Email Marketing – Should You Be Doing It?

Email Marketing - Should You Be Doing It?

November 11^th 2010 Sally Ormond copywriter, Email marketing, freelance copywriter

What are the advantages of email marketing?

Well for a start its a quick and cheap way of reaching out to thousands of customers instantly. In a relatively short space of time it as revolutionised marketing. But as with everything, there are some people out there who want to spoil it for everyone—the spammers.

Spammers are those people out there who think it’s fine to fill our inboxes with unsolicited emails. But thanks to them, genuine businesses now have a much harder time.

If you want your email to get through the spam filters and be opened and read, your message has to be strong and eye-catching.

What is spam?

It is basically unwanted (and unwelcome) emails sent to thousands of recipients simultaneously. I’m sure you receive shed loads of it every day.

I want to use email marketing, but when should I use it?

The best time to use email marketing is when you want to:

Let your customers know about new offers or products
Give advice or information you think would be useful
Keep in touch
Follow up contacts

Each of these will help you build relationships with your customers. They add value and useful.

How not to use email marketing

If you want your customers to read your emails make sure you don’t use this method of marketing to:

Prospect for business, it is very impersonal
Generate leads
Send unsolicited sales emails to rented or bought-in lists

How to I create a mailing list?

If you want to use email marketing, your best bet is to build your own opt-in mailing list. Yes it takes time to build but the response will be far higher than buying one in.

You can attract people to your mailing list by making it easy for them to sigh up for your news through your website. Offer them a free newsletter, email only offers, or free report.

Don’t ask them for loads of information, keep it simple:

Email address
Get their permission to send emails
Tell them what you’ll send
Give them your guarantee that you won’t share their email address with anyone else

One more thing. When you send your emails make sure there is an opt out link clearly visible. So should they decide they don’t want your newsletters any more or marketing messages they can be removed from your list easily.

Don’t expect to get thousands of sign-ups over night because it won’t happen. But over time you will create a good, responsive marketing list to help generate income for many years to come.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter

Tags: copywriter, Email marketing, freelance copywriter

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