Despite the recent proliferation of other online marketing strategies, mass emailing remains one of the best ways to reach customers and convert sales. After all, no other medium connects so many people at any given time and in any given place. Smartphones have given consumers nearly 24/7 access to email, and the ability to reach these increasingly-savvy consumers is vital for any company.
Here are 10 easy tips for upgrading your email marketing game…
1. Ensure opt-in – Respecting the opt-in, or the user’s express permission to include him or her in mass email campaigns, is sacred. Ensure that you receive this permission at least once, if not twice.
2. Differentiate email content – Different recipients want different emails. Break your lists into groups using a strong online bulk mailing service and test different email formats with each group.
3. Try more than newsletters – Newsletters are a great way to make general and more-official announcements to your email list. But breaking out into segmented and targeted campaigns is an effective addition to your greater strategy.
4. Brand your email – Do you have an insignia or logo? Use it regularly to establish a familiarity with recipients.
5. Remember mobile – More and more people use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to read emails. Consider the screen real estate of popular devices when designing your content, and remember that many mobile users won’t see images when opening emails. Alt text or text-only emails therefore become critical.
6. Keep it simple – Loading your emails with images, videos, and crazy fonts makes look more like spam and slows loading speed on your emails.
7. Get to the point early – Readers are pressed for time and want to digest your emails quickly. Put the main message in the subject line or the first paragraph.
8. Test your emails on multiple clients – Check out how your emails look in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and Thunderbird before sending.
9. Follow up regularly...but not too regularly – Reinforcing great deals or promotions is a good idea, but filling inboxes with not-so-great deals or boring announcements is a great way to lose subscribers.
10. Make the unsubscribe option easy to find – Despite your best efforts, you will undoubtedly lose some subscribers in your email campaigns. Making the unsubscribe option easy to find, however, prevents users from clicking the more-prominent “mark as spam” function instead.