Posts Tagged ‘Email marketing’

One of the most effective sales tools your business can have is email marketing, but at the same time it can also be one of the quickest ways to ruin the reputation you've spend so long building. If you decide to buy in lists and send umpteen unsolicited emails out to people who have never heard of you before, you'll quickly get a reputation as a spammer - not good. But if you're sensible and build you own list and only send emails to people who have opted in to your list, you'll be seen as a responsible email marketer because you'll only be sending information out to people who have asked for it. The only problem is building your own list takes time, which is why so many companies opt for the first option. But if you use WordPress there are a few tools you can use to help you along: Pippity ...

What do you see when you check your emails during the day? If your inbox is anything like mine there's probably a lot of subject lines like: 'Blood Pressure Myth', 'Shoes', 'CarClearance_Lot', 'Get more traffic', 'Fitter body', 'SEO services' etc. They'll also have another thing in common, they'll be addressed to 'Sir/Madam' or just 'Hello', but they definitely won't address you by name. These are all what you would term as 'spam' emails because you didn't ask for them. Annoying aren't they? But think about your own email marketing for a moment, are you sending out emails to people who haven't opted in? Have you bought in a list? Are your emails personalised? In other words, are you sending out genuine, well-thought out and relevant emails or are you blanket 'spamming'? To spam or not to spam If you use your very own home-grown ...

Email marketing coupled with a home grown marketing list is one of the most cost effective forms of marketing available to any business. Within seconds your offer, news and information is nestling in inboxes around the world waiting to be opened and read. But how can you make sure you make the most of it? Below are 5 very simple tips to help you get the most out of every email you send. 1. How long should it be? Finding the perfect length for your email can be challenging. It must be long enough to offer great advice and information, but short enough to be attractive enough to read. After all, no one wants to be faced with War and Peace. An average of 400-600 words is generally good to aim for; long enough to say what you want to say, but not so long it will bore the pants of the reader. 2. Make it ...

Email marketing isn't one of those things you can dabble in when the fancy takes  you and then forget about it. Keeping in touch with your customers is essential, which is why your email marketing activities (what ever form they take) must be regular. Newsletters, email offers and updates are all great and add value to your customer relationships - but think how much better it would be if your customers received emails  that reflected their relationship with you. Matching marketing and relationships A timely targeted email will give a boost to your blossoming relationships. Depending on which stage you are at in your relationship with your customer, your emails can be designed to nurture them and provide help and assistance when they need it. So for example you could use these stages: 1. Welcome Just a simple email ...

When you employ email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy, you are bound to experience some level of churn (the number of subscribers lost over a period of time). Your churn can come from a number of reasons: Unsubscribers who are bored of your emails Those who no longer require the information you send Those clearing out their inbox and you just happen to me on their 'cut' list Emails bouncing back Spam complaints It's a fact of life and all businesses will experience it to some degree. You'll never escape from it completely, but you can take steps to reduce it. 1. Trust and honesty The strongest relationships are built on trust and honesty. So, when someone signs up for your emails, make sure you tell them what they will receive and when - and stick to it. If you ...

Nobody is perfect - nope, not even you. We all make mistakes, some large, some small, and some we'd rather not think about. So what happens when you've finally finished your latest marketing email (that you've spent many painful hours working on), hit send and then spot a terrible typo, experience that sinking feeling when you realise you've just sent it to the wrong list, or you've got the decimal point in the wrong place in your offer and are now giving away a free gift worth £100 with every £30 flower arrangement? The overwhelming urge could probably be to go and hide somewhere or perhaps leave the country. But, as already mentioned, no one is perfect (not even your boss, no matter what they say), we've all made cock-ups, but it's how you deal with them that matters. Coping with mistakes What ...

Is email marketing part of your marketing strategy? If so, I bet you’ve pondered long and hard about how to get your emails opened. Much of the problem you face is that, ultimately, the success of your email is determined by the type of day the recipient is having. So, it’s not surprising it can be a frustrating activity. Boosting your open rates There are 5 simple strategies you can take to give your open rate a bit of a boost. They aren’t new and they’re hardly earth shattering, but they do work. 1. When do you send? Believe it or not, the day you choose to send your email will have a big effect on your open rate. As a general rule, it’s best to avoid Mondays and Fridays. As you would expect, most people are either catching up on work from the weekend ...

  What kind of success rate are you getting with your email marketing at the moment? Pretty good or could do better? Your electronic marketing strategy should be constantly evolving – test, test and test again until you create the optimum format and content strategy for your audience. Just in case you’re looking for inspiration to inject some new life into your efforts, here are a few tips that might just help you improve your stats. 1. Mobile More and more people are reading their emails from mobile devices so you must find out how your email looks. Not only that but you have to ...

