How often do you check your email? The majority of people, likely yourself included, checks email multiple times daily. For business owners, email is an effective way to stay in touch with and communicate with your customers. To see how to get started in email marketing, read on.
Keep your emails short and simple. No one wants to read a long marketing ploy that exceeds a couple paragraphs. You don’t want to annoy your potential customers, you want to keep people interested and not waste their time. If you can quickly say what needs to be said and let your audience go, they are more likely to read you next time.
Your marketing list should receive email messages which include your colors and brand logo. Since your email subscribers will already associate your brand colors and logos with your business, it’s important that they be included. Consistently making your emails coordinate with your website will make them appear more familiar and make them less probable to be deleted.
In order to ensure that every single customer on your list has given their permission for you to email them, you should have customers opt-in to your list twice before you send the first email. This might seem difficult, but it will ensure that those are customers who want to get your emails. As a result, you are less likely to get in trouble in the future.
Avoid spammy sales techniques, such as urgent messages that they need to “Buy now!” messages. These kinds of approaches are overused, and can give your emails a spam-like feel. It can cost you customers. They are aware that you want to increase sales, so it would be best if you built a solid, professional relationship with them before encouraging them to buy anything. They will like this and will likely purchase from you.
Make your emails as personal as possible. This doesn’t just mean addressing your customers by their first names. Make use of all the information your customers have provided to you. Create smaller mini-groups of people that have common interests, and then customize messages for each small group.
Never send emails that do not provide a high level of value to your customers. Don’t abuse their confidence or insult their intelligence by sending them blatant sales petitions. You can include solutions to problems that commonly come up, new ways to use your products, or special deals in each email you send out.
You can use A/B testing to improve the results of your emails’ subject lines. Take one of your emails, and divide the mailing list in two. Send each half of the list the same mail, but with differing subject lines. You will learn which subject lines have the best open rates and which ones people ignore.
Make your email messages as personalized as possible, and you can make recipients feel special. They are more likely to ignore your email if they get the feeling that your email is generic. Putting in the first name is simple, but you can personalize it even more. In your data from their opt-in or subscription, you should be able to discern their geographic location, the time they registered and even why. Use all this information in the message you send them.
It is imperative that you never add anyone to your email list who doesn’t want to be there. If not, people will think of you as a spammer; they will send your mail to the junk folder, delete it or leave your list. After a few complaints, your web host is likely to boot you from their servers.
If a customer chooses to opt-out of your emails, you should remove them from your marketing list immediately. If you keep sending subscribers emails after they opt-out, they may feel like you are disrespecting them.
Perhaps an obvious, but nevertheless critical, email marketing tip is to verify the accuracy of all email addresses. Don’t waste time receiving email addresses, only to get a message that the address was invalid. Doing so is a time waster!
Develop a strategy that addresses your customer base. While persistence is important in email marketing, it only of value when your efforts are focused on the right audience. Customers who have proven unresponsive to your emails are unlikely to be swayed by continued efforts, and may even get frustrated with you, instead.
Make every effort to strike a personal tone in your emails. If you send emails which the reader identifies with, they will be more apt to buy from your company. One way to project a friendly tone is to include the reasons they signed up for your emails, if you know what those are.
If you use email marketing, be sure to keep your companies branding consistent in all communications. When you are creating any piece of creative data (including names, or design) choose something that will stand the test of time. Sending mixed email messages that look different from each other makes it harder for your subscribers to remember you.
Including a sales pitch and call to action in your emails is fine, but you must provide more than that for your reader to feel your email is worth their time. Messages should be like a newsletter with relevant information about your business. A lot of people will drop off of your email subscription list if you only try to sell them things. Even if your newsletter is a way to sell products, your customers expect more than a sales pitch.
Any message you send out should be proofread for spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. You have to be sure that everything in the email is correct. Prior to transmitting the message, check a sample of the email to make sure that it looks the way you intend for it to look. Test links that you include in your email to be sure they are working.
Email marketing can be a terrific method of keeping in contact with current and potential customers. You will start seeing results with email marketing when you apply the advice from this article. It is easy to promote the company through email and reaching out to customers.
