Blog entry by Federico Darcy
Make your email messages as personalized as possible, and you can make recipients feel special. A customer who feels they're just getting a form letter, the same as everyone else, is more likely to delete it without reading. Adding in their first name is very easy, but take it step further. Try to retain data about the time, place and reason for their initial registration with you. Take that information and use it as you craft your message.
Try using A/B testing for your email marketing campaign. This basically entails creating two very different versions of the same email (A and B) and sending "A" to half of a small test group and "B" to the other half. Whichever half receives the most positive response is the one that you should be using for your campaign.
In order to promote excitement in your customers regarding receiving emails, offer them special discounts or limited promotions in your newsletters. This form of email marketing not only gives your readers a real value for their participation, but also encourages them to refer friends. You may even want to offer a referral program that will allow you to expand your mailing list in a major way.
Limit your marketing email messages to only one each week. Most of your customers probably receive multiple emails each day, and are too busy to constantly open message after message. If you send out too many emails, they might not read them anymore and that's not good if you spent a lot of time working on the messages.
When you are having your customers provide their email address to you during the sign-up process. Make sure that you have the clear disclaimer visible that you will be undertaking email marketing campaigns. Try to give the consumer an indication of how often you intend to make use of their addresses so that they are not unaware.
Try using various kinds of resources and learning all you can about email marketing. You can read books at the library, check out blogs and join forums. You should also look into joining a class or a workshop about internet marketing in your area.
Pay attention to the demographics within your subscriber base. See what content and links intrigued a particular segment of your audience, and then follow up with a new email to that subgroup. The boost in your response rate from peeling away the top layer will really surprise you, but in a delightful way.
Never overuse the "Buy this right now!" approach. " approach. You may lose business by doing this because it may appear like you are a spammer. They understand you want sales, but build a solid relationship and stay professional. They will like this and will likely purchase from you.
Have a strong call to action in your email marketing campaign and position it to be seen. You shouldn't make it difficult for your email readers to know exactly what you want from them. If it's too hard to figure out, then your email will most likely be quickly deleted. Instead, offer a clear call to action and deliver it in a way that can't be missed.
You want every email campaign to have feedback that is passive as well as active. Active feedback entails soliciting suggestions and opinions from your subscribers. Passive feedback can be much more subtle, and may even be undetectable by your readers. Passive feedback is comprised of the tools and monitoring techniques you use to see which links receive the most clicks and to determine the open rates of your emails.
You should try and build an email list the best that you can from networking in person as well as on the Internet. You should not buy or rent lists of names that you will email to drum up business. There is no guarantee that any of the people you contact will be interested and you may even end up getting reported to your email service provider.
Keep in mind that major holidays are not the best time to send out important emails. During these times, people are likely to be preoccupied with personal issues, vacations, and inundations from various other outlets. There are times, however, when this may not be true. Black Friday, for example, is one occasion where a date relevant campaign is warranted.
Be sure that you provide people with a way to opt out of your email marketing newsletters. There is a cost to sending email, even if it is small. Not only that, blowback and negative attention spammers get are terrible for the company's business and can ultimately result in black listings or blocks.
It may seem obvious, but it is essential to your email marketing campaign that the email addresses you are sending to are correct. It would be a waste of time looking for email addresses and having to resend emails after they didn't go through. This is a huge waste of time.
You should now start to feel more confident when it comes to seeing success with your site or sites. You want to be sure that you apply all the knowledge you gained today with confidence because when you do that you have fun and just become successful with ease as you progress.