How To Start Using Email Marketing

How To Start Using Email Marketing

Email is a reliable method of reaching your contacts where they are. As long as you have a properly curated list, respect their privacy, and provide interesting information, you are well on your way to building a powerful communications tool.

Let us take a closer look at how to successfully set up and run email marketing 

Have a clear goal in mind

When you start planning for your campaign, it is important that you have a clear goal for your campaign from the start. Your goal might be one of the following, or something completely different:

• Grow your business.
• Increase user’s knowledge about your product.
• Sell your product.

Knowing what you want to accomplish is most important step in executing a successful campaign. After all, you can’t measure success if you have no metric against which to measure it.

You may find that you need to create different campaigns to achieve different goals, and that is perfect. If you do so you can segment your subscribers to better target them based on their needs and your goals.

5 Important points to remember

Right from the beginning there are five important aspects of your email marketing newsletter that you need to pay special attention to.

1. Mail regularly

It is very important that you set up a regular mailing schedule and stick to it. Whether you send newsletters once a week or once a month, your contacts will become accustomed to your publishing schedule, and they will expect you to be consistent.
Use your email reports to see if there is a day or time when your contacts are more engaged, and send your emails when you can expect them to respond most positively.

2. Send what you promised at sign-up

When inviting contacts to sign up to your newsletter, online or in-store, make sure to give them an idea of the kinds of emails you will be sending. Will it be special offers? Knowledge sharing? Free gifts? It is very important that you set the right expectations, and then stick to them.

3. Use images and links

High-quality, clear images make your emails more attractive. Just make sure that you have a good image-to-text ratio in your emails. If too much of your email is an image, your contact’s email provider may flag it as spam and send it to the junk folder.

Email is a great tool for driving traffic to your website. Include clear links, in the form of a well-positioned call-to-action, and encourage your contacts to visit your website.

4. Make it readable

Take a little time to design your emails for easy readability. In general, people read on the internet very differently to how they read books or newspapers. Eye tracking studies have shown that people read in an F-pattern, reading the first few sentences, scanning down until something else catches their eye, and then scanning to the bottom. Use proper hierarchical design, with clear headings diving content into short blocks, and you’ll get more of your message across to your contacts.

5. Make sure you obey all the spam rules

Make sure that you obey all applicable spam laws for the country you live in, and the countries your contacts live in.

In general, spam is:

• Anonymous
• Sent to a very large number of recipients
• Unsolicited

If you follow these guidelines, you will be well on your way to launch a successful email marketing campaign.