10 useful email marketing tips & tricks

During the whole practice of internet marketing those who worked on it discovered a range of tricks, tips and secrets which any email marketing campaign depends on. There are some generally accepted rules which a normal internet marketer has to obey. Though not every email marketer obeys them, but you must believe that following such marketing tips will likely lead you to success, attract more customers, and advertise your brand more extensively, than just spamming and these rules ignorance will.

Here are some of those well-know email marketing tips.

Internet marketing tip 1. Permission.

Permission is not only user’s ability to agree to get a subscription. Much more lies beyond this ability. When you offer your products or services to a potential customer you must do it unassumingly, giving the recipient an ability to choose, whether to consent your proposition or to decline it. Giving the recipient such an opportunity means you respect his opinion and he will likely respect you in return. Thus the basis of good relations between the sides is formed.

Besides, this is not only an email marketing tip, it’s a rule.

The 2003 U.S. law regulating commercial email, popularly called CAN-SPAM, permits opt-out marketing with a couple of conditions: all commercial emails must have a working unsubscribe function. Plus, emails sent to recipients who didn’t give you “affirmative consent” must include language that the message is “a promotional email” within the message.

Permission is not difficult to get. You may just offer something valuable, be it taking into discount program or any special bonuses, in exchange for the customer’s agreeing to get your newsletters.

Internet marketing tip 2. Call-to-action including.

Another web-marketing tip is that each newsletter you send should exactly contain what you want the receiver to do. Make links visible and prominent to attract them to the special directions you want. And you should be repetitive if you really want to call them to action, nothing to worry about it.

So, you can place the links at the top of the letter and in its bottom. The recipient mustn’t forget what you have wanted him to do while he reads the letter text.

Internet marketing tip 3. Targeted mailing list.

Any internet marketer knows that well-organized and targeted email list is the basis of his success in email marketing. It’s another useful email marketing trick. Every person whose contacts are in your mailing list must be interested in what you can offer, every email address must be valid, and your list must permanently grow.

If you have no such a list, you can purchase one. There are some companies gathering bases of email addresses and selling them. For example, if you want to sell video equipment, they can offer you a list of addresses of those who had subscribed to correspondent newsletters only.

One more way to get your list expanded is to have your best customers and your biggest fans ask their friends to sign up. It results in a self-screened database of prospects who are probably interested in your offering.

Internet marketing tip 4. Newsletter design.

The next of our internet marketing secrets is that your letters must look fine, there’s nothing to discuss. You can easily use templates for your newsletters. It would be good if these templates reflected the colors and signs of your brand name.

You also must not forget about the recipients who can’t see all beauty of your HTML newsletter. So please create the plain text version of your newsletter.

And finally, test on yourself how your emailing works and letters look. If they are personalized, check how the names are performed. It would not be good if the recipient sees other name in the invitation, as well as misspelled text or crooked banners.

Internet marketing tip 5. Persistence strategy.

Another important email marketing trick is that your mass mail sending should take place according to a schedule. You can analyze when it’s proper for you to send bulk email letters but it has to be persistently. If you aren’t touching your clients in some way at least once a month, chances are they’re going to find somebody else find what they want.

This requires a lot of work but it works. You must think of new propositions, discounts, types of advertising to keep them interested permanently and to remind them about yourself periodically.

Internet marketing tip 6. Story telling.

A well-crafted newsletter should be more than just a summary of your resume or company history. The letter must be interesting to read. It can include some advices, tips and tricks, some cases from someone’s experience.

So you can attract the customers not only by the production you sell, but with some interesting information on the same subject your business is and which may be useful for the recipients. The potential customer will likely follow the direction you want if he reads a real story, which your competitors didn’t even try to tell.

Internet marketing tip 7. Exit strategy

There are a lot of examples when at first the subject of one’s online marketing was interesting to the recipient, but then the interest was lost. Then the recipient tries to unsubscribe, but there’s simply no such an option on the site.

That is why a great advantage will be enabling your recipients to exit the program. There are several reasons why it is so important.

Firstly, with such feature you can keep your mailing list more targeted and fresh. In case somebody wants to unsubscribe your mailing but has no such ability, he will simply change email address, ignore your letters or even mark them as spam, or your advertising will simply annoy him. There again, it determines the amount of respect given to the customer.

And there is one more e mail marketing tip for this case. You can define a set number of non-response messages, after which you stop sending them emails. It sends a negative brand message and it doesn’t do anything to help reestablish your relationship with them.

Internet marketing tip 8. Analyzing and watching your statistics.

Use different analysis systems to watch your progress, determine periods of time when your conversion is of the largest amount and the dead seasons. Gather the statistics data where you will discover, which of your marketing steps were successful and which were not. There are some such systems of analysis.

And hurry to unsubscribe bounced addresses. An email can bounce for any number of reasons, and it’s best to wait to see if the address bounces more than once before scrubbing it from your list.

Internet marketing tip 9. Knowing your aims and changing your strategy according to their changes.

The key to maintaining a set of successful best practices is to know what you want from them and be prepared to rewrite them as your business needs change.

«The most important element in any kind of successful email marketing is understanding and defining what your realistic strategy should be,» Mullen says.

Internet marketing tip 10. Using quality software.

No argue that quality of your software can either ease your work or turn it into suffering. Use one which is handy, flexible, and multifunctional, and which requires fewer system resources.