People tend to shy away from email promoting. Knowing how to take advantage of email promoting strategies can make it much easier to realize how it can give you a big advantage as you grow your business.
Market to your readers. After you get a small list going, go a step further and find ways to get them to invite their friends on board. Remember to have a subscribe link inside your email; hopefully, your customers will pass it to their friends that have similar interests on the products that you offer. Your subscriber base will grow by itself.
If you want to go ahead with marketing via email you should get permission from your customers before you email them, you should do this for every single person on your list. If not, you will be looking at many spam complaints and loss of customers.
Each email should have one obvious message. With a deluge of information in your email, you can create an overwhelmed or bored reader, very easily. Only send one message and make it short within reason, easily getting to the point. In the end, your customers will be thankful for being given the information in a concise and organized manner.
Place your unsubscribe link in a conspicuous place in your email, like the footer. Avoid not having an unsubscribe link or burying it within your email to the point where it is hard to find. You want each of your users to feel like everything is their choice, and you are not forcing them into anything.
Try different email formats until you find what works best for you and your readers. Put your important information and any new offers near the beginning of your messages. Try using various formats to figure out which of them gets more responses. When you find a format that is effective, stick with it. This consistency will make it easy for customers to know where to locate your information and maneuver through your emails quicker.
Remember that more and more people are reading their email with a mobile device, like a smartphone. Devices like these have much smaller screens and less work space. Find out how your messages look on these devices, and make any changes necessary to make them easy to read on small phone screens.
Always focus on the fact that the reason for email marketing is to get more people to buy your products. Every email should be a way to get clients to make a purchase. Do so by building emails that provide information on new products or that offer special deals and promotions.
In your emails, give customers an incentive. Your profits will increase if they feel that buying from you, through your emails, benefits them in some way. 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.
Your marketing emails should contain rich content to complement the request for business. Offer your subscribers deals that they can’t find anywhere else, including your main website. Also try including special offers on products and services. Be prepared to offer holiday or birthday greetings, and other special communications, that don’t always appear to be eliciting a purchase.
Utilize email previewers in order to take advantage of your preheader material. Preheaders are the first text line in an email body, normally highlighted. Gmail and various other email providers use that line of text after the subject line, so it will grab the reader’s attention.
A major holiday is usually not the time for an important marketing campaign. People do not have time to check their emails as much since they are away from work and have limited access to their computers. There are times, however, when this may not be true. For example, emails advertising a holiday sale or a Black Friday campaign will attract attention at almost any time.
Strive to set a personal tone in every message you send as part of an email promoting effort. The recipients are far more likely to respond positively to an e-mail that isn’t overly formal and distant. Your customers will be a lot more impressed if an important person, such as your president or another high-ranking executive, sends the message.
Place your unsubscribe link in a conspicuous place in your email, like the footer. Make it easy to find so that people feel comfortable about receiving your emails. Ideally, your users should feel like they have control over the messages that they receive, and they should never feel forced into receiving them.
Don’t add an address to your email subscriber list without their permission. Adding random emails to your list will not only draw the ire of the owner of those emails, but other customers, as well. You could also face penalties from the provider of your email services if you violate their rules regarding spamming.
Make sure you use both active and passive feedback mechanisms in your email marketing campaign. Ask what they like about your emails, what they don’t and what they’d like to see added, all called active feedback. Passive feedback is generally not seen by the readers. Try many techniques and use the software available to determine which method yields you the most reads and/or clicks.
Email Clients
To build an email list, place an option on your website for readers to sign up and start receiving your emails. You can garner some enthusiastic, entirely voluntary subscribers simply by making the option to sign up prominently available on your website.
Test how your email messages look in different platforms. Once your marketing message is perfected, test it using all of the major operating systems, email clients and browsers. Emails can vary on how they appear in different email clients, such as Linux Gmail or Windows Hotmail.
Always test out how your email messages will show up on a lot of different electronic 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. The manner in which your email is displayed can vary greatly between different email services, such as Hotmail and Gmail.
Your marketing emails should be brief and to the point. Use direct language wherever you can. Doing this will show that you respect the time of your readers. It also makes it more probable for the reader to actually read through the message in its entirety. Remember the importance of this, as your important links and content will probably be near the end of the email.
Your marketing emails should be reasonably short. Be as concise as you can be. This communicates to the reader that you value his or her time. Readers will probably read the whole message, if it is direct and short. It is important to remember that even the finish of your email has critical content.
