Best practices for successful email marketing
Done right, email marketing builds and strengthens the relationship you have with your customers. Imagine your subscribers open your emails and then share them with their friends. Imagine people responding to your email campaigns. Achieving high email open rates and response rates is all about following some of the best email practices and consistently delivering something of interest and value to your subscribers. Let’s take a look at some of the best email marketing practices and how you can put them to work for you.
Registration Process: Setting the Expectation
The registration process sets the stage for your relationship with your subscribers. Get this right and people will search for your email, get it wrong and your email won’t open. Getting this right means beginning the process by clearly communicating what your subscriber should expect from you. This sounds elementary, and it is, but the web is still littered with bad examples in this area. Your registration form should make it clear what you will submit, as well as when and how often. When a person signs up, they should be shown a thank you page that tells them what to expect next.
Require a subscription or not
An opt-in as an additional step that takes place between the time a person signs up and when they officially become a subscriber. The purpose of opt-in is to ensure that the person receiving your email really wants it. Churches need something like this to prevent people from registering others in an effort to preach to other people in an annoying way. For most companies, this really isn’t worth the effort to implement. It is also important that your email contains a way to unsubscribe from your list. The best practice is to place a link to remove you from your list at the bottom of the email.
Sender and subject lines
Think about what you do when you open your email program. You scan the list of messages in your inbox, and depending on the sender or the subject line of the email, there are some messages that open immediately and others that don’t. An email marketing best practice is to enclose in square brackets [ ] an ID that will include all the subject lines of your email. This makes it easy for your subscribers to recognize your email and also create email filter rules for your emails to ensure your emails get seen and opened.
Find out what works and what doesn’t
To find out what’s working and what’s not, you need to be clear about your goals and measure and track progress toward your goals. Email marketing can be a powerful engine for growing your business and it all starts with a great email marketing strategy and the right email marketing software. (I’ve used AWeber email marketing software for years because it has so many must-have features and makes life easier.) You need to measure which email subject lines are working and which are not. You should be measuring your email response rates – how many people click through to your website, etc. The right software makes it easy.
The secret to a healthy list of subscribers who open and read your emails is to deliver great content in a predictable way. Ask your subscribers to give you their opinion. Over time, as you deliver valuable content in the form of interesting information that your subscribers expect to receive, you are building important relationships with your subscribers. Your subscribers will be happy to tell you what they want to know more about and equally important: what they don’t like that you might be doing. Request and listen to feedback from your subscribers.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that many businesses use to increase sales and leads. With these email marketing best practices as a starting point, take a moment to review your current email marketing campaign or start thinking about how email marketing can help you reach your audience and add value to your business. business.