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.
Market to your readers. When you have a substantial number of readers, brainstorm ways to have them sign up friends. Always include some sort of subscribe link in the body of your email. This will make it easier for your readers to refer the link along to other people. This method will have your list of email subscribers growing exponentially.
Follow up with contacts you meet at trade shows. Collect people’s phone numbers when they stop by your table and call them within a couple of weeks of meeting them. Use the follow-up call to check in with your contact and ask him if he would like to receive your marketing newsletter by email.
Avoid bombarding your recipients with the “Buy now!” approach. ” marketing approach. People may view your emails as being spam-like and not want to purchase from your company any longer. They understand you want sales, but build a solid relationship and stay professional. Your customers will find this refreshing and be more inclined to make a purchase from your company.
Use A/B testing of your subject lines to test effectiveness. Choose an email and use two different subject lines to see what works better. This way, you can see which kinds of wording are successful at garnering a response and which kinds of wording fail to do so.
Practice consistency. Always make use of the same company color and logo in your email. Use a clear and legible font style. People will begin to recognize the emails that you send and look for them. Branding is an important method to increase your business reputation.
Avoid using too many images in your emails. A lot of email services don’t allow photos, so a photo dependent approach is not effective. Also, email programs may send image-heavy emails to your junk mail folder.
Get creative with your email designs to find out what works best. Send out a few emails with content and links that differ in their fonts and text color. Play around with image positioning, including buttons and logos. After you’ve sent the emails, find out which ones had the best click-thru rates. Stick with those for the time being, but change it up on occasion to see if you can find a method that works even better. More click-thru rates equate to more sales.
Try to enhance your campaigns for email marketing with not just active feedback, but passive feedback, as well. Active feedback will give you very direct answers to public opinion of your brand. You ask for suggestions or comments, and you will receive them. Passive feedback may not even be noticed by the reader. Use the tools at your disposal to analyze how many people read your emails and how often the links within are clicked.
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.
Remember that more and more people are now using a smartphone or another type of mobile device to view emails. Such devices have just a fraction of the resolution of a standard computer monitor, so your messages will look quite different. Knowing the limits of these mobile screens will allow you to make emails that your users can read.
Always make sure customers have a clear and concise way to opt out of emails at any time. They signed up with you because they wanted more information, and if at any time they wish to stop receiving that information, they should be able to opt out. It is only fair.
To maximize the effectiveness of your emails, send them out on Tuesday or Wednesday. Research shows that people are actually more inclined to respond positively to various forms of communication on these days, including email. Not only are they more likely to read your email, but they’re also more apt to click on buttons or links, which means that you’re more likely to see an increase in sales. Send your emails at mid-afternoon for optimal results.
Rather than purchasing or renting a mailing list, build your own from the ground up. You can do this by including opt-in forms on your website, gathering business cards at conventions or other industry events, and encouraging your subscribers to share your emails with others, which can garner even more subscribers.
Be persistent. Studies show that it takes a minimum of 7 to 8 impressions before your advertisements will take effect on a potential customer, and it could take many more. You need to touch base with your customers at least once every few weeks, and assume they will not buy your product or even click your links for several iterations of messages.
No doubt email marketing works on so many levels. It can be one of the most cost-effective ways to reach out to the largest amount of people all over the world. Take the advice and techniques that are offered in the article above to help you design an email marketing plan that works for you and your business.
