Do you have an online business that could use a boost? One easy solution is a business strategy called email marketing. Marketing through targeted emails to potential customers is a great way to get some extra visibility for your business. Read on to find out how you can start today!
Always get permission! Unsolicited email is not welcome, and in certain cases, can get your ISP blocked. When contacting someone, always include a newsletter or an offer – this way the customer has the chance to agree to receive your messages. The last thing you want is to be branded a spammer.
Before you put someone on your email marketing list, you need to have their permission. If you don’t have their permission, you will be responsible for sending spam and there will be many complaints. Your email provider may even dissolve your account if they get wind of what you’re doing. Prevent that from happening by requesting that people subscribe to your list.
Treat each reader like a relationship. Ask in the first email for permission to send more. In the second email, tell them what discounts, products and services they can expect in future emails. In the third email and after, follow through with the content you promised to provide them with.
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.
Your email marketing efforts will give you the best results when you coordinate them with the rest of your marketing campaign. Do not work against yourself by unnecessarily duplicating your efforts in several different marketing channels. Make sure that your use of email, social media, and traditional venues are all designed to work well together.
Make sure your emails are consistent with any branding you have done. You should be including your company colors, logos and anything else unique to your business in your emails. Customers should be able to recognize your emails when they arrive in their in-boxes so that they are not automatically deleted.
Not only should you provide your subscribers with an easy way to unsubscribe, but also you should ensure that it goes into effect immediately. Receiving emails from you after they have unsubscribed will give recipients a negative impression about you, harming any future relationships with them. Process requests to unsubscribe right away.
When acquiring e-mail addresses through your website for marketing purposes, make certain that your sign-up form is brief. In general, you can limit the information required to sign up to only a name and an e-mail address. Names are useful for personalizing your e-mails. However, if you feel that even the name might be too much, it is perfectly fine to limit your sign-up form to just an e-mail address.
To ensure that your email marketing is really helping and not hindering your business, pay close attention to the spam that you once deleted from your own email account. See what kind of language you yourself respond most negatively to an alternately what kind of topics make you more likely to open a marketing email.
See how your emails appear using the variety of methods your customers are likely to use. After you have created a design you feel is perfect, test it for compatibility with all email clients, browsers and operating systems if at all possible. Messages will vary depending on the email server.
You might want to send a follow-up email to your clients that includes a caution if your products or services supply is running low. You could include a link that tells them to click here and begin. The ending postscript could tell them to act now before your supply runs out.
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.
Check your email messages across different email providers to see how they look. By doing this, you’ll be able to ensure that your emails are standard enough to be compatible with the most popular email readers. Be as thorough as possible when doing this, so that you don’t miss any segment of your customers.
Use multi-part coding when you send out email marketing messages, in order to grab a larger market share. These are emails that include both HTML and plain text content, so that they will display appropriately no matter which option the recipient favors. It is a minor effort that gives big results, because someone who prefers text emails will not long remain with a subscription that only uses HTML.
Create an unsubscribe link that works immediately. If a customer unsubscribes from your list, that should be the last mailing they receive from you. In today’s computerized world, there’s no excuse for unscriptions not to be immediate. Customers who continue to receive mailings after they unsubscribe are likely to treat those emails as spam, and respond accordingly.
As you can see, email marketing is something that any business owner can use to great effect for their business. Applying the tips in this article to your marketing strategy will make some great improvements to your business right away! Try it now and see what a difference email marketing can make.
