Highlights
Email Marketing – Proper Practices and Tips
In the United States, eighty-eight percent of adult Internet subscribers utilize email. Many large retailers such as Best Buy, Papa John’s and Kohls are utilizing email marketing to reach consumers. While large retailers typically have a captured audience and email addresses many independent business owners have yet to take advantage of such an effective and affordable marketing vehicle.
Email marketing is relatively easy to launch with by following proper practices and etiquette.
The first step to email marketing is compiling a database of email addresses and names. If at all possible try to get a name associated with each email address. Typically the best resource to gain valuable email addresses is from existing customers. With minor changes to our existing business processes you can easily gather email addresses from customers from a number of channels. Try adding an email address field to your customer enrollment forms, customer surveys, applications or even prize registrations. Be sure to always state that their email address will be used for product specials and promotions.
There are email databases available for purchased based on various demographics, however purchasing a list of email addresses and sending unsolicited email announcements can sacrifice your business reputation and portray your business or organization as a spammer, even if you give the user the option to unsubscribe from your service. It is imperative that you always offer the user the option to unsubscribe from your email marketing on each email broadcast you send even if the user did sign up for your announcements at an earlier date.
Once you have a decent size list ready to send to you will need to choose a method of sending an email to your list. There are various services out that that can assist you in managing your email campaign. ListServ (Lsoft.com) and IntelliContact.com are a few options where your email addresses can be store on an email management server and can handle broadcasting to your subscriber lists. Typically the guideline to sending from your personal email software such as Microsoft Outlook is no more than fifty email addresses per message. To make an email marketing campaign successful you will typically need to utilize software that can handle hundreds or even thousands of subscribers, including the ability for users to easily “opt out” of your marketing messages.
Developing an attractive-easy to read email message is also key to sending the right message to your customers. I suggest using a professional to create a template that is not only appealing to the user, but also versatile across the broad range of email software. HTML is almost universal with very few email users with text-only email software. Most Web designers can build a template in which you can adjust and re-use for each message sent with the ability for you to change the message text with little computer knowledge or skills.
Here are some tips and tricks for what and how to send email marketing messages considering that timing and content are the largest factors in broadcast email messages.
- 11am PST is the most popular time in the United States for users to open email messages.
- Another interesting fact is that Wednesday is the best day of the week to achieve highest percentage of email messages opened. Try to send your email when it is most likely to be read.
- The subject line of your marketing email can make the difference between a customer opening your message or deleting your message. A rule of thumb for the subject line is LESS than 50 characters maximum.
- The most influential aspects of email marketing are when there are action items for the user prompting them to take the next step in purchasing from you. The following percentages are based on effectiveness in influencing consumers to purchase via email promotions:
Dated Discounts – 27%
General Product Promotion – 24%
Prize Drawings – 20%
Including links to products or promotions on your Website can also increase the effectiveness in your efforts.
- Statistics show that the more links included in your message the more effective the results.
The decision on how often to send an email message to your list can be crucial to your business.
- Common practice suggests sending NO MORE than once per month or your customers will unsubscribe from your notifications due to annoyance. Anything much longer than 45-60 days can cause subscribers to forget they enrolled in your program. The exact frequency can be difficult to predict in your business, but listen to your customers and they will alert you to or unsubscribe alerting you that you are sending messages too frequently.
- With the costs of non-Internet marketing rising it makes sense that with minor effort and resources an email campaign can be a supplement or stimulant to your current online and Website marketing. Keep in mind your business reputation and the annoyance of all email users in reference to spam (junk email). Resist the temptation to spam users with an abundance of email messages with no substance or real offers. Internet users are aware more than ever of spam and will pick up on it. Keep it legit and offer a real discount or promotion and you too can have a successful email marketing campaign.
Jeremy Kauten – General Manager – VGM Forbin
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