Email marketing, love it or loath it, it is one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective ways of building relationships with your customers.
For starters, they signed up to hear from you, so you have a hungry audience just waiting for your latest missive.
So why are you getting it so wrong?
How hard can it be?
Pretty hard judging by some of the emails I’ve seen.
To help you avoid the slippery slope to email marketing oblivion, here are a few tips.
Welcome
Once you’ve sent your initial welcome email when someone signs up to your list, how long is it before you contact them again?
All too often nothing happens.
It could be months before they receive anything else, by which point they’ve forgotten all about you.
If you’re one of the people that shies away because you don’t want to pester them remember, they signed up to your list – that means they want to hear from you.
Make sure you contact them regularly.
Unsubscribers
You will get people unsubscribe from your list – everyone gets them. It could be that they just wanted the freebie, or perhaps your emails just aren’t hitting the spot.
Whatever their reason, don’t get hung up about it. If it really bothers you turn off the unsubscribe notification emails and remember, there are plenty of people out there who want to hear from you.
Value vs offers
Yes, a big part of your email marketing strategy is about selling, but you must balance the number of offers you send out with great content.
If your subscribers are just being bombarded with sales messages, they’re going to switch off. But if you also balance them out with high quality, relevant content that they find useful, they’ll hand around.
Mobile
Today, about 65% of emails are read on smartphones or tablets, which means it’s essential you make sure your emails are mobile friendly.
That means layout, font size, images and links.
Focus
How many ideas should your email cover?
It’s tempting to squeeze as much information as possible into your email, but control yourself. One that is focused on 1 or 2 ideas will have far more impact than one that’s crammed to the rafters with information and offers.
Oh, also make sure you round it off with a strong call to action.
Boring
You probably get shed loads of emails land in your inbox every day – it’s the same for the people in your mailing list. That’s why it’s important to differentiate yourself from everyone else.
Develop your own style and personality and don’t be afraid to be a bit different. It’s a great way to make sure your email gets noticed.
Know what you want to achieve
All the other tips have looked at the email itself. This time I want you to think about your overall strategy.
Do you know what you want to achieve?
How do you want people to see you?
What is it that your customers want?
I’m not going to answer those questions for you, that’s for you to do with your own research, but it’s essential you have a strategy planned out before you start your marketing campaign.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to email marketing than setting a diary note to send something out each month.
The best campaigns are those that are pre-planned and structured and that remain focused on what the customer wants and not what the business wants to say.