Including a sales pitch and call to action in your emails is fine, but you must provide more than that for your reader to feel your email is worth their time. Your mailings should aim to be a newsletter providing important bits of information about the industry or business itself. Filling your emails with only sales pitches will eventually result in annoyed customers and a lot of people unsubscribing from your email list. While it is good to make use of your time with your customer to sell, it takes more than just that for them to stay interested.
Make sure that your message is an appropriate length and that it stays on topic. Marketing messages often lose their appeal rapidly. Usually anything beyond a paragraph or two is going to be left unread. Customers are often pressed for time and only want information they are highly interested in. Just make your point quick and move on, as they will then be willing to come back for more later.
A great way to help customers is to provide an unsubscribe link. Don’t make it difficult to find. Make your customers feel that you value their participation and not as though they have been roped in unwillingly and unable to escape.
If your emails include images, make use of Alt tags. These are just in case an image is unable to load. The tags should have relevant descriptions of what the image is, this way the recipient knows the intent of the image. Your links should also contain these tags.
It is very important that you gain permission from anyone before sending correspondence by email. If you fail to do this, you will destroy the trust of your existing customers and generate negative word of mouth. Some ISPs may even blacklist your emails, ensuring that your marketing campaigns fail and your profits diminish.
Your opt-out link should yield immediate results. If you’re not getting these people off the mailing list in time, that can be seen as disrespectful to your subscribers because you’re not listening to what they want.
Keep customers by sending emails that are personalized. Maintain their happiness through discounts and special loyalty sales. The key is to tailor those sales and discounts to products similar to what they have bought in the past. Once you gain a customer’s trust through that first sale, he or she will be more inclined to purchase more of your products.
Try using A/B testing on your subject lines. Choose one email, randomly split the mailing list in two and send each half the same email with different subject lines. This can help you see which subject lines cause readers to open your messages and which get ignored.
Ask permission of those on your chosen email list prior to sending anything. Very few people like to receive information that they did not sign up for. Sending out spam will give a bad image of your business. Start off the right way, and be certain that your efforts are going to people who agree to hear from you.
Allow your readers who visit your website many opportunities to opt-in but avoid any pressure tactics to subscribe. Assure your customers that their information will never be compromised and that you are worthy of trust. Make certain to also inform them how they will benefit from signing up with you. A successful e-mail marketing campaign depends on your ability to get customer information.
Keep things consistent. Make sure to be consistent with your colors and branding in your emails. Always choose a font that is easy to read, even on a mobile device. After receiving a few messages, consumers will begin to recognize you, hopefully causing them to pay attention to your emails. Cultivating familiarity (or branding) is an important part of marketing, especially through email.
Send birthday greetings to subscribers. Add a field to your subscription form for customers to enter their birthday, and use this information to send an automated greeting when their special day rolls around. Just this simple step will go a long ways in making your customers feel like they are remembered and special. This can be especially true if you add a promotional code, discount or coupon for them.
Your subject line should be interesting and informative. The subject title will be seen first by clients and it is important to entice their curiosity enough for them to actually open the email. Getting recipients to open the message is the hardest part, and a good subject line should get them to keep reading.
The appearance of your email marketing messages is an important consideration. Spam filters will oftentimes block logos, animation, and pictures, so do not use graphics. It is important that key information is displayed in the text of your email. Make sure it is easy for subscribers to click a link to go to your website. You can wow them with images once they are there.
Effectively marketing through email depends upon attention-grabbing messages. This could involve some trial and error on your part. If something is not working for you, try a different approach. Even when you find something that is working for you, be testing out new strategies and techniques that you learn about online or from somewhere else.
You can use a multi-part message to approach several topics in one email. These are emails that include both HTML and plain text content, so that they will display appropriately no matter which option the recipient favors. It is a minor effort that gives big results, because someone who prefers text emails will not long remain with a subscription that only uses HTML.
Email marketing might be old, but it still has lots of profit potential. Using what you’ve read here when you draft your campaign strategy will lead to sound decisions and increasing profits, so gather your thoughts and put them to work!
