Email marketing tips
I’m losing confidence in email marketing as a primary means of communicating with customers and prospects. Email inboxes are way too full and – despite the best efforts of spam blockers1 – replete with unwanted spam that dilutes the impact of legitimate emails.
All that being said, email marketing is still the least-expensive marketing vehicle available. It’s great for customers and prospects who are already interested in what you have to say (or offer) so that they can stay abreast of your offerings and opinions. To keep them interested in receiving your emails, you must first provide your readers with helpful ideas and information; selling what you have to offer should be a secondary focus.
destinationCRM.com recently published a nice article with 8 tips for sucessful email marketing. They recommend that companies…
- Get permission from email marketing subscribers. Today, many email recipients expect you to ask permission to send them “marketing-type” emails. To do otherwise might result in an upset customer or prospect.
- Build a targeted mailing list. destinationCRM makes a great suggestion to ask your current customers to refer you to other potential prospects.
- Work with a clean, targeted database. Makes sense. I would add to this point that the contacts within the database should be segmented according to vertical market, interests, etc., so that specific email content can be targeted at specific contacts within the database.
- Adopt a strategy of persistence. As anyone in marketing knows, it takes several marketing “impressions” to build up enough interest in your offerings to motivate some kind of buying interest. Companies need to communicate often with prospects. In my mind, email marketing should be just one of the vehicles used to communicate that information.
- Tell a story to your email marketing recipients, including useful content and tips. Best of all, tell an ongoing story that leaves recipients waiting in anticipation of the next communication from you.
- Let readers drive design based on their feedback and interests. In most cases, the best approach is to not get too fancy with the graphical design elements unless it enhances the illustration of a concept or tip.
- Have an exit strategy. This goes back to the concept of obtaining – and in this case keeping – a recipient’s permission to send them information via email. Certainly you should provide recipients with a means of opting out of receiving emails from you.
- Know what you want out of your email marketing strategy. What are your objectives? As email marketing and your business evolve, so should your email marketing strategy.
You can find the complete article here.
1 With the exception of “confirmation-type” spam blockers that ask the sender to confirm that they are indeed a real person and not a spammer. However, this type of spam blocker blocks out lots of potentially good emails, and places extra burden on legitimate emailers such as friends, family members and colleagues.