Being reported for emailing spam is harmful to any business. Therefore, every company should safeguard it’s reputation by having a two-step opt-in procedure that requires a confirmation. Your customer will receive an email to ensure they typed in their email address correctly, and that they actually subscribed. Add two links to the email – one for confirmation and one to opt out. This security measure will give you more credibility and you will have a proof that people agreed to receiving your emails.
You want your sales list to be highly targeted. You can do this by getting your top customers, as well as their contacts, to subscribe to your mailing list. Making your email list customers feel special by offering them special deals that aren’t available to the average walk in customer and they will feel privileged to be on that list.
Email Promoting
Craft compelling, efficient subject lines. Subject lines that contain 60 characters or fewer are more likely to grab readers’ attention, resulting in higher open rates than rambling, overly long subjects. If you’re having trouble keeping your subject line concise, start it off with the most significant words to ensure that they don’t get cut off when the email reaches a customer’s inbox.
A tip for someone who’s getting started in email promoting is to proofread their emails before sending them out. This should go without saying, but many people get into the habit of writing an email without thinking. You’re merely sending an email, right? You should think again! You need to treat your email promoting with all the same professionalism and attention to detail that you use in other media.
Always proofread your emails carefully before sending them. This should go without saying, but many people get into the habit of writing an email without thinking. You may be thinking that it is only an email. That’s not true! An email marketing program is a critical part of your overall marketing strategy, and mistakes like ugly emails or emails that aren’t proofread can have wide-ranging impact on your business.
Send out Happy Birthday wishes to subscribers. Add a field to your sign up form that lets subscribers enter their birthday if they want to so that you can send them automated greetings. Taking the time to do this will help your customers to feel more valued, particularly if you add in a coupon, discount code, or some other special offer in the message.
Take advantage of special holidays and events to push your email marketing efforts. Consider upcoming holidays far in advance and prepare your email marketing campaigns to take advantage of them. Build relevant campaigns with retail holidays like Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas in mind. You can better your sales by marketing in the slower periods of the year.
Make sure that your email marketing campaigns are in sync with various special events and holidays. Consider upcoming holidays far in advance and prepare your marketing via email campaigns to take advantage of them. Come up with campaigns that revolve around major retail holidays, including Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Days and any others that may be appropriate. Make sure you keep some interesting content to generate sales in between holidays.
Ask permission of those on your chosen email list prior to sending anything. People don’t like spam, and spam is unsolicited email. Engaging in this behavior can have a negative effect on your business. So, get a good start with potential customers by ensuring they are o.k. with receiving your mailings.
Always ask explicit permission before you send email to anyone. Very few people like to receive information that they did not sign up for. Sending mail that is unwanted can really harm your business. Make sure you do everything legally by sending out emails to people who want to receive them.
Your emails should always include brand logos, as well as color. Subscribers to this list are already quite familiar with your site, so they associate certain colors, logos and designs with you. Consistently making your emails coordinate with your website will make them appear more familiar and make them less probable to be deleted.
Never email a customer without getting their permission first! An email that arrives uninvited is not likely to be read, and sending such a message exposes you to being labeled a spammer. Worse, people will opt out of your list en masse, and you may have your email account canceled for abuse.
Take a look at the emails your competitors are sending out. Subscribe to their newsletter. Knowing what they are doing will help ensure that your e-mail campaigns are better than their campaigns. Look for areas that could use improvement, and do a better job. If your competitors are sending out promotions, try to make yours more valuable.
When building an e-mail marketing list, build it organically. You should never buy or rent an email address list. Instead, make up a list of contacts by using business cards of people you have met, and also by utilizing subscription sign ups within your site. Doing so is a way to target the right people and improve your business.
Your subject lines should be less than 60 characters. Many email providers cut off longer subject lines. Some of them simply can’t show longer than this. Regardless, your subscriber may likely only need that many letters to make the snap judgement of reading versus deleting of your message.
As you can see from the advice above, there are many ways you can use email promoting to benefit your business. By applying what you’ve learned to your own marketing strategy, you should see a change for the better in no time.
Use the information you get from the subscriber to make their shopping experience smoother. If a customer is filling out an order form linked from an opt-in email, automatically fill in the information you already know about the customer. That makes the sales process run more easily, and makes people more likely to make a purchase.
