Establishing an ongoing relationship with current customers and reaching out to new customers is a crucial part of a successful business. Email marketing is one of the newer and most effective ways to accomplish this. The tips and techniques in the article below were designed to help you launch an email marketing strategy that accomplishes that.
Provide subscribers with a way out. Place an “unsubscribe” link in your emails or on your website to allow them to remove themselves from your list. You should also set up your list to cull itself by removing subscribers after a particular number of messages prompt no response or action from the recipient. This prevents your emails from becoming annoying to disinterested subscribers and preserves your image.
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.
Try using A/B testing on your subject lines. Pick one email message, divide up your mailing list in two and send them out with the different subject lines. This allows you to determine which subject lines lead to subscribers opening your emails, and which get deleted without a second thought.
Get creative with your email designs to find out what works best. Send out a few emails with content and links that differ in their fonts and text color. Play around with image positioning, including buttons and logos. After you’ve sent the emails, find out which ones had the best click-thru rates. Stick with those for the time being, but change it up on occasion to see if you can find a method that works even better. More click-thru rates equate to more sales.
Branding your business is essential, and should be incorporated in your marketing emails. Because of this, it’s important to take some time and create a template that lets you put your colors, company logo and fonts from your site into your emails. This will help users recognize you and your brand.
Develop content that is interesting and informative to your customer base. The message should be engaging, and not filled with dry, boring content. The recipients are more likely to read it all the way through if it is not too long. As they see that your content is relevant, your reputation will grow.
You can create a targeted mailing list by having customers get their friends to sign up too. The reasoning is that their friends are probably interested in the same things as they are and trust a friend’s recommendation. Include a subscribe for the link in your emails so that customers can forward them to friends, helping your mailing list grow by leaps and bounds.
A good business person knows when to close the deal. Nothing is worse than having all the right tools but closing the deal at the wrong time. You must know when to make an offer, and you must earn the right to make that offer. Making the offer at the wrong time will be detrimental to the success of your email marketing campaign.
The emails you send out as part of your marketing campaign should start out with a welcoming, personalized tone. Include the name of the recipient in the subject line and the opening of the message. This will make your customers feel more receptive to your message and be more likely to patronize your business.
Use auto responding messages to your advantage in your email marketing campaign. These can help you stay in touch with your recipients. They can be effective if your subscribers sign up for emails about various things you offer. You can tailor these to correspond with the information they signed up for. It also allows you an easier way to stay in touch.
Have an exit strategy for customers that stop responding to your mailings. If a customer is no longer interested in the products you have to sell, they’re going to be irritated and even angered by continued contact. Determine a number of messages or a length of time that you’ll keep sending messages, then if the customer doesn’t respond, remove them from your mailing list.
Once you have the format of your email marketing messages set up, you should check it on multiple email clients. In the same way that different browsers can display web pages differently, a strange email client may show your message in an unexpected fashion. Make use of all of the popular free email clients and ensure that your message is going to appear properly on them.
There is nothing wrong with composing your marketing emails in HTML, but you may find it rewarding to give it a break from time to time. A simple message composed in plain text will be taken as a little more intimate and a little less formal by your subscribers. If you exercise moderation, sending plain text emails can encourage loyalty and draw your readers closer to you.
It is very true that your relationship with your customers is a vital part of having a successful business. All businesses need a way to interact with current customers and to be able to reach out to potential customers who are interested in your product. The information and tips in the above article can help you do just that.
