered to a client. These spam filters determine if an email is spam by relying on specific criteria. If an email displays too many of these indications, it is deemed to be spam and automatically deleted. These criteria include the use of words such as “discount”, “save,” and “free” in both the subject line and content of an email. Although it may seem difficult to eliminate these words, there are creative ways to capture the attention of your customers and make them aware of your promotions through email without setting off any spam filter alarms. It’s better to have an email reach your customers without these words than to risk having it not reach your customers at all.
Using the tips in this article will help you to master email marketing and use it effectively to promote your product. Once you have your campaign underway you can move on to the many other forms of marketing both online and off to boost sales even more and reach your goals.
