Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Highly Effective Techniques That Work Well In Email Marketing

Email marketing is a marketing method that uses emails to promote to customers. To some, this can sound a bit difficult, but it really isn't. Using email marketing to reach your customer base isn't as hard as you might think, especially if you pay close attention to the tips in the following article.

Slowly build your contact list. Start with those who have already appreciated what you offer and then move on to areas where you can engage your prospects. It can take a while to pick whom should be receiving your emails, but it'll be worth it in the end to build a reliable contact list.

The easier it is to subscribe to your email newsletter, the more subscribers you will have. If you have a physical store, ask your customers for their email address when they make a purchase. If you sell on a website, ask them for their address when they are ready to check out.

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.

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.

Email marketing marches on, and the good old newsletter has become largely obsolete. Instead of sending around a general circular for all of your subscribers, expend the effort to tailor emails to the interests of their particular recipients. There are many robust programs and services that can help you do this automatically.

Use tools to measure the success of your email marketing campaign. You should learn all you can about how many times your emails are read, if your subject lines are being read, which articles you write are being read, etc. Using information like this can help with the future success of your campaign since you will know what works and what does not.

You don't want to alienate a good customer just to keep your email base high. For this reason, you should always give readers an easy and obvious way to unsubscribe. To put a silver lining on unsubscribe requests, constantly ask readers why they want to unsubscribe and use that information to improve the experience for future readers.

Conduct thorough testing to see how your email marketing messages look across various platforms. As soon as you have the perfect email creative, send it to various email clients and operating systems. Send it, as well, to web-based email clients, and open up these emails using all of the major browsers. Your message may look great when viewed through your Gmail account, but it might not look so hot to a Mac user using their ISP provided email client.

When following up with customers, try following up with a sale schedule. Include a link in order for them to view this schedule. The end of the email could inform them that they can get all the specifics on this sale schedule by clicking on the link that was provided to them.

Try using A/B testing for your email marketing campaign. This basically entails creating two very different versions of the same email (A and B) and sending "A" to half of a small test group and "B" to the other half. Whichever half receives the most positive response is the one that you should be using for your campaign.

A good business person knows when to close the deal. Nothing is worse than having all the right tools but closing the deal at the wrong time. You must know when to make an offer, and you must earn the right to make that offer. Making the offer at the wrong time will be detrimental to the success of your email marketing campaign.

Offer incentives. People might be hesitant to give their consent to receive e-mails. Try offering some sort of incentive as a bonus for receiving e-mails from you. Offer coupons or exclusive promo codes. Make sure that there is content in these e-mails that they will find both worthwhile and useful.

Be straight forward with your recipients about what they will be receiving. When someone opts to receive e-mail from you, make sure they know what they're agreeing to. Keep information easily visible about what they will be receiving in these e-mails and how often these e-mail will arrive in their inbox.

You might want to consider following up to your clients by sending a follow-up email that includes a bad link correction. Attach a request on your email that says to read this. The ending postscript could inform them that they can get a sneak peak by clicking on the provided link.

Learn what domain authentication is and then set it up. You want internet service providers to know that the messages you are sending are in fact coming from you. This seriously diminishes the chances you have of getting blocked and blacklisted, or your emails getting eaten up by spam filters at the server level.

Make your marketing emails friendly to mobile users. Many people have freed themselves from the mouse by adopting technologically advanced phones. With this, you will be wise to do slight modification to your format. Customers will appreciate your effort in making your messages easy to read by making sure they are not as wide as a standard-sized email messages.

Hopefully now that you have read this article, you are a little less intimidated by email marketing. The widely used marketing practice is fairly simple to implement and can be adapted in no time at all. Simply remember all of the tips that you read here and you will be on your way to using emails for marketing.

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