Email campaigns and newsletters are still important and cost-effective. However, today, email campaigns must be targeted, relevant, and break through the noise and hurdles of our inboxes. Gone are the days of effectively reaching your audience with mass emails. To be effective, with everything that everyone is receiving, you need to really answer the following questions:
1. Did you find the right contacts? Before you even start the email process, you must find the right contacts for outreach. It’s crucial that you identify your desired audiences. 2. Are the email addresses accurate? An email will not be received unless you have the right data. Therefore, you must have strong data and find any that may be missing. This will ensure the right email gets to the right contact; simple human error can switch letters in an address. 3. Will your email be viewed or put into spam? If your email went to the correct address, did it hit their inbox or their spam? Check your emails against an email spam system before you hit send. New email spam systems pop up all the time, so go online and search for tools that can check to see if the email that you’re sending looks like spam. If it does look like spam, then it gets scored like spam and it’s never going to be seen. Email spam systems break your email down, telling you what’s wrong, and allowing you to fix it. 4. Will your emails be read? Spam emails can also be uncovered by simply reading them. It’s fairly obvious when an email looks like spam. During a webinar with Cirrus Insight, RingLead CEO Donato Diorio did a spam test, where he showed four emails and asked the audience for the one that wasn’t spam. He displayed each email on screen for 10 seconds. More than 50% found the non-spam email. As humans, we’re able to determine whether an email is spam by the visual structure … in seconds. 5. Is the email well written? Writing emails to potential customers can be one of the most difficult tasks for any marketer. Remember grammar is important and always be professional. 6. Did you grab their attention? Now we shift our focus to the content of the email. It’s reaching your audience, but is it interesting? Should they care? Are you targeting the right demographic? The message, audience, and content need to grab attention. 7. When do you plan to send the email? There really is a right and wrong time to send an email. Sometimes, the timing doesn’t matter. But do you know the difference? A detail as seemingly trivial as the timing of an email can determine whether a lead responds. Take a few minutes to do some research and it may make all the difference. 8. Do you have tracking in place and are you going to look at it? We’re in an age where sending emails blindly will no longer cut it. In order to thrive, you need to know which email strategies are most effective. The way to do that is through analytics. Create dashboards showing email opens and customer engagement and check it often. Only then will you be able to correctly follow-up.
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I have always been a fan of email marketing, and newsletters are still at the top of my offerings to almost all my clients.
E-mail is an action-oriented medium in general. There is the idea that our e-mails are supposed to be, something you have been expecting from someone, something amusing and entertaining, or coupons and specials encouraging you to buy something. But we also expect to do something following consumption of the content, a call to action. What we are forgetting is the newsworthiness of email. I have been teaching my clients for years to educate their consumers and prospects. Give them the information they want to read. Do not bore people with more information on your company or just a plain old ad or coupon. Of course, there’s a limit to how much media people will allow being pushed in their face via email. The wrong content can make an email newsletter into a product that is incredibly annoying. But the right content can make the newsletter into a habit. And nothing excites a business like the chance to create a profitable compulsion. One reason email marketing has value for business owners is that it's an easy way to start reaching consumers without investing a lot in technology or software. Email marketing isn't something marketers do just because they can and it's easy. The tactic is highly effective at helping business owners and consumers stay connected and informed. In fact, consumers often seek out email marketing campaigns from their favorite businesses and local stores. This goes beyond coupons. There is a real value to staying connected to customers and email marketing makes that easy to do. It's also easy to customize and integrate into other marketing tactics. The versatility of email marketing is another reason that marketers keep this tactic in their marketing toolbox. Depending on the depth of the email database and the skill of the crafter, email marketing messages can range from simple to complex. Email marketing can also be utilized with just about any other marketing tactic, which makes email an important part of any integrated marketing campaign. And email marketing is still effective and inexpensive. To sum up, the best reason to use email marketing: It's easy, effective, and inexpensive. Email marketing allows business owners to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of pennies per message. For small-business owners on a budget, this makes it a great choice. You don't have to take my word for it. A joint study from Shop.org and Forrester Research found that 85 percent of U.S. retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. The point of all this is that email may be an old tactic, but it remains a vital one. It's relatively easy to do a newsletter, so there's no excuse for business owners to not be taking advantage of it. Understandably, business owners may be too busy to handle the email marketing on their own, but this is something with which any marketing professional (wink, wink) can help. |
Boost Your BusinessMaria NovakI have over 35 years' experience in Marketing Small Businesses. Categories
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