Our top 8 tips for getting the best out of your email marketing

Promoting your business by email marketing is a powerful form of direct marketing, you can communicate quickly, effectively and very cost effectively to all your groups of customers and prospects at a time of your choosing.

Any email marketing needs to be planned with real care so it can be interesting and most of all relevant to your recipients, so here are our top tips to get the best out of your email marketing campaigns.

1. Targeting
The whole point of email marketing is to target the right people so your message can go direct to a user who is interested in what you are offering. You need to bear in mind that unsolicited emails or spam is illegal and server side software often filters these out so they are wasted email anyway. A user will usually always delete an email that is unsolicited and irrelevant but an email to a customer or prospect who has agreed to receive your message is far more valuable to you as a business.

2. Keep it relevant
A number of companies have large email databases of customers and prospects so it is worth analysing what you know about this list, how recent is the data for example? Can you sort the data into categories – you do this so you can ensure you send a relevant email to the relevant category.

3. Opt in for your emails
We have already said that it is illegal to send unsolicited emails anybody receiving junk email, spam or stuff they didn’t ask for is not going to wax lyrically about you and your business, so why not check or ask every now and then if they are happy to still receive your email? Of course ensure your site has the option to sign any user up – this one for example you can sign up on the side menu OR at the bottom of this post, please do!

4. Give people a reason to sign up
Following on from the last point, sign up to our email list and we will just update you with all that is relevant in Email Marketing, Social Media and Online for your business. For your business an incentive may well be a special discount, you let people know first on email maybe or something exclusive just to this email list. When you make offers available on an exclusive basis you will see viewing and click through rates higher than normal straight ‘brochure emails’.

5. Growing your email lists
If you run regular email campaign then don’t miss opportunities to add new people to your list when you have new marketing material, ask people if its ok to send them an email, if you create content for your website then add an email sign up on the post (as is on this one). Your website is one of the most powerful (and easy) ways to collect data so use it and remember to mention the benefits or reasons to signup up to your email list.

6. Creating the email newsletter
You need to use a good strong and flexible email marketing system that allows professional looking email to be created.

This email marketing system allows easy customization, targeting of category groups and scheduling of emails amongst others, if you want a free demo please let us know.

When creating the email these are three key points to bear in mind:

a) make it interesting and relevant
b) customize the message for the audience
c) include the opportunity to record clicks through to the content on your website

Also make sure the business phone number is available if possible so people have a number of ways to contact you. Finally the opportunity to unsubscribe needs to be on every email, mailPDQ has this as default so you cannot send any future email again to anyone who has unsubscribed.

7. Make it engaging
Anyone will only read something and act on an email that interests them so keep yours engaging by tailoring it to your audience. You could even even split test your email to see which one works best. So how do you make your email engaging?

a) get the best subject line that attracts attention, many readers will decide whether to read just by the subject line, so put some thought into and dont go wild and wacky as this subject line can still get picked up by spam filters – no the greatest ever etc etc…
b) get to the point, waffle is terrible in conversation so why put it in your email newsletter?
c) offer benefits, we have mentioned earlier about special benefits to email subscribers, what can you offer?
d) how often do you send? only send when you have something interesting and relevant.

8. Monitor and follow up
All email newsletters/campaigns should be monitored and follow up else how will you improve next time? You also monitor to make sure your time spent creating everything is worhtwhile so make sure you record views and click throughs, maybe also the best groups of data that respond to the best message? This way you can improve the next email and make it even more engaging.

So here you have it, our top 8 tips to get the best out of your email marketing, to find out more about the email system we run then please contact us here for more information.

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