The Best Marketing Email is Useless Without Subscribers to Read it
The Internet has become a tremendous marketing asset for the small business owner, allowing modest companies to reach out to worldwide audiences. Among the many avenues available for online marketing, email marketing is one of the simplest and most effective. If you want to use emails to promote yourself and your business, you’ll find plenty of advice online about how to craft effective messages and encourage reader response. There’s another vital job you have to do in order to use email marketing effectively, though: You have to build a subscriber list! Here are the most important points you’ll need to consider on the subject.
The core of any good email marketing subscriber list should be made up of existing customers. These are people who have already demonstrated an interest in your products and services and a certain amount of trust in you. If you sell things directly from your website, your checkout page is an excellent place to start recruiting subscribers. Make the signup process easy, but also be clear about what you intend to do with your customers’ email addresses.
This point is worth addressing in greater depth. You must secure explicit permission from everyone you add to your marketing list. The negative consequences of sending out unsolicited emails can easily overwhelm any positive impact your email marketing campaign has. You’ll build negative word-of-mouth, lose customers, and potentially face more serious repercussions. Play it safe by being as clear as possible when you ask for permission to send emails. It’s also a good practice to make unsubscribing easy for people who are already on your list. Every email should have simple instructions that will allow recipients to opt out.
If you’re giving your subscribers the option to abandon you every time you send an email, how do you keep your list from bleeding readers with every new message? The answer is simple: Respect your subscribers’ time. Every time they open one of your messages, they should find information that is useful, relevant, and valuable to them. Don’t send out messages just because you haven’t sent any in a while, and don’t rehash content that your subscribers have already seen. If your emails are consistently valuable to your readers, the odds are that they’ll continue to open and read them.
If you’re stumped for valuable content to offer your subscribers, you can always fall back on the mainstay of email marketing: The exclusive special offer. This is a special deal that you give only to the customers on your subscription list. It’s valuable in a number of ways. For one thing, if you announce the offer to all of your customers, you’ll encourage more subscriptions. For another, access to exclusive deals will make your current subscribers pay more attention. Finally, you can use this tactic to increase sales of slow-moving products. It’s a good deal all around.
Email marketing can provide a significant boost to your sales if you go about it properly. You need to learn and practice many different skills in order to be an effective email marketer. Because building and maintaining a strong subscription list is a vital prerequisite for a productive email marketing campaign, you’ll find this article’s advice well worth following.