We all know the power of email, its efficiency and low cost make using email for marketing an extremely attractive proposition. Everyone of you reading this will have received marketing emails from businesses, probably many times, and on occasion you probably found yourself actually responding to the email, most often by visiting a web page that the email wanted you to go to.
And its this rate of ‘occasional’ response from a customer that all email marketers are aiming to improve, the higher the response rate to a marketing email the more visitors you get to visit your web page and so naturally increasing the number of sales you make, so getting the marketing email content itself absolutely perfect is essential.
Follow the tips below to set you on the right track to email marketing success…
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Don’t confuse
The most important aspect to get right is the message you want to get across. If your message is confusing because it involves too many pieces of information, or because you have talked about more than one subject, product or service, then you will confuse the customer into not knowing what it is you are offering them, and in turn they will bin your email before they even read the first paragraph.To avoid this you should keep your marketing email focused to one specific message, therefore allowing the customer to know quickly what it is you are offering them.
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Don’t make it too long
Another mistake to avoid is making your email too long. People will not sit and read a thousand words of your beautifully crafted text, so don’t waste your time making it. Think about marketing emails you have responded to, almost certainly they had a brief message that quickly got to the point and didn’t force the reader to endure masses of text.Try to make your message quick to read, and certainly have the whole message appear in a typically sized email window without the customer having to scroll to read more of the message.
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Don’t make it anonymous
This means making sure the email is personalized to the customer you are sending it too. This of course assumes you have other information available to you as well as the customers email address.Make sure wherever possible that you address the customer by name at the beginning of the marketing email, this is essential in helping disarm them from the natural stance of assuming all marketing email is spam or worthless and so deleting it without a second thought.
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Don’t hide what you want them to do
The purpose of sending a marketing email is that you want the customer to do something, this something would normally be visiting a web page that goes into further detail about whatever it is you are talking about in the email.You should make sure that it is very clear to the customer what they should do, they need to know within a second that they should click a particular link to find out more about what your telling them, so don’t hide this ‘call to action’ link away, make sure it is prominent and that everyone seeing your email knows immediately what you want them to do next.
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Don’t send it without testing
Simple enough eh? Well, you would be surprised how many folks write a marketing email, include some links and send it out, only to find later on that the link they included had an error, or the customers name wasn’t included correctly, or that there are spelling or grammatical errors.So, before you send out thousands of emails to your customers, send one to yourself first, then check it over when it arrives in your inbox. Check for spelling errors, click all the links to make sure they go where they should, make sure the customer name is correct, make sure the email is coming from the correct email address and that the ‘reply to’ address is what it should be.
By following these tips you will set yourself on the way to great email marketing success, and ensure you give yourself the best chance of getting the customer to react to your marketing emails and therefore help grow your business.
