Email marketing may not be the latest, most exciting marketing platform, but it’s a tried-and-true component of nearly every successful online marketing campaign. Just think – what other platform reaches almost every online consumer at almost every moment of every day?
Whether you’re already sending bulk emails or are a relative novice to unlimited email marketing, the following 5 tips should help you improve your email campaigns and your bottom line...
1. Focus on education, not sales – Email marketing has always been done with sales in mind. In general, an email campaign emphasizes what’s on sale, what new items are in stock, and how long the sale lasts. Any additional information is just icing on the cake. But what if you sent some sort of educational email just once a week, something like (for a menswear company) “The 4 Most Important Tie Knots Every Man Needs to Know.” Not only is this an engaging headline, but it will generate clicks to your site, and those can translate into sales.
2. Respect permissions – Email is great because all of your recipients have, at one point or another, opted into receiving your emails. Respect this! If you’re ending up in spam filters or are seeing a lot of unsubscribing, there’s a good chance you’re not being respectful of the opt-in.
3. Segment and test – Not all email recipients want to read the same boilerplate newsletter you always send, so make a few different group segments using your email auto responder and send different emails to each. Test the results to find out which emails work best with your groups.
4. Keep it simple – While emphasizing your brand with appropriate graphics and colors is definitely a positive, don’t overdo it with all the bells and whistles. All this does is slow down your loading speeds, make it harder for mobile users to read your emails, and make it more likely that you’ll end up in spam folders.
5. Make the “unsubscribe” button easy to find – Even the best email campaigns lose followers along the way, so make it easy for these people to unsubscribe. This may seem counter-intuitive, but imagine how easy it would be for a few disgruntled recipients to simply click “spam” in order to block your emails. This would be a much larger problem.