Many businesses are quickly discovering that email marketing can be a vital part of their business. Emails can be a great way to keep in touch with customers, to offer them deals that will interest them and to invite them to special sales. The information and tips in this article can help you see all that email marketing has to offer your business.
Ask your customers for feedback on your emails. Since your customers are the most important part of your campaign, it is important to know if they are pleased with the emails they receive from you. You could ask them to fill out a short survey with a few questions on what they like and what they dislike.
To get subscribes psyched up about your emails, offer special promotions and discounts that are only available for those on your mailing list. This type of email marketing gives your customers an incentive to participate and they could also have the chance to refer friends. In fact, a referral program is a great way to grow both your email base and your customer base.
Treat each reader like a relationship. Ask in the first email for permission to send more. In the second email, tell them what discounts, products and services they can expect in future emails. In the third email and after, follow through with the content you promised to provide them with.
Make sure you only email subscribers who give you permission to do so. Spam emails will diminish your credibility within your customer base. It could become bad enough that people decide not to buy from you at all and completely detach themselves from your company.
If you have images or graphics, put them on the left side of the email message. Make sure that your call to action element is always on this side. Research has documented that this location produces almost double the number of clicks to your product, service or website than placing these elements anywhere else does.
Don’t use too many graphics in email marketing materials. Quite a few email reading programs available block graphics, making it possible that many of your intended readers can’t read the email properly. Too many graphics can also trigger the junk mail filter present in email programs, preventing your message from ever being seen.
Give your marketing emails the same consideration that you give your site content and other marketing materials. Too often businesses take a too-casual approach to their email marketing efforts, and seemingly small errors like typos end up undermining their readers’ perception of their level of professionalism. Before you add an email to your marketing rotation, ask yourself if it would inspire you to buy.
Take every opportunity that comes up to be festive when you send out your emails. When there is a holiday try to tailor your emails to fit the occasion. Subscribers will be very appreciative of this, and they will feel as if you are human and not a robot. Offering holiday discounts is another great idea that ties into the festive theme.
Playing with fonts is fun, and you may be tempted to spice up your emails with exotic fonts. Resist that temptation! Fonts may display differently, or even be replaced by defaults, on someone else’s computer. Even if an odd font does display correctly, there is no guarantee that your recipient will appreciate it the same way you do. To avoid any font-based mishaps, stick with fonts that are widespread, easy to read, and understated.
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.
Try to keep your email subject lines short. Try keeping them around 60 characters or so. Depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to get away with a longer one as long as you put your most important information first. That said, it’s better for the average consumer to keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
Build your mailing list one person at a time. Start by asking your largest customers to sign up and recommend you to their friends. Word of mouth is the best form of recommendation and you will gain much more business this way as well as have a larger, targeted email list to market your products to.
Use plain text and hyperlinks in your email messages, and save the images and Flash animation for your web page. Many email services now filter out images and animations in the name of consumer safety, meaning that your lists may not even see your carefully-crafted images. Plain text messages are guaranteed to go through intact, and then the images on your website will catch your viewers.
Avoid using the character string “$$$” in your marketing messages. Many spam messages use this character string either in the subject line or body of their emails. If you use it, people and email servers may treat your emails as if they were spam, too. Your emails may end up ignored or even blocked.
It is a well-known fact that the use of the internet has opened up an entirely new way for businesses to interact with customers. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to keep in touch with loyal customers and to reach potential customers. Use the techniques and tips from the article above to create an email marketing strategy for your business.
