Email marketing is a marketing method that uses emails to promote to customers. To some, this can sound a bit difficult, but it really isn’t. Using email marketing to reach your customer base isn’t as hard as you might think, especially if you pay close attention to the tips in the following article.
While online promotion is essential, don’t overlook the opportunity to promote your mailing list offline. To build both new subscribers and potential clients, look for any opportunity possible to get the word out. Some great opportunities to build your business can be found at networking events, trade shows, conferences and local gatherings.
To keep your email recipients engaged, use various sequences for different types of readers. For example, if you get an email address from a sale, that customer should receive a very distinctive welcoming email than a reader whose email you received from a lead. If readers aren’t getting what they want from emails, then they simply won’t read them.
Data mine your email list and bucket your audience into various segments based off of any profiling data you have. This will allow you to be more strategic with your messaging and effectively increase your chances of higher open and click through rates. Even if you don’t have profiling, look to geo-targeting. Various regions respond differently to different types of messaging.
Email is a great marketing tool, but it is not an arena where the hard sell is appreciated. Never pressure your subscribers into buying. Put sales pitches at the tail end of your emails, especially if your readers signed up with expectations of informative content. Consider email as a tool to cultivate interest, not instant sales.
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.
Choose appropriate but useful fonts for your messages. Try and select a font family that accomplishes two things. It should reflect your niche or industry, as well as the tone of your content. It should also be a universal category of fonts that will work on all computers and email devices.
Use plain text and hyperlinks in your email messages, and save the images and Flash animation for your web page. Many email services now filter out images and animations in the name of consumer safety, meaning that your lists may not even see your carefully-crafted images. Plain text messages are guaranteed to go through intact, and then the images on your website will catch your viewers.
An important step for email marketing novices is to do thorough proofreading of emails prior to distribution. While this seems obvious, it is easy to overlook professionalism when sending an email is so fast and so simple. Use a business tone in your e-mails if you want to be taken seriously. That is incorrect! You need to treat your email marketing with all the same professionalism and attention to detail that you use in other media.
Keep your important aspects of your messages “above the fold.” This “fold” refers to the area that is previewed in an email program. Anything that is important should be arranged with this “fold” in mind. Many readers use these to preview a message before deciding to open it. Keep anything important within this area so that they don’t have to scroll to find it.
Implement a double opt in. Sometimes clicking a little box to signify that you want to receive e-mails slips by a person. To eliminate complaints of spam, use a double opt in. Have the person confirm that they wish to receive e-mails by verifying their e-mail or clicking a second button.
Implement a double-confirm option for those who sign up for your emails. You will avoid common mistakes such as misspelled email addresses. You can reduce the risks of sending out emails to wrong addresses by asking people to confirm their email address.
After about nine months, ask your subscribers to re-confirm their wishes to receive emails from you. Retention can be tricky, but those on your email list will appreciate you asking, and will be less likely to unsubscribe. The re-confirmation process will also let you know which readers are loyal to you.
Your email subscription confirmation should be opt-in. This will assist a person in double checking whether they want to receive emails from you. Doing so will minimize the likelihood of your messages being reported as spam, or complaints against your business by people who don’t desire to receive your emails.
If you are looking for a good email marketing tip, you may want to consider sending out HTML emails rather than simply text emails. Text emails are easily forgettable and generally boring to look at while html emails can make eye catching, impressive designs that readers are much more likely to remember.
Hopefully now that you have read this article, you are a little less intimidated by email marketing. The widely used marketing practice is fairly simple to implement and can be adapted in no time at all. Simply remember all of the tips that you read here and you will be on your way to using emails for marketing.
