email marketing tips

Email marketing tips:

Email marketing campaigns are a fast, efficient and affordable way to stay in contact with past clients, garner new sales and promote your business. Starting an effective email marketing campaign is easy with a few tested strategies that can open up a whole new base of clientele.

And email marketing is by far the BEST and CHEAPEST way to stay in touch with your customers and build rock-solid relationships with them — so they’ll buy from you again and again! (This is called the “lifetime value” of your customers, and it’s extremely profitable.)

Consider this: About 99% of your website visitors will leave without buying anything from you on their first visit. But by creating a great opt-in offer you can at least get their contact details — and then use email marketing to follow up, build relationships, and turn them into paying customers. Business 2.0 recently reported that permission-based marketing messages enjoy a response rate of 11.5%, compared to a mere 0.55% for banner click through’s.

If you’re stuck for ideas on how to use email marketing to ramp up your profits? Here you can start with 10 proven tactics:

1.Develop relationships & establish credibility by offering free information: Highlighting how you have helped past clients is an effective way to show what you can do.

2.Acknowledge the subscription of a user: Plainly put, you must give subscribers a choice. Subscribers must make a conscience decision that they wish to receive your email. Avoid stealth sign-up methods that collect addresses. Avoid pre-checked newsletter boxes that opt users in with little deference to their true desires. Confirmation of all subscriptions should be required.

To help you maintain an efficient operation, you can automate the acknowledgement process by setting up an auto responder to your subscription email. An auto responder feature allows you to create a customized message that will automatically be generated and sent to your list member to let him/her know that you have received a message. You can start out your acknowledgement email as “Thank you for subscribing to our weekly newsletter.”Keep a record of all requests for subscription to your newsletter or product offerings, even years afterward.

3.Allow users to unsubscribe from your list: Be respectful. Always include an opt out message at the bottom of the page. Include clear instructions and a link for opting out of future mailings. Not only will this save you the headache of dealing with people that really want off your list, it builds trust in clients that are actually reading your emails.

Keep your email list clean by removing faulty email addresses. ISPs monitor the volume of email sent as well as the failure rates. Large volumes of both are indicative of spam and could result in your domain being black listed. ISP’s make the assumption that you are a spammer & could block all emails from your domain.

4.Personalize: Response rates to email campaigns are said to increase with the personalization of emails. People are prone to respond more favorably to emails that start with their names, or personalized salutations such as “Dear Susan.” However, personalize your emails only if you have information on the first names of your subscribers or opt-in list. If you’ve incomplete data, never attempt to personalize your emails and have your emails start with “Dear Unknown.” There is nothing more irritating to an email recipient than being labeled as an “unknown.”

5.Subjects: Be honest with subject line. Make sure your subject line is relevant and capture the reader’s interest. If the first couple of sentences are not related to the subject line, you will lose your audience. Many email readers screen their email by simply deleting those topics they deem SPAM.