What You Should Know About Email Marketing And List Building
Email marketing is one of the most powerful mediums available today for reaching customers and prospects
. It is fast, cheap and easy and enables you to get your services and products to the attention of your existing or potential clients and customers. As most people these days spend more time reading their emails than they do surfing the web, you want to be driving the message to your customers instead of having them search for you. Your campaign will therefore depend on your list building efforts because marketing to an opt-in list produces the best results. Newsletter marketing is the best way to increase your reach so you can capture the emails of individuals with a signified interest in your product, service or information.
Like any new marketing tool, email marketing can be abused and ends up being counter-productive if your audience is being turned off by bulk email marketing campaigns. Poorly presented emails are not worth the effort as more than 55% of them are deleted immediately without even being read. It is more time and cost effective if you spend your efforts on marketing to an opt-in list and use newsletters or ezines to build your lists.
Emails that are obvious advertisements tend to be ignored by the people. Customers are looking for information so they can make an informed choice therefore your email campaign should be looking to form an online relationship where trust can be established through information. The first rule is not to irritate the reader! Your presentation must be professional and it goes without saying that poor spelling and grammar are going to immediately put off potential customers. Using all capital letters and too many exclamation points is also off-putting and leads straight to the DELETE button. It is not recommended using music in the background - Vivaldi or punk rock may immediately turn off large and different segments of the population. So if you are just setting up your email marketing campaign, think information first and save the gimmicks for when you have established yourself as a niche with an opt-in population.
The next consideration is how to prevent people from unsubscribing once you have gone to the trouble of hooking their original interest. You have permission to send information only if people have responded to your email newsletter with a request for more information. Sending a boring sales pitch for a product that is irrelevant to them will only cause them to unsubscribe. Make sure you have a box for "Please send me announcements and special offers by email" and this will be the basis of your successful list-building process.
There are endless video courses and books out there on email marketing and list building but try online first for free advice and lists of best practices - read and learn and take them to heart!