10 Essential Email Marketing Tips Every Business Must Know

 

10 Essential Email Marketing Tips

10 Essential Email Marketing Tips

It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing available. No other marketing medium works as quickly and as efficiently as email.

Consider the fact that the average user on the internet has at least one email address and you begin to understand why email marketing should be regarded as your best form of marketing available to you today.

However, before you start blasting out emails to people (this is considered as SPAMMING) we’ll discuss the right way to go about your email marketing efforts.

Why Email Marketing Is So Important

Before I present you with my Email Marketing Tips, let me digress a bit and define why I believe email marketing is the most powerful marketing tactic that you can incorporate into your marketing plan today.

Take a moment and look at the people you know, how many of them use the internet?

Now, of those people that use the internet, how many of them also have an email address?

How many email addresses do you have?

Are you starting to see the big picture.

Today, everyone on the internet has an email account. Afterall, big companies like Google, Yahoo, and MSN make it so easy for anyone to get an email address. Gmail and Hotmail are free services that provide email and it only takes a minute to signup and setup an email account. It’s no wonder that the average user on the internet may own and use multiple email accounts.

So here’s a question for you – When was the last time you asked someone for their Telephone Number? What kind of a response did your request conjure up?

Chances are your request was met with a response similar to “Why do you need my phone number?”.

Now, think about the last time you asked someone for their email address… More than likely, your request was granted without to much resistance or hesitation.

The perception today is that emails are less intrusive than a telephone call. Which is probably the correct when you think about email as being a form of communication that we as an individual control… Meaning, we can read our email at our leisure, scanning through the emails deleting the ones that don’t interest us, keeping the ones that do, and responding to the ones that, at the moment, are most important to us.

My Top 10 Essential Email Marketing Tips

So now that you understand the importance of email marketing, let’s review my Top 10 Essential Email Marketing Tips that will provide you with a guide to how to incorporate email marketing into your marketing plan.

  1. Utilize Permission Based Marketing – Always use permission based email marketing. Permission based email marketing is broadly defined as “You have received the recipients permission to email them”. Let’s say you want to send out a periodic email to your prospects/customers and you have a signup form on your website where visitors can signup for your emails. It’s a good practice to use a double-optin form which requires the user to respond to an email after signup to confirm that they want to receive your emails. This double-optin ensures you have been given permission by the owner of the email address to send them emails.
  2. Allow for an Easy Opt-Out / Unsubscribe – Just as important as receiving permission, you should also provide your prospects/customers with a way to “Opt-Out” of your emails if they so desire. Everyone’s interests change, hence if your prospects/customers decide they no longer want to receive your emails they should have an easy way to unsubscribe.
  3. Set the Subscribers Expectations – Let your subscribers know up-front how often you will be sending out emails. Also, be sure they understand the email content they will be receiving from you. This will ensure that you don’t get complaints from subscribers that thought they were signing up for some other type of email.
  4. Keep the Content Pertinent to your Subscribers Expectations – The content that you share with your email subscribers should be pertinent to their expectations. If they signed up for emails from a website about “Western Apparel” then your emails should always be relative to that subject content.
  5. Focus The Content of Emails To Your Recipients Needs – Keep your emails short and to the point. If the original intent of your emails were to inform your customers of upcoming specials or new product information then don’t include stray off topic. If you don’t have anything to provide relating to the intended topic then it’s probably better to not send an email at all.
  6. Test Your Email Messages – Many of the email marketing providers today have fancy templates that utilize images, html, or flash. Before you get wrapped up in making a fancy email that will just end up in the users “Junk Mail’” folder, test the email, ensure it’s deliverability. If in doubt, utilize a simple text version when possible. Text emails have a higher probability of reaching your intended recipients in box.
  7. Don’t Over Communicate – It’s so easy to send out email broadcasts to your users, once that you have them in your list, that you will be tempted to send emails frequently. Don’t!  Stick to your planned distribution cycle, your users will thank you for the respect.
  8. Consider Segmenting Your List – Not everyone on your list is always interested in what new products or services you provide.
    Segmentation is the ability to identify a subset of your list that is more interested in a specific topic or item from a previous email. An example would be – You send an email to your list with a link to a new product and 25% of your recipients click on the link. You could now identify that 25% using tracking in your email to send them additional information or special pricing tailored to their specific interests.
  9. Keep Your Email Lists Current – Periodically, give your subscribers the ability to reconfirm their subscriptions. This will help to keep your list current and will eliminate bad or unused email addresses  from your list.
  10. Interact With Your List – Encourage feedback and input from your email subscribers. Over time it’s possible that their needs may change, be prepared to respond to your lists needs and you will encourage a long lasting relationship with your subscribers.

Email Marketing Summary

Let me know if you enjoyed this article on the Top 10 Essential Email Marketing Tips by leaving your comments and feedback below. We follow these email strategies in our own marketing efforts and incorporate them in most of the marketing strategies we use on the internet today!

The NetworkCEO

 

 

 

 

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