E-mail Marketing is defined as a powerful form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail. Typically it is in the form of an electronic newsletter but can also be an online survey, coupon or announcement.
Email marketing is an amazingly cost-effective way to build relationships with your customers or potential customers that drive business success. In today’s challenging economic times, this cost advantage makes email marketing arguably the most powerful tool for building any business. But the main advantage of email marketing is not cost. Email is simply the most effective way to stay in touch with most of your customers.
10 Keys to Successful Email Marketing
Most of the statistics that suggest high returns on email marketing investment depend on how closely marketers stick to these basics.
- Only send email to people who know you. People open email from people they know, and they delete email from people they don’t recognize OR mark it as spam. It doesn’t even matter what’s legal or ethical. So if your business makes a habit of emailing total strangers, then your reputation, your budget, and your growth will suffer for it.
- Don’t treat email addresses like email addresses; treat them like relationships. An email address is one of the most personal things someone can share with your business because it’s an invitation to send your messages to a place where he or she sends and receives personal communications as well as business ones. Email doesn’t work if it feels like a computer-generated HTML document. It has to come across as being part of a meaningful relationship.
- Send relevant content that has value to your recipient. You probably weren’t going to send irrelevant, valueless content on purpose, but content with good intentions isn’t the same thing as value and relevance. In order to ensure that your emails are valuable and relevant, you have to know exactly what your audience wants. You have to be a good listener to be a good communicator.
- Engage your audience in the content you write. This requires attention-grabbing subject lines, clear headlines, and thoughtful content.
- Maximize your delivery rate. Getting email delivered is harder than you might think. Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) like Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail work diligently to block emails from unwanted senders. We even have a pretty strong SPAM filter on our servers. If your email isn’t up to professional standards in reputation, technology, or permission, you might as well be sending your email directly to the junk folder.
- Don’t share email lists with anyone. Your email list is a valuable asset. It will lose value if you loan it to someone else because the people on your list won’t recognize a foreign sender. AND you should never borrow an email list from someone else. That list is full of people who aren’t familiar with your business, and you will probably attract more enemies than friends.
- Set expectations with your recipients. When someone signs up to receive your email communications, they do so with the expectation of receiving something of value. If you don’t communicate clearly what that value is, your audience will draw their own conclusions. Tell your audience what you’ll be sending and how often you’ll be sending it. That way, you’ll defeat any value, relevance, and frequency objections before your audience even signs up. For instance, if you decide to send out a DAILY newsletter and your recipient didn’t know that, they are going to become annoyed with the barrage of emails you are sending, and consequently become annoyed with your business AND probably unsubscribe also. Then you have lost them….on several levels.
- Look professional whenever you communicate. If you’re a salesperson, you know how to dress for success. Similarly, if you’re an email, you need to look familiar, inviting, and consistent.
- Be ready to respond. Email communications can be highly automated, in an off-putting way that distances you from your customers. Don’t set an email auto reply in your inbox and take a mental vacation. Keep an eye on your communications and your responses so you can take action, make changes, and repeat positive results. How many of you have sent an email to a company and they never answer it or it takes them a week to get back with you? Isn’t that annoying?
- Regularly review your campaign results. A good email marketing system provides you with statistics about who opened your email, what they clicked on, etc. The longer you practice marketing the more you realize how unpredictable your results will be if you don’t analyze your past and make adjustments based on your data. Use these tracking reports to help you improve, progress, and grow.
At this point your mind is either spinning with ideas on how to put these ideas into practice for your business or scared about the thought of tackling a project like this. Either way, we can help.
Right now, we are offering a 60-day free trial of our favorite email marketing software…..and we’ve tried several over the years. One of the reasons it is our favorite is because it is one of the best in the industry.
You don’t have to be one of our website customers to take advantage of the 60-day free trial. If you already use an email marketing software, maybe you would like to try ours out, go ahead and sign up for the trial……you never know, ours might be better! Some of you aren’t using email marketing at all but want to get started right away, so go to our website and sign up as soon as you get back to the office! The rest of you may be thinking that all of this sounds like a great idea but are kind of freaking out about the thought of taking on this kind of project, give us a call and we can get you set up for one of our “fully managed accounts” and we will handle it all for you.
We are practicing what we preach and have created a monthly “marketing tips” newsletter and would like all of you to sign up.