If you thought that the days of using email as a marketing tool are long behind you, think again! While solicited emails have been around for as long as the Internet, that doesn’t mean it’s a dead form of marketing. Fresh approaches and new twists on the standard forms of email marketing are being invented every day. Read on for tips on how you can use email marketing to grow your business.
Ensure that your audience is targeted correctly. Why would your readers want to sign up for your email list? Once you have the answer, use it to your advantage. Always include a subscribe link in your email; hopefully people will pass it on to their friends who might have an interest in what you have to offer. This way your base will grow organically.
Learn as much as you can, from a variety of sources, to become a master of email marketing. Check the web and the library for books on the topic. You should also try to attend local email marketing classes and workshops.
Always get customer permission before you begin contacting via email marketing. Emails that are not wanted are likely to be regarded as spam, and people will tend to delete them or ignore them without caring about the content. Sending out emails to large groups of individuals without permission might violate ISP policies.
Keep in mind that the goal of email marketing should be to promote and sell your goods. Therefore, every email you send should increase the likelihood that subscribers will buy. Share information on a brand new product, talk about how to use an older product or offer a special promotion.
Increase the value of your email content by including helpful information. Provide your customers with articles and things they cannot get from your website. In addition, include an exclusive offer for your products. Avoid sending emails only when you want sales, and be sure to send emails on holidays.
It is smart to allow interested parties to double opt-in before receiving emails. This will protect you from spam complaints, possibly saving your website from being shut down by your host over reports that you’re sending out unsolicited email.
Do not send more than 1 email a week to your subscriber base. Your customers often will get several messages a day and are very busy in their lives. If you send too many messages, you will just become part of the clutter. They may begin skipping them, or worse, deleting them without ever reading!
Branding is something that extends throughout your business, even down to email marketing. Because of this, it’s important to take some time and create a template that lets you put your colors, company logo and fonts from your site into your emails. By doing so, you can make your emails recognizable to your readers and make use of any preexisting familiarity they have with your company.
Include in every email calls to action. This will allow your recipients to know what actions are expected of them once they read your email. Make sure that any links you have are obvious and let it be known how to use them. You can repeat these sections by including them in both the top and bottom of your messages.
The value of email marketing is alive and well, as you have seen. By taking these ideas to heart and staying current on news methods of email marketing, you can make sure that such campaigns produce solid results well into the future.