  If you’re an online marketer you need traffic – and a lot of it. Why? Because your traffic is your customers and more customers means more money. How do you actually get more traffic though? And, once you’ve started to get it, how do you convince them to buy from you? There are various things you can do to encourage more people to your website and make it more visible in the search engine rankings. And no, that doesn’t mean plastering it in bright colours with loads of flashing images. Here are 4 ways to help boost your traffic. Remember though, gaining more traffic isn’t going to happen over night. It is something that’s going to require commitment on your part. 1. Keywords This ...

  Regular communication with  your customers is a great way to keep them informed and to keep your name firmly etched in their minds. One of the most effective ways of doing this is through email marketing.  New subscribers will eagerly await your first email to land in their inbox. They will probably continue to welcome them until, one day, the honeymoon period is over. You will begin to realise your emails aren’t being opened as often (or at all); your messages are now unloved, unopened and unwanted. What do you do? Panic? Send flowers? It’s time to take action. Fighting email marketing ...

  Email marketing is an excellent way to your message out to potentially thousands of people instantly and relatively cheaply. But if you don’t do it right your emails will simply be deleted and remain unopened. So successful email marketing doesn’t start when you begin to compose your email copy, it starts when you begin to devise your strategy. You do have a strategy – right? Step 1 – Back to basics At this point in the process you’ve made the decision to start an email marketing campaign. Great, so what’s next? Well, before you start writing there are a few things you need to think ...

  Your list is one of the most vital parts of your email marketing campaign.It doesn’t matter how great your offer or sales message is, if you don’t send it to the right people, it won’t work. The quick option is to buy in a list but how can you be sure it is the right audience for your offer? Surely the best way to optimise your campaign’s chances is to use a home-grown list that you’ve developed over time from an interested audience. So how do you get started? Well it won’t be a quick process. Building your own quality list will take time. It ...

  If you a business owner today the likelihood is that you dabble in email marketing, or at least have started to think about it. Email has opened up a new and effective way of keeping in touch with your customers quickly and relatively cheaply. You can use the emails to give great information, keep them up to date with industry news as well as new products, services and offers. It only takes a few seconds to communicate with thousands of people. Because email marketing is a hot topic, I have written numerous posts about it, such as: How to build your email marketing list Email marketing – Welcome How to be an email spammer

  Businesses everywhere are beginning to appreciate the benefits of email marketing. It is a form of marketing that can be done cheaply and on a massive scale. It’s never been so easy to get your message out to your market place. But not only is it fast, its results are also measurable. With today’s sophisticated software you can track who opens your emails, what links they click on within the email, what they do once they’ve made that click. This kind of transparency helps you hone your email marketing, constantly improving it to make sure it’s giving your customers what they want. Testing the effectiveness of ...

If you get it right, email marketing can be one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses today. Yes everyone’s doing it but that doesn’t mean it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. If you want it to work you must give each email a lot of serious thought otherwise it will simply end up being deleted. Every email must count and convert. That may sound simple enough but in practice it can get complicated. To help you out, here’s my top 3 tips to boost your email marketing conversion rates: 1. Tell them what they need to know You’d be amazed at how many businesses that don’t. Just as with website copy, many companies insist on using their emails as a way of telling their customer ...

If you engage in email marketing you’ll know how difficult it can be to get someone to read your email. For your email to survive it has to have a strong, clear and concise subject line to make the recipient curious enough to open it. So all you have to do is come up subject lines that won’t get junked or deleted—simple! Winning subject lines To make sure email subject line draws the recipient’s attention and gets your email opened make sure you: Keep it short (no more than 60 characters, including spaces) Personalise it Identify your company Tell them what your email is about Give them a benefit as an enticement Salesy is bad If you make your subject line too salesy you will turn your recipient off immediately. No one likes being sold to so if you make it obvious that’s what you’re up to the barriers will go up. The other hurdle you have to get over ...

  Email marketing is cheap, quick and effective. Plus as most sent today are in HTML you have the added benefit of the hyperlink. This allows your reader to click directly through to your website or landing page for more information or to buy or sign up to your offer. But if you want that to happen your email must be interesting and relevant to your recipients otherwise it will just be transferred to the deleted folder. So make sure it’s appealing by following these simple suggestions: 1. Friendly Just as if you were writing a letter, use a salutation preferably personalised. This personal touch ...

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 ...

Help! I have just started an email campaign and it’s not bringing in the results I want. What’s gone wrong? Why isn’t it working? Sound familiar? Email marketing is an art that has several elements that work together. Miss one of those out, and you could be heading for disaster. If your email marketing campaign is to have the strongest chance of success (remember, there are no guarantees), you must ensure you have looked at all the following elements: 1. Content This is one of the biggest and most vital aspects of your email marketing campaign. Its ingredients include a powerful subject line to get your email opened, a strong headline to get your email read, an amazing offer to make your recipient want to buy and a strong call to action to help them buy. But, no ...