6 Tips to Help Your Email Marketing Skills
As much as business owners may love to interact with their clients, in this busy day and age, you just don’t get as much face-to-face interaction with customers anymore. Thankfully, we can keep people in the loop by contacting them through email. Businesses can send their clients news updates, sales and promotions, and even tell engaging stories through email and email marketing. But there’s a lot more to email marketing than just sending a message to your client. It’s important to consider things like visual appeal, word choice, and taglines. To help you navigate the world of email etiquette, we’ve got a list of 6 tips to help your email marketing skills!
1. How to find subscribers… and keep them!
Where would an email campaign be without its loyal subscribers? It wouldn’t go very far, that’s for sure! Subscriber lists are what keep email marketing alive, and their engagement is the key to the campaign’s success. You can continue to build up your list frequently, and the best way to do that is by featuring a subscription signup box on your website. You can also advertise your newsletters on your business’s different social media pages. Be sure to include any special features about your newsletter than will engage customers to subscribe: things like exclusive deals or first looks at new content. If you’re a retail store, feel free to politely ask your customers if they would like to give you their email at checkout. Also, be sure to encourage current subscribers to share with their friends, perhaps by enticing them with more exclusive deals!
But they say if you love something you should set it free, and that’s as true of email subscribers as it is anything else. It’s important that you make it easy for your subscribers to unfollow your email campaigns if they want to. You don’t want to make them feel trapped by your newsletters, and you definitely don’t want them to resort to blocking or reporting your emails! And there are still plenty of ways to keep your subscribers engaged with the content of your newsletters.
2. Stay Out of the Spam Folder
Most people get plenty of emails flooding into their inbox on a daily basis and a good number of those emails are unsolicited spam. To prevent your newsletters from getting swept up into that spam category, be sure to put a lot of thought into making your content look personalized. That means making sure your emails look like they were put together by a professional, and not a series of odd words and images sent out by a spam bot! You can do this by making sure the content of your emails are clear and free of spelling or factual errors. For your subject line, avoid overusing capital letters and exclamation points, and in the body of the email make sure to properly format any HTML links.
Additionally, you should send out your campaigns using a professional email address associated with your business. Be sure to avoid having odd numbers or random and unnecessary letters in your email. People can usually tell the difference between a legitimate email and a spam bot. What’s more, some email software automatically block messages from odd-looking email addresses. For example, “naturalsoaps2019@email.ca” looks much more reputable compared to something like “n4tur4ls0apz20x19@email.ca.”
3. Make it Look Appealing
Making your digital newsletter look appealing is another one of our key tips to help your email marketing be successful. And it’s another factor that will keep your emails from being mistaken for spam: after all, there’s no artificial replacement for quality designing! Put careful thought into how you display your newsletter and what kind of image you want it to convey.
For example, if you run a law firm, you’d want to display how efficient and professional your business is. You can do that by using carefully balanced colour schemes and fewer images, while still being pleasing to the eye. Meanwhile, say if you run a candy store, you could use bright colours (although not too overwhelming) and have a good number of images showing off your products. In either case, don’t overuse images or rely on them to convey the information. This is because some email browsers won’t display images, or will mark emails with too many of them as spam.
4. Keep Your Readers Engaged
The main purpose of email campaigns is to get readers excited about your business and to get them involved with it. Reaching out to them through emails is a great way to show off your business and what it has to offer. But if your subscribers open your emails only to close them again, it doesn’t actually generate any traffic to your website, nor does it encourage any interaction with your business.
But there are still plenty of ways of catching–and keeping–the attention of your subscribers. For retailers, it’s a great idea to feature exclusive deals that are only available through your email newsletters. And be sure to make it clear that the deals are exclusive and that your subscribers won’t find them anywhere else! For non-retail businesses, you can still feature exclusive perks in your newsletters, like early news updates or limited stories.
Of course, in order to generate traffic to your website, it’s important to embed links in your emails for subscribers to click. To encourage your readers to follow the links, feature sneak previews of your special features, or give links to the products advertised in the newsletter. Either of these will convince your subscribers that your website is worth visiting!
5. Have a Mobile-Friendly Site
Once you have your subscribers clicking those hyperlinks and visiting your business’s website, you’ll find traffic to your website increasing exponentially. And since most people check their emails on their cellphones, most of that traffic will be from mobile users. So with increased mobile users on your website, it’s extremely important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
A website that isn’t optimised for mobile will be very frustrating to many of the site’s visitors. For instance, if subscribers run into problems on their first visit to a website, they are not very likely to want to try and visit again. What’s more, they may not stay to open your emails or unsubscribe if they know that the website attached to the emails is hard to use. Having a well-assembled mobile website will not only help your email campaign, but it will also help the success of your business in the long run.
6. Test It Before You Send it
The piece of advice that’s probably one of our biggest tips to help your email marketing campaign: test it before you send it! This means reviewing the content of your newsletter, checking it over for spelling errors, mistakes, or misinformation. You should also check the formatting, and make sure the email will look how you want it to in both computer inboxes and on mobile phones.
You should also test any hyperlinks that you may have placed in the email to make sure they work properly and that they lead to the right webpage. See how it looks to a recipient by sending several test emails to yourself. You can also send it to colleagues who might be able to give you a fresh perspective. This might sound rather self-explanatory, but these are all very important things to remember when preparing an email campaign. Once the campaign is sent to subscribers, there’s no going back! So, it’s very important to make sure you’re putting forth the best possible product to send to your subscribers.