EMail Marketing Best Practices

If you are among the unenlightened people who believe email marketing doesn’t work, you’re making your competitors very happy. While you’re passing on one of the most effective means of customer acquisition, they’re attracting the people you’re ignoring. The good news is it’s never too late to play. These email marketing best practices will get you solidly in the game.

Have A Clear Goal

Before launching an email campaign, decide what you want it to accomplish. Sending random emails with no clear purpose is a surefire way to get your customers irritated. So before you hit send, make sure your purpose is readily evident, whether it’s generating new leads, getting existing customers to buy more products, or increasing your brand awareness. Each purpose requires a slightly different approach, so be sure you know what you want and craft your mailings to achieve it before you spend the money. By the way, having a single goal enables you to keep your messaging short and to the point. Recipients give you very little time to make your case, so it’d better be compelling as soon as the message is opened.

Target Your Messaging

Personalized messages to a specific audience have the best chance to be successful.Giving you the ability to place the right message in front of the right group of people at exactly the right time is what makes email so powerful.No other medium gives you this capability in as intimate a fashion, whether you’re selling ebooks, cosmetics from home, or electronics.To accomplish this, segment your email lists and personalize each message you transmit. If you assign a persona to each group based upon its demographics, you can identify details and interests likely to gain a positive response.

Leverage the Power of Mobile

Chances are you’re reading this on a mobile device right now. Guess what? That’s what your customers are using to read your emails too. When you craft your message, test it on every mobile device you can acquire. Also make sure it looks good on iOS devices as well as Android. Sometimes, what works on one, appears wonky on the other. Test all of your links to make sure click throughs go without a hitch. You also want to optimize all of the elements of the message to look good (and be legible) on mobile devices. Compress images so they load faster, increase the sizes of your buttons and links, avoid loading your messages with rich media, and pass on the streaming video for a while. Some mobile devices tend to chug when they have to display them. Actually, testing and proofreading should be very thorough regarding of the device for which it is intended.

Never Use a Paid List

Yes, the temptation to get thousands of names in one fell swoop is strong. But don’t succumb to it. First of all, you have no way of knowing how good a paid list is. Penalties can be severe if you’re caught sending messages to people who never agreed to get them from you. If you’re thinking about spending money to buy a mailing list, use that capital to invest in a subscription generation campaign instead. Yes, it’ll take longer to accrue, but your quality will be higher, and your response rate will more than make it worthwhile.

Always Include a Call to Action

A marketing email message without a call to action is a wasted opportunity. Actually, it’s a squandered opportunity. You’ve put your message in front of potential customer. You’ve targeted them carefully; they opened and read the message, but you didn’t present them with a call to action? What was the point of the campaign? Every list of email marketing best practices you’ll ever see always advises including a call to action.