Have you dabbled in email marketing with disappointing results? Have you heard about the profit potential of email marketing, but don’t have the expertise to put it into practice? This article is here to help you. Below, are some great ideas to help you get started and improve your email marketing.
Only send emails to people that you know. Emailing random people is considered spam and could get you in trouble with your ISP or web host. People will not recognize your brand and will not trust you at all. They’re likely to delete your email, wasting everyone’s time.
In order to make customers excited about your emails, try giving special discounts or promotions through newsletters. This will tell your customers that they are special, you care about their business and that you want to reward them for staying loyal by signing up for your opt-in list. This will even nudge them towards letting their friends see the emails through forwarding. In fact, referral programs are great in growing both your customer base and email base.
Educate yourself about email marketing using whatever tools necessary. Search online for information, or check out books from the library. There are a lot of classes that you may be able to enroll in to benefit you.
Test the different formats of emails. Include the information that is most important, as well as new offers, at the very beginning of your emails. Try different formats in order to see which elicits the most responses. When you find a format that is effective, stick with it. When you do this all of your customers know where they need to look for when searching for information they are interested in reading.
It is good to ask individuals who want to get your emails to opt-in twice. Although it is an extra step for your customer, you can be more confident that your customer is genuinely interested and it also reduces the risk of trouble with your email provider for spamming.
Branding your business is important, and it needs to work with all of your marketing efforts. For this reason, it is worth designing a template that contains your logo, standard color scheme, and fonts that appear in your other marketing materials, such as your website. This will make your emails unique and instantly recognizable.
Always get permission from your customers before you correspond with them via email. By doing so, your gain customer trust, and protect your reputation. In addition, you could find yourself blacklisted by an ISP, which can be catastrophic for your business.
Having an unsubscribe link where it can be clearly seen is a great idea. Don’t fail to include one or bury it so that it is not readily apparent. You should strive for your readers to feel that they are in control and that you’re not controlling them.
Provide an incentive with each email you send to your customers. Your customers are more likely to deal with you if there is some type of incentive involved. A good example is letting customers click a link and when they purchase from your site, provide them with free shipping with orders that total over a certain amount.
Do not send emails that use images to convey the most important information. Most email clients today, especially web-based ones, will not properly display these images. Image-heavy messages may appear unattractive or unreadable if the client does not display the graphics. You should always use text for your important information and use alt tags to describe your images.
Show all of your customers and followers that you do truly appreciate their support and value their time, do this by sending emails that are informative, as opposed to spam. Respect the customers’ intelligence by only sending well thought out emails containing pertinent information, not merely sales pitches. Aim to incorporate a solution to some typical problem, a very clever new method of utilizing a product, or some type of special promotion in all of your emails.
Your company’s email marketing campaign should have an option to unsubscribe for people who no longer wish to receive messages from you. It’s costing you money to send those emails, and sending them to people who don’t want them is money poorly spent. Being considered a spammer is very bad for business, and you can be blacklisted from certain websites.
A good way to get your content out there is to provide a way for people to easily sign up for your email list. This can be anywhere on your site, as long as there is an easily located place where your subscribers may go to update their preferences.
Email Clients
Test your marketing messages using thorough tests that show how your email will look on various platforms. 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. Emails can vary on how they appear in different email clients, such as Linux Gmail or Windows Hotmail.
Email marketing can be an incredible tool, but like many things, it’s only effective if it’s used correctly. After reading this article, you can see how to successfully use email to enhance your business. Start using these tips, and soon you will see a big results in email marketing!