Many an online business has been made, or broken, by a single email marketing campaign. If you do it right it can go viral, driving massive traffic to your website. If you do it wrong, on the other hand, it can sink your company. Read this article in full to find tips and techniques to teach you how to do it in a way that benefits your company.
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.
if you run out of ideas for your email marketing campaign, try allowing your customers to assist you. Do things like write down questions that you receive from customers. Then when you go to send the next email, you have a topic. Make sure to include the customer’s name for credit too.
Maximize the results of your email marketing by encouraging your readers to respond to every email. Always read and reply to these emails immediately. Building a personal relationship with each of your readers is the best way to convert them into loyal customers. This is also a good way to get more specific feedback on the success of your efforts.
Your email marketing campaign will be more effective if you make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. This may seem paradoxical, but people will tend to trust you more if you make them feel as if they are in control. Post the unsubscribe link in an obvious place so they can find it easily.
Post a version of your newsletter with graphics and animation on your website. Then send your email list a plain text version of the newsletter with a link to the web version. This keeps your emails simple enough to stop them from being diverted to the spam folder as well as encouraging your customers to visit your website.
Avoid using exclamation marks as crutches in your emails. If you want to express a sense of urgency or importance, use the structure of your sentence and the words you choose to to make that impact. Overusing this form of punctuation can turn potential customers off and make your message seem insincere.
Use tools to measure the success of your email marketing campaign. You should learn all you can about how many times your emails are read, if your subject lines are being read, which articles you write are being read, etc. Using information like this can help with the future success of your campaign since you will know what works and what does not.
Give customers the choice of getting a plain text version of your email marketing materials or a rich text version. Customers can choose the option they prefer when they sign up for your newsletter. Plain text versions don’t include graphics, so customers with slower connections or overactive spam filters might appreciate this option.
Beware of including attachments to your email marketing! Mass emails with attachments are instantly suspected as spam by most spam filters. As well, these days many types of computer malware and viruses are carried in email attachments, and people are aware of this. Your email is in jeopardy of being immediately deleted when they see an attachment without even being read.
Design your marketing emails to be easily read on mobile devices, in addition to computers. An increasing number of people check their email messages using their cell phones. If the message is difficult to read on their phone, it is likely to be deleted without the content ever being read.
It is crucial that before you add a person to your subscriber list, they have given you authorization to do so. If you avoid doing this, most people will not even read your emails. If your ISP gets enough complaints about you, they may drop you for spam policy violations.
Conduct testing to understand how email marketing looks across various platforms. Once your marketing message is perfected, test it using all of the major operating systems, email clients and browsers. The way that Windows Hotmail looks is very different from the way Linux Gmail looks.
Make sure your email campaign matches your brand. Use the same logos, fonts, colors as well as a similar messaging style to what your readers could find on your website. This helps the receivers of your email feel comfortable with the content and makes them more likely to open it.
When you know what to do, creating an email marketing campaign will be easy, effective and profitable. You’ll better your online reputation while building profits, and the initial investment of both time and money is small. There is no better way to grow your business, so start creating your campaign today!