Tips and Tricks for Your Email Marketing Strategy
Companies new to email marketing sometimes are so eager to get started, they overlook a few important details. It’s easy to make a mistake when you don’t have anyone to advise you on your strategy–hopefully, the following tips and tricks will help all you new email marketers out there create lasting connections with your customers.
Get permission
This is the most important rule in email marketing: Do not email a newsletter unless the recipient has given you permission to do so. Some marketers have made the mistake of assuming that if someone sends them a business-related email or hands them a business card, that’s as good as saying, “Sign me up.” It’s not.
Assuming a person has voluntarily signed up for your newsletter, you still want to confirm that subscription. If you’ve ever received email meant for someone else, due to a typo in someone’s name or misspelling, you know that people aren’t always the most accurate typists. So anytime you get a new subscriber, send a follow-up email to that person immediately to confirm their interest. Otherwise, you might end up on a spam list, because you’ve been sending newsletters to Jan Smith instead of Jane Smith.
Let people choose their news
Ideally, you want to provide a short list of options for subscribers, so they can choose which topics they want to read about, and how often. If you’re new to email marketing, don’t worry about getting too detailed with content choices. You could provide just a few categories, like special offers, new products and company news.
Frequency can be a little trickier to work out–you want to offer subscribers the ability to limit how often you send mail, but you have to make sure you’ll be able to deliver at the frequency they choose. So, if you can’t come up with content every day, don’t offer daily emails as an option. You might start off with just a weekly and bi-weekly option, if you want to keep things simple (or you can tackle frequency at some point in the future and just send weekly newsletters for now).
Don’t just sell
Even if subscribers chose only “special offers” from the list of news categories you provided at sign-up, you still have to send a newsletter at the right frequency–meaning, even if you have no special offers in a given week, subscribers still expect an email from you.
To help keep subscribers interested, include newsletter content that has nothing to do with selling a product. If you’re a B2B marketer, share some industry news. Or include content about your company–perhaps a profile of an employee, or a photo from a recent company event.
The actions you take in the early stages of your email marketing campaign lay the groundwork for your long-term customer relationships. If you need help getting started, ask us how Delivra’s software and services can work for you.