When you are trying to market your business, it can be hard to know which marketing techniques to focus on. Email marketing can be a strong, fundamental part of any marketing plan. Here are some useful email marketing tips to strengthen your overall marketing strategy, and to build your bottom line.
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.
When you ask people to opt-in, let them know what to expect. Tell them what you will be sending and how often you will send it. People will be more likely to sign up if they know that you are not going to flood their inboxes with wordy emails that they have no intention of reading.
Be especially careful when crafting your first three emails to new customers. A new customer should get an introductory email inviting them to join your marketing list. Once they accept your invitation, the next email should tell them about discounts or special offers they can expect to get now that they’ve signed up. The third email should contain their first newsletter and their special offer.
Make sure you have permission from the subscriber before you send them emails. If you fire off unsolicited emails, the recipients are not likely to take you seriously. Most people will not only delete the email, but also resolve to never do business with you in the future.
While you want to use your email marketing to improve your sales. The only way to get potential customers to read your emails is to convince them that they have value. To do this, your emails should always contain concrete, useful information and relevant links, and not just generic sales fluff.
Be prepared to respond to emails if your email marketing is done properly. If you take too long to respond, you may miss a bunch of opportunities. If you provide good content that is free, be prepared to get responses to it from your recipients. You must be prepared and available as much as you can.
You should always ensure that every email address that you have is correct. You shouldn’t be wasting time tracking down addresses and sending out more emails once you receive tons of messages that have bounced back due to invalid addresses. This is a huge waste of time.
Getting permission to send emails is not difficult to get. You can use discounts, coupons, special offers and even flyers given out in trade shows to get customers interested enough to receive your emails. They can sign up on your website among other methods. By being friendly and offering a good incentive to sign up, customers may even give you access to personal information and their personal preferences.
Encourage your recipients to forward your e-mails to friends that might be interested. A recommendation from a friend is very effective due to the fact that people trust their friends. This is a great way to introduce your business to potential customers that are very likely to have an interest in your products or services.
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.
Test and design your messages to be readable and functional even if the images and graphics get blocked. Many email clients do this automatically. Make sure that any images you do use have descriptive text substituted via the Alternative attribute that should be available in your email composition software interface.
Keep mobile users in mind when choosing the size of your message. You might be composing your emails on a monitor that has four or even five times the available pixels that a smartphone user has. Send your messages small or scalable so that everyone can read them easily and quickly.
Reflect current festivities with your email marketing messages. Have a theme focusing or referring to love at Valentine’s Day. Be thankful to your subscribers around Thanksgiving. Sending out content in tune with current holidays lets your readers know that your messages are up to date and not just old content being regurgitated by some server.
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.
Email marketing can be an effective, smart way to promote your business. You have to know what to do. Just apply the tips laid out here so your email marketing plan goes well. Learn as much as you can about email marketing so that you only improve as your business grows.
