Many business owners want to appeal to more potential customers, but they don’t want to spend a lot of money to do it. A great solution to this dilemma is an email marketing campaign. If you don’t understand the perks of email marketing to improve your business, read on! This article is meant to get you started.
Be sure that you provide people with a way to opt out of your email marketing newsletters. Whereas emailing may be quite inexpensive, it still does cost something. You’ll also damage your reputation, causing your profits to reduce and potential backlash such as appearing on an email blacklist.
Always limit your mailings to people who have given you permission to do so. If you don’t do this, people may not trust you and that makes your business look bad. In addition, you could find yourself blacklisted by an ISP, which can be catastrophic for your business.
Being pegged as a “spammer” is not something that is good for a business and it is important to take precautions against being labeled as such. To do this, subscribers should receive an automatic email from your website requesting that they confirm their interest in subscribing to the email list. The email that you send should have two links: one that refutes the subscription, as well as one that confirms it. This gives you verification that you are not spamming, and respects the desires of your customer base.
Marketing emails should contain very few graphics. Graphics can take a long time to load which may discourage some users from viewing the e-mail. Also, your email is likely to end up being sent to junk mail if it contains too many graphics.
Sending an email to your list more than once every seven days is a bad idea. Your customers are likely busy people who receive several messages every day. Sending more than one a week may make them skip or delete your messages without regarding your work.
Run tests to determine how your messages look on various email clients, including mobile clients. Once you have a design you deem perfect on your computer, test it across all browsers, email clients, and even operating systems if possible. Viewing a message on an Android phone can be a far cry from seeing it on a PC based format.
Use multi-part messages to cover your emails. These emails include both plain text and HTML versions of your messages so that your readers can decide on the option that’s right for them. The time spent doing this, is well worth it if it stops a non-HTML-reading subscriber from dropping out of the list.
Use your emails to give your customers incentives. They will be more apt to do business with you if you give them a good reason to. For instance, advertise a discount, free shipping or a free sample with every purchase.
Try out more than one email format. To make sure it gets the most attention, important information should always be in the top portion of your emails. You should however experiment with various formats in order to identify which format elicits the most responses. When you determine what works, continually use it. This helps your customers learn what they can expect from your business and where to find information that they are interested in.
Passive and active feedback from your customers is an essential tool for enhancing your email marketing projects. Active feedback means things like customer opinions or suggestions. To get passive feedback, you need something that is subtle. You can use whatever tools and software you have available to determine what links are getting clicked on the most.
Your email marketing content should be attention grabbing. This may take you some time and some experimentation. Change up whatever is not working well. Even if a particular technique does seem successful, continue trying new strategies to constantly improve your campaign.
The layout of your emails plays an important role. You may be tempted to utilize graphical elements in your message, but it is often that case that spam filtering functions will block photos, animation features and corporate logos. It is important that key information is displayed in the text of your email. You can provide the audience with links to an external site to view your graphics.
Emailing a free report or similar product to new clients is a great follow-up tool. Attach a short note that they should take advantage of that offer in a timely manner. Encourage them to act swiftly by including a message regarding the available number of free offers.
Keep messages to the point and short. Nobody is likely to read any more than a few paragraphs of your material. They are busy and don’t care what you are talking about. Make your mail brief, and on topic, to assure that your email won’t be skipped next time they see it in their inbox.
You can use A/B testing to improve the results of your emails’ subject lines. Split the mailing list in half. Use a different subject line for each half of the list, while keeping the rest of the email the same. This will allow you to check out which subject line is the most effective, as well as which subject line gets ignored the most.
Take a look at the emails your competitors are sending out. Simply sign up to receive their emails. This can help you to stay one step ahead of the game when you are sending out your own business emails. Always try to find areas in which they are not meeting the needs of their customers, so you can try to fulfill those needs. For instance, you should always try to top their discounts.
Now you can plainly see that email marketing is a great tool for a business of any size to build its customer base. Given the low cost, you really should give email marketing a try. Once you apply the tips from above, you will see results.
