When marketing your business, Creativity is King. Today you have all the latitude in the world to appeal to your target market. As long as you have a clear vision of who they are, you will understand how to influence them and what they wish to know.
There are an abundance of ways to reach out, stay top of mind, and distinguish yourself from the pack.
Although social media has blurred the propriety lines between businesses and their consumers, there are still best practices your company should maintain across effort, and particularly with email marketing. Which incidentally is not dead yet!
Email Marketing is still a viable, affordable effort as part of a concerted marketing strategy.
It may not be as cool as Twitter, but you can Tweet your newsletters to help drive traffic to your site and to other platforms. If it conveys useful content, it can’t be all bad!
While common sense, these Email Marketing Tips bear repeating. If for nothing else then to reinvigorate your appreciation of its significance:
1. Simplify the sign-up process
Don’t ask for any more information than is absolutely necessary. Requesting too much may result in decreased likelihood of subscription.
2. Make unsubscribing easy
The consumer doesn’t want to feel as if they’re being forced into any kind of spam situation. It’s important they feel they can leave at any time they choose. This will instill trust.
3. Send a welcome email
Once someone subscribes to your email newsletter, make certain an autoresponder follows. It makes you seem more personable, and it’s just the polite thing to do.
4. Make it easy to contact you
If a subscriber ever has any questions or concerns regarding the emails they’re receiving, they should be able to easily reach you. On the same note, you should remain vigilant and responsive to these concerns.
5. Send all email to seed accounts first
Ensure that your emails are actually going through to your database, and not automatically being marked as spam.
6. Remove inactive subscribers
A good way to not get marked as spam is to semi-regularly clear out inactive email accounts. A simple “Do you still want to be sent these emails?” should suffice. The more active subscribers you have, the less likely you are to be labeled as spam.
7. Communication preferences
Consumers will be more likely to stick around if they’re only getting emails about things in which they are interested. Give them the option to only receive emails about certain topics, and they’ll happily remain subscribed.
8. Use incentives to increase open rates
Simple, right? If you’re offering someone a discount or other incentive for opening your email or subscribing to your newsletter, it will persuade many more people.
9. Cut down on the clutter
Your message should be clear. Keep the different typefaces and pictures to a minimum. Again, you should only include exactly what you need to in order to convey your message. Nothing more, nothing less.
10. The 5 Second Test
Can your reader figure out exactly what you’re trying to say with only a quick glance? If it takes more than 5 seconds to do so, then you may want to trim some fat.
11. The Functionality Test
Make sure to send a test email first to see how it looks and so you can confirm all links are working. If you’re trying to drive potential clients to your site, an operational hyperlink is the way.
Overall, if you can deliver a professionally designed template, full of compelling (and not “sales-driven”) info, sent out with regularity, you will have an effective database touch of which to be proud.
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