Bharat SainiLast Updated on October 22, 2014 by Bharat Saini
It is pretty much accepted across the board that e mail marketing is one of the best ways to get attention of your customers, raise brand awareness and hopefully generate new sales for you. However much like any promotion methods that you can undertake for your business there are right and wrong ways to go about this. So, if you do want to go down the route of e mail marketing (good decision) then make sure that you that you spend time researching all of your options so it is something that you get right!
So what best practices should you be following?
1 – Using The Right Software
The chances are that you can’t manually send out emails so you need to invest in some software to make this happen. As you might expect of a piece of software like this, there aredifferent options open to you. It is essential that you spend a little time reading up on the options that are open to you and making sure that you use a piece of software that is reliable and up to the job. Whether this is just to send the emails, design them or auto respond to them you want something that works well, so read up on the options available and make sure that you make a sensible decision.
2 – Get Their Attention From The Beginning
When your email arrives in someone’s inbox, the first thing they will see is the subject line. It is this that helps them to decide whether your email is worth opening and reading so you need to make sure it is a good one. Catchy subject lines or headers that tease them into reading the rest of the email well are usually good places to start. Read up on email marketing examples to see what works well and how you can adapt these to work for you and your business.
3 – Content Is King
When you read up on marketing methods you’ll probably read the phrase ‘content is king’ numerous times. This is usually about the right content for websites and social media, but don’t let email content be over looked. When you’re landing insomeone’s inbox you need to make sure that you have something interesting to say. You want people to pay attention to your email, read it and take in what you are saying. Make sure that your email is just about the hard sell, instead it is full of helpful information with a little nod to your products, as this is likely to be the best way to get your customers attention and keep them happy.
4 – Think About When You Are Sending
When you are looking at the type of content you want to add to your email, think about what is relevant to the here and now. It could be that you can mention something that has happened in the news or a time of year – anything that gets peoples attention and shows them why they need to buy from you now and not a bit later down the line. Christmas emails, summer emails and items like celebrity trends are all good ways to show your customers what they are missing and how you could give them what they need.
5 – Sometimes Less is More
When you have access to the email address of all of your customers it is easy to assume that sending them as many emails as possible is the best way forward, but that is not the case at all. Customers do not want to be bombarded with your sales emails and if you send too many they’ll simply delete them before they open them or even add you to their blacklist so you go straight to junk.
This often comes down to content and making sure that you actually have something relevant to say rather than just sending out a sales email because you can. Give some thought to how you would feel as a consumer about receiving that email, and if you think you would happy then this could be a good indication that your customers would be too.
