Thursday, March 28, 2013

Email Marketing And You - Tips To Get The Best Bang For Your Buck


By Lance Budreau


Email marketing has so many attractive features that make it a great way to reach customers and to bring them to your business. Email marketing can be inexpensive, lucrative and can even help the environment by saving paper. Whatever your reason for choosing email marketing, you will find useful information about it in the article below.

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.

Do not send too much information in one email. Customers will get frustrated and overwhelmed if there is an overabundance of information in a single email. Instead, put a sufficient amount of information in a series of emails and be sure that each one contains a few paragraphs. This will keep their attention.

Take timing into consideration as to when your messages are sent. Try and time your messages for when readers are likely to be reading. For consumers, this is probably evenings and weekends. For business clientele, weekday mornings are more ideal. Emails sent in off hours can get buried further down in inboxes than will likely get attention if someone is deleting a bunch of messages at once. Do not forget about time zone differences either.

One good tip to developing your emails is to use humor. From the opening line all the way through your content, a little comedy can really attract readers. Everybody loves a good laugh and a funny or amusing email when used appropriately can catch the reader's attention and make them want to read more.

Always seek permission before sending marketing emails to potential customers. Sending unsolicited emails will quickly have you labeled a spammer. Getting permission to send your messages doesn't have to be hard; offer something valuable to your customers in exchange for the ability to email them, such as a discount, coupon, or other sign-up incentive.

Your marketing email does not need to be just black and white only. Your logo should appear, and a color scheme of some sort should also be part of your campaign. However, it is very important that the color scheme be specific and consistent in order for it to be effective for your campaign.

Offer a bonus, such as a coupon, discount code, or other freebie, in exchange for signing up for your email mailing list. People love receiving free things. An email address is low in value to the customer but high in value to you as a business. People will gladly trade their contact information in exchange for a 10% discount off their next purchase.

Show your subscribers respect by not sending them tons of unwanted emails. Two or three email messages a month should be all that they receive from you. If you are flooding their email boxes, not only it will not be appreciated, but it will be highly unlikely they will buy anything that you are selling.

After about nine months, ask your subscribers to re-confirm their wishes to receive emails from you. Retention can be tricky, but those on your email list will appreciate you asking, and will be less likely to unsubscribe. The re-confirmation process will also let you know which readers are loyal to you.

Do not restrict yourself just to email marketing. As you identify your core clientele that trusts you, see if you can get phone numbers and physical addresses. Build on your relationships by expanding your communications with your loyal core base by contacting them through these mediums as well as email.

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.

A great email marketing tip that everyone would be wise to use is to take advantage of the holidays. Make emails more festive by creating a holiday theme whenever appropriate. Your readers are sure to enjoy the extra effort you put into your holiday emails and this can greatly increase your success.

If you have to send out a long message, like a newsletter, use anchor tags near the top. Your subscriber should immediately see the headlines of the individual components of your message. This lets them jump straight to the ones that interest them instead of scrolling over the rest of it.

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.

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.

Don't include the use of newsletters in your email marketing campaign. You can send the people on your opt-in list relevant emails about particular topics instead. You will attract more people when they know that they will only be receiving information that they are interested in, and that they will not have to sift through an entire newsletter to get it.

Email marketing can be a great opportunity to reach your clients and customers. If you implement the tips that this article has given you, you are likely to notice that your target market is more satisfied. Use the tips here to create a solid email marketing plan that ultimately raises your profits.




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