Staying in touch with your customers is important if you want your business to succeed. There are many ways to do so, but one of the most effective is through email. You can use these messages to promote your business and let your customers know about new products or services you have available. Use the following tips to get started.
Minimize traditional email marketing activities during the holidays. Customers are preoccupied with family and friends and are less likely to be paying attention to business emails. Your odds of ending up in the spam box are considerably higher, which could have longer-term implications for your bottom line. The major exception to this would be a business directly related to the holiday activities. Otherwise, give yourself a break and enjoy some downtime yourself. The business will be back on track in a day or two.
Be sure to put the logo of your product or business in the email. This way, customers will become familiar with the logo and associate it with your company. It is best if the logo is something that will catch the reader’s eye and be easy for them to remember it.
Identify and appeal to your audience. Encourage your subscribers to invite their friends to join your list too. Always include some sort of subscribe link in the body of your email. This will make it easier for your readers to refer the link along to other people. This is a great method to use to organically grow your base.
If you run out of ideas for your email marketing campaign, try allowing your customers to assist you. Do things like write down questions that you receive from customers. Then when you go to send the next email, you have a topic. Make sure to include the customer’s name for credit too.
Do not use dollar signs in either the subject or the body of your emails, unless you are using just one to denote a specific amount of currency. This will strike many recipients as being spam behavior, and many spam filters will automatically trash emails that include character strings like “$$$.”
In order to banish all concerns about spam and ensure that no one on your subscriber list is there by mistake, consider employing a double opt-in strategy. Your first message should require some sort of additional action, like replying or clicking on a link, to make certain that the reader wants to receive further emails.
Even though you may be tempted, do not fix email addresses that appear misspelled or mistyped. Given the sensitive nature of email, it is important that you do not tinker with what a person typed while opting in. If your attempts to reach a particular address continually bounce, remove it from your database and move on.
Use words that are appropriate to the industry you are focusing on in your marketing materials. For example, if you are writing marketing materials for new technological items, use words such as “new,” “advanced” or “state-of-the-art” that are commonly used in that industry. Using the right words will help increase your products’ appeal to your customers.
Utilize both passive and active feedback in your email campaigns. Active feedback is obvious: ask visitors for suggestions and advice. Passive feedback is generally invisible to your reader and more subtle. Many tools and software allow you to see how many of your emails were opened and how many people clicked on links.
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.
Automatically unsubscribe customers who don’t respond to your marketing materials after a certain number of emails. If your customers aren’t responding to your emails anymore, they most likely have lost interest in your newsletter but aren’t annoyed enough by it yet to unsubscribe. By unsubscribing them, you avoid generating bad feelings that could hurt your business.
Always make sure customers have a clear and concise way to opt-out of emails at any time. They signed up with you because they wanted more information, and if at any time they wish to stop receiving that information, they should be able to opt-out. It is only fair.
When someone subscribes to your email marketing list, confirm that this is what they really intended to do. Implementing this double opt-in strategy will make it much less likely that your email provider will receive spam complaints about you. Also, you will be assured that the people receiving your emails are actually interested in what you are sending them.
By now, you should be aware of how effective a marketing medium email can be. It makes it easy to stay in touch with your customers and keep them up to date on what is happening with your business. If you put the advice from this article into practice, your business will boom.
