1. Planning and Permission should be the prime concern in Email Marketing
What do you want to get out of your email campaign? If you want to increase sales, think about how to achieve this. Plan your strategies. For example: Make special offers designed to appeal to specific groups of customers, Invite customers to an exclusive shopping evening. Besides this planning other important thing is permission from the customer to contact them. To ensure compliance with Data Protection legislation makes sure your email marketing is permission-based which means you need the customer's consent to contact them. To build up your contacts database, collect email addresses from your customers at every opportunity!
2. Target a particular group of Customers
Targeting will ensure your email marketing sends the right content to the right people at the right time. By tailoring email content to different customer groups, you will significantly increase your chances of success.
3. Call to action
Include a call to action in every email you send. For example you could invite customers to download discount vouchers, purchase a discounted product online, or agree to attend an event.
4. Proper Links on the website should be updated
Make sure you have links to your website so customers can find out more about individual offers. By monitoring customer click-throughs you will be able to measure your campaign's success.
5. Subject line of the email should be meaning full and the design of the email should be professional.
The subject line has a major influence on whether recipients open and read emails. Keep it short and avoid using CAPS, exclamation marks or words like 'free'.
Make sure your design works! An HTML design will make your email look more professional, but if you don't get it right, it will fail to render correctly across all inboxes or will get caught in spam filters. If in doubt, try using the free templates provided by email marketing solutions such as dotMailer. In short you have to make a attractive email with brief but interesting content of your offers.
6. Experiment with your Emails
Find out what works. Consider doing some split testing, by sending slight variations on your email to different customer groups. For example, find out what happens if you change the sender's name from male to female, or use a different subject header, or send the same email at different times.
7. Deliverability of Email Service Provider
Believe it or not, the main obstacle you will face is getting your email into your customers' inbox! ISPs delete billions of emails each day. Make sure you choose an Email Service Provider with good deliverability rates so that you can make sure that your mails are not deleted by the ISPs. Click here to find out more.
8. Keeps records, it will help you in near future
Measurement is the key to future success. By finding out how many emails were delivered and opened, and which links customers clicked on within the email, you can fine-tune your next campaign.
About the Author
Andrew Brown is the marketing manager and deals mainly with email marketing, email marketing software. For details visit http://www.dotmailer.co.uk/.
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