Many companies send out emails without understanding whether or not the overall message will help achieve their goals. When used strategically, email marketing can be wildly successful; but randomly sent emails can be a disaster that alienates potential customers. Here are seven quick tips to help ensure that your email marketing campaigns are successful and don’t turn people off before you have a chance to turn them into customers.
- First, don’t ever send marketing emails to people that didn’t give permission to email them. Not only is this a likely violation of the CAN-SPAM act, but it’s a surefire way to turn people off and get labeled a spammer.
- Moderate your output. If you barrage people with constant messages, you’ll end up in their junk mail folders. With email, the old adage that less is more definitely holds true, at least as far as message frequency is concerned.
- Make sure your subject line is intriguing enough to grab the reader’s attention without going overboard into becoming obnoxious. Avoid those old spammer standards – free, act now, limited time or special deal – and use verbs to make the subject line more actionable and engaging. While you’re cleaning up your subject lines, eliminate the exclamation points, dollar signs, capital letters and brightly colored fonts that most experienced readers know means the message is most likely spam.
- Keep in mind that most people read email on their smartphones or tablets so test the email to ensure it loads quickly and displays properly on multiple devices. Keep your message layout simple and avoid clip art and dense, slow-loading images that proclaim you’re a marketing amateur.
- Segment your mailing list and only send messages that fit the reader’s profile. Is the target an existing customer, a prospect or just a casual lead? Whatever the case, these groups should be receiving different messages that reflect their knowledge of your company and its products, as well as their status in your sales funnel.
- Receiving a message that includes specific information or a clearly targeted offer based on the reader’s demographics, their interests and their relationship with your brand can help cement customer loyalty, while random offers result in a raft of unsubscribe notices.
- One way to ensure that your target reader will be interested in your message is to make it personal. Address the reader by name if possible; don’t use honorifics that aren’t gender-matched, and be sure you include a real email that people can use for replies. Women hate receiving email addressed to Mr. followed by their first name because it’s a sure sign that the message is spam. Receiving a message from Do not reply is another sign of a mass emailing that doesn’t earn the right to be read.
Of course, developing a strategy that includes well-thought out offers and goals for campaigns is the most important step you can take to ensure email marketing success, but by taking a careful approach that avoids any appearance of spam, you can easily make your email marketing even more successful.