A big part of running a successful company is learning to get the word out about your business. To do that, you need a strong marketing campaign; one of the best ways to market your company is to use email marketing. Email marketing can be a smart way to reach your target market, and here are some great tips to have success.
The easier it is to subscribe to your email newsletter, the more subscribers you will have. If you have a physical store, ask your customers for their email address when they make a purchase. If you sell on a website, ask them for their address when they are ready to check out.
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.
To get the most of your email marketing, invest in a program that personalizes your emails with every customer’s given name instead of a generic greeting. Ensuring that every email starts with the recipient’s name is key to encouraging your customers to see your newsletters as valuable information and not just more sales spam.
Provide your customers with useful tips or information in each marketing newsletter. Think of the newsletter as an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise in your field. Your customers will trust you more when they see how much you know and will be more likely to buy products or services from you.
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.
The importance of branding your business extends all the way down to your email 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 cause your readers to instantly recognize your company.
Use colors and fonts that reflect your business and are easy to view. Even if the content is interesting, difficult to read fonts and harsh colors can cause some customers to reject the email, and possibly future ones as well. Use the same color scheme and fonts for all of your emails.
Pay attention to the demographics within your subscriber base. See what content and links intrigued a particular segment of your audience, and then follow up with a new email to that subgroup. The boost in your response rate from peeling away the top layer will really surprise you, but in a delightful way.
Make responding promptly to emails your top priority. If a potential customer reaches out to you through email, you ought to do everything you can to reply to them within one day. Waiting longer may cost you the customer, and they may mention the lack of response to others.
Perhaps an obvious, but nevertheless critical, email marketing tip is to verify the accuracy of all email addresses. 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 can be a waste of your time!
When someone subscribes to your email marketing list, confirm that this is what they really intended to do. Implementing this double opt-in strategy will make it much less likely that your email provider will receive spam complaints about you. Also, you will be assured that the people receiving your emails are actually interested in what you are sending them.
On your email subscription form, set the expectations for your potential subscribers on what you typically will send to them. Always inform your readers of what kind of email you will be sending and how often it will arrive. New subscribers will know exactly what to expect from you, and won’t be shocked by the quantity of emails, or their content.
Your email marketing content should be attention grabbing. You may have to try a couple different things. Stop using a technique if it’s not getting the results you expected. Even if you discover an area that works, always test new techniques which can be learned online or some other location.
Keep all of your branding in your email consistent with your business. Don’t make your email appear as though it belongs to another business. Try to stick with your usual colors, voice, and fonts so that the readers can recognize that the email is from you and so they will read it.
Emphasize the benefits of your product or service whenever possible. Subscribers will want to know what’s in it for them, so tell them–in the subject line, in your links, and in your content. Your subscribers will be much more interested in your message if they feel that it can help them in some way.
Email marketing can be a boost to your business, or it can hurt your business. Use the tips laid out here to make sure that your email marketing plan does what you need it to do; apply them to your email marketing, build relationships with your customers, and raise your profits.
