Email marketing is still a great way to reach out to your current or potential customers and readers, without having to get them to come to your website first. Most people have their e-mail open almost all day, so you can bet that if you do your marketing campaign correctly, you will get a lot of views back to your offer or to your site. Here are a few tips on just exactly how to plan and execute a good email marketing campaign.
Email Marketing Software
For any good marketing campaign, you are going to need an email marketing service like Aweber. Companies like Aweber allow you to collect and store and manage customer email addresses in their database, automatically respond to newly signed up customers, schedule newsletters in advance, and track the results of all of your campaigns.
How To Get Email Subscribers
You cannot have much of an email marketing system without subscribers! Before you get rolling, you’ll need to think about what you are going to do to get them to sign up to your list.
Will you give them some kind of freebie for signing up?
Will you offer a drawing for some kind of giveaway?
How about an eCourse – teach them something over email?
You don’t necessarily have to give something away for them to sign up. If your site is interesting enough, they may sign up without a freebie of some kind. However, it sure doesn’t hurt to have an incentive!
Make Your Subscriber Form Prominent On Your Website
You will also need to have the form for them to sign up for updates somewhere on your site, preferably somewhere prominent so that once they have read something interesting, they are willing to sign up to get updates and have the opportunity to do right in front of them.
Most email marketing software companies make this fairly simple. With their code, you can put the form wherever you fancy on your site such as the sidebar or in the header. Once you put the code in place, all the subscribers have to do is enter the required information, and they will start getting updates!
Set Up Your Follow Up Emails
It is smart to go ahead and have a few messages in place before you even have subscribers. That way they begin to receive updates from you almost immediately without you having to race to get some content out to them.
Email marketing companies like Aweber allow you to send previously written messages to subscribers either immediately or at a later scheduled time.
Use Catchy Email Titles
How many emails do you skip over in a day? For me, I skip a lot. If you do not want to fall into that group with your subscribers, then make sure you use catchy titles for your messages. Do not make them misleading, just make them something that you would want to click on if you saw the headline.
Rather than “Joe’s Newsletter – Issue #1”, try something like “5 Ways to Make Money With Your Email List” – which one would you rather read?
Be creative here and have some fun with the titles. People will be more likely to open your message if your title is something that stands out from the rest of the junk in their inbox.
Don’t Overdo It
Be careful not to email your customers too much. What constitutes “too much” is a bit different for every group, but just put yourself in their shoes. How many times would you want to get a newsletter or eCourse? There are some email newsletters that I look forward to receiving every day. There are others that I get a couple of times per week, and if they came every day, I would probably start to ignore them after a while or just unsubscribe if it got too intrusive. You can also test and see how many readers open your messages at different intervals. Once your list starts to grow, you can even ask them what they prefer!
Don’t Underdo It
Don’t let your subscribers forget about you, either. You want to have your name and/or product in front of them regularly so that it stays in the front of their minds. You do not want them to see your email and wonder who you are and why they are receiving it. Again, each group and industry may be different in this respect, so some testing is probably in order to see what works the best, but I generally recommend contacting your list at least once per week.
Don’t Just Sell, Sell, Sell
If your readers know that all they are going to hear from you is a sales pitch, they will probably start to unsubscribe or just ignore you altogether. Make sure that much of what you send is useful, helpful information so that your customers or readers look forward to hearing what you have to say. That way when you do have something to offer, they’ll be much more receptive to buying…
Remember – they are aware that you are going to be selling something to them, even if it is just an invitation to come back and visit your site. They signed up, so they do not mind a new sales pitch. Just make sure that’s not all you’re doing.
Email Split Testing
Many email marketing software services allow you to “split test” your messages. In other words, you can send one version of an email to a part of your list, and another version to the others. Then you could track exactly how many opens and clicks each message receives. This is a great way to see what titles and content work the best in getting your audience to respond. You could also use this to test the duration between emails that we discussed in the sections above.
If you will follow these steps, you will likely see a good response to your email marketing campaign along with more traffic and sales!
