Gone are the days when business had to send out flyers to mass markets or have them put on cars in parking lots and hope for the best. Email marketing helps businesses reach their established customers as well as those who would genuinely be interested in their products. This article can help you develop an email marketing campaign that will help you reach your target.
The beginning and conclusion of your marketing email should include a call to action for your customers. Be clear about what you want your customer to do, and include at least two obvious links to your site. Use clear suggestions that direct your customers to the offer your email is promoting.
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.
You should avoid sending too many emails; one a week is enough. Most customers receive lots of messages per day and don’t have time to read them all. Sending several emails a week can eventually result in people deleting what you send without even taking a proper look and ignoring your hard created content.
An email marketing campaign needs a design and testing phase, just like anything else. Plan on putting in time making sure that your messages get past all techniques used for fighting spam, from content filters to image blocking and java-script suppression. You can send out a million messages blindly and not ever know if they are even seen.
In addition to using email marketing, incorporate SMS marketing into your campaign. Have customers sign up for an SMS option and send them text messages when on the go. When these two methods are used together, you have a better chance of getting more customers to sign up for your product.
Make it easy to unsubscribe. Make the unsubscribe link clearly visible in your email, allowing someone to stop getting email marketing. This way you are less likely to get reported for sending spam. Also, if someone has unsubscribed, don’t make the mistake of continuing to send them email: that is likely to cause them to complain.
Your customers are busy people, so don’t bore them with information that they can’t use. Sending emails with valuable information instead of always sending sales pitches will build customer confidence and credibility for your product. Every email should have something relevant, like tips or discounts.
Try using A/B testing for your email marketing campaign. This basically entails creating two very different versions of the same email (A and B) and sending “A” to half of a small test group and “B” to the other half. Whichever half receives the most positive response is the one that you should be using for your campaign.
Tailor your emails to each reader as much as you can. This makes the emails more interesting. A customer who feels they’re just getting a form letter, the same as everyone else, is more likely to delete it without reading. Using the first name of the recipient is simple, and you can even go beyond that. You should be able to tell when, why and where they signed up. This information should be used in your messages.
As previously noted, flyers that are posted on cars and sent to everyone on a mailing list were notoriously expensive, time-consuming and mostly ineffective. Email marketing has come along and allows you to send market your business in a much more effective manner at a fraction of the cost and with a greater success rate. Use the information in this article to help you create a successful email marketing campaign.
