Email Marketing Done Right

Email marketing is a powerful, cost-effective and flexible way of marketing a business. If done right, you can attract customers, increase sales, spread brand awareness, generate leads, and save time while reducing marketing cost. A lot of people have an email address, and because of technology, most of consumers can read their emails directly from their mobile phones. This gives email marketing a wide reach.

It is easy to create an email about your business and send them out, but how effective is it? Because you are marketing your business, you want to make sure that people will open, read, and contact you after reading the email. Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool and you want it to be effective to ensure that all efforts return by means of reaching your goal.

There are a lot of ways on how to make email marketing work for you. You need patience and strategy like taking time to write the right content, building a list of target customers, and timing when and how to send your email.

Here are some tips on how to make email marketing work for you:

The Email Content & Design – You want people to read and know more about what you are marketing. Before you can do this, you have to make sure that your content is designed to engage a reader. What you can do is create magazine-like content instead of the normal email format. Add videos and links in your content; make it creative so the person who is looking at your email does not delete it right away. Keep them engaged and give them teasers of articles of what they can find on your website.

Adding active links to your content will also increase your reader’s interest. Make it easy for them to find and learn more about what you are marketing. According to HubSpot, placing the right amount of links on your content will give a higher clickthrough rate. Placing a lot of links in your content will also decrease the unsubscribe rate. Don’t forget to add link tracking on your content because this gives you an idea on the effectiveness of your email.

Make sure that your content is mobile friendly. A lot of people are opening their emails on their smartphones and when they do, this might be the only chance you get with them. It is important that you give them the right impression. Choosing the right subject line is crucial because you want your recipient to open your email. Use subject lines like Posts, Jobs, Survey, and E-newsletter rather than Confirm, Features, Magic, and Raffle.

The List – once you are sending the right email, you start building a list of subscribers. It is important that you manage your list of subscribers by sending them news about your business. Track your emails and watch those that bounce and try to reconnect with them through Twitter or LinkedIn. This will give your subscribers a sense that you value their interest in your business. Start conversations or direct them to your social sites like Twitter or Facebook.

How and When to Send – now it is time to choose the right Email Service Provider (ESP) for your business. Choose a provider that will give you a high deliverability rate, provides reporting, reasonable price, and comes with high quality service. Once you have an ESP, the timing of sending your emails is crucial. According to HubSpot, the best times of the week to send emails are towards the weekend, from Friday to Sunday. These days show that readers are more engaged to look at your content than any other days of the week. Clickthrough rates are higher during these days and readers have more time to understand what you are marketing. In terms of time-of-day, clickthrough rates are highest during early morning and drops to its lowest during the afternoon, then it rises up again as it approaches midnight.

Now that you have your content and you have an idea when to send it out to your readers, it is time to track your email’s success. Look at your email metrics and study how many of your readers opened and clicked-through. You can also track your web metrics and study the traffic that goes to your website. Look at the stats and wait for feedback.

These are all essential in your email marketing success because you will be given an idea of how to improve your next email campaign. You will have an idea of what works for your readers and what topics have grabbed the most attention. Do not be afraid to experiment with topics and timing. And whatever happens, respect your list of readers. In any business, you do your best to give your customers the sense of importance and your business will have a higher chance of succeeding.

Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog and CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm.   She helps create connection, credibility, community and cha-ching through mobile marketing and social commerce around your brand. She is co-founder of#brandchat - a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding.