Today, companies have many more outlets to reach potential customers. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, social media, blogs, websites, and mobile devices are some of the many ways companies use. Email marketing is nothing new, but when done correctly, your business can skyrocket.
Your goal for mounting a successful email marketing is to build on your existing customers’ trust. Here are 2 ways to accomplish that:
- Don’t send them sales oriented emails all the time. Instead send them helpful information and advice. Promotion should be carried on in small doses, with a maximum of 10% sales orientation and 90% helpful information. The last thing you want them to do is unsubscribe.
- Speaking of unsubscribing, please remember to give them that option. Refusing to add an easy-to-find “unsubscribe” link makes the customer feel trapped. And, your email may be blocked because of it.
The main ingredient is the email list.
There are ways to gather email addresses to create your email list, but you must get permission from them to include their email on your list. Their permission comes from enticing them with a samples, free coupons, discounts, training modules and eBooks. You can casually place this information in a box asking for their name and email address. You should also place a privacy policy link underneath the box with the signup button. That’s all you need.
Place your “Subscribe” information on your blog, social media, website, business card, landing page, confirmation/thank you page or as a QR code. Once they sign up. the information is part of the list.
The next step is design.
- Keep the design simple and elegant.
- Keep it looking presentable, even on mobile devices.
- Fonts should be easy to read
- The message should be easy to understand.
- Quality images make email designs stand out, but make sure they’re small-ish so they don’t take too long to load.
- Your color scheme should go with your fonts and images.
- It’s a good idea to use your existing company colors in the email.
- Finally, make each email personal, since one subscription template won’t fit every customer.
The last one is time commitment.
How often will you email your customers? It should be a maximum of once each week, though once every two weeks or once a month is even better since you won’t be flooding their inbox.
- Be sure to leave enough time between emails for them to let your information soak in before the next one arrives.
- Be sure to allow them time to respond if your email requires a response.
- Keep up this pattern and loyal customers will come to expect this. Don’t overdo it. Sending emails too frequently will drive people away.
Effective and inexpensive, email marketing is the easiest and fastest way to send information to current customers and develop new ones. Feel free to contact us for more information.
If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to check out these others:
Email Marketing: How to Keep Your Messages Out of Your Customer’s Spam Box
Why Should You Care About Starting A Blog?
Combining Blogging and Social Media into a Truly Effective Strategy
5 Ways You Can Benefit By Using LinkedIn
How To Amp Up Your Visibility With Facebook
This article is published by Will Sherwood | The Sherwood Group |Website Design | Graphic Design | Marketing Communications: The Sherwood Group has over 30 years of experience working with all sorts of companies, small and large. Our clients range from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 firms, in nearly every business sector, from across the street to around the world (and yes, even Europe, China, and South America). Our goal is to create advertising, graphic design, website design, and marketing communication that still looks fresh and relevant 10-15 years later. Our mission is to stir your imagination and leave your competition shaken and wondering, Now what do we do?” We are located in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Do you need help growing your business? Click here to check out the social media marketing and website design packages from The Sherwood Group. We’ll help you capture new business and achieve your goals.
“Like” us and/or “Follow” us at these social media sites and we’ll return the favor:
Please comment. We’d like to know if you found this article informative or helpful?
Your logo gives an important first impression, but it shouldn’t stop there. Every part of your visual system needs to be branded.
Our creative solutions have doubled and tripled the business volume of many of our long-term graphic and web design clients.
When you hire us it isn't just to create a beautiful website. We’re here to help you accomplish your specific goals online.
Tel: 661-904-9977
wills (at) thesherwoodgroup.com
5801 Oyster Catcher Dr., #1014
14 Comments:
By Doug Millhoff 23 Apr 2014
I won’t speak for others, but I rarely respond well to unsolicited e-mail spam. Especially random, untargeted crap.
Clueless job recruiters spamming me with insurance clerk positions, fake Rolex watches, fake Viagra, get-rich-quick scams, Horny Dating Sites, etc…
The question here, is how is your email marketing NOT spam??
By Mike Stevens 23 Apr 2014
Nice article. Emailing often doesn’t provide immediate results, but as you mention, it helps build relationships, which produce both sales and referrals. Thanks for the info.
By Billy Chapnick 23 Apr 2014
Will, I would add one last very critical element…. metrics and analytics. Setting up the eBlast correctly so that you can receive meaningful data is essential, specifically track your ‘call-to-action’.
Closely tracking the results of each campaign gives you direction on the effectiveness of your communication. I look at open rates, unique opens, unsubscribes, clicks rates and bounce rates to tell me if the eBlast was successful. Also, it is important to take a look at how much traffic went to social media and to your website from the content of the eBlast as well.
Hint: if you’re seeing a lot of unsubscribes and low click-through rates…. your content is probably not relevant to your audience.
By Robert Henslee 23 Apr 2014
Hi Will:
Will we do much with on-line campaigns. The latest trend is how Google’s new spam logic is affecting our clients. I wrote this article about the challenge. Enjoy you can learn allot about this here http://www.coachingbysubjectexperts.com/fix-my-opt-in-rates/
By Smeet Shah 23 Apr 2014
Definitely, great find! In India it’s the most trending form of marketing.
By Ian Spencer 23 Apr 2014
At the risk of an accusation of self promotion I will say up front that I do quite a lot of email marketing for clients. The stats on it say that it is still not just good value but the best value electronic direct communication. (I am searching for the 2013 survey done in US and Europe with the numbers and will post later)
I also have a lot of opt ins with both B2B and B2C marketers to keep in touch with the market. The good marketers in both areas are still doing a lot of email.
Good email is not simple like writing this post. Lots of corporates think they can design and run good email campaigns in house and end up having a negative impact on their brand as David outlines above. Just getting the HTML to work properly in about 40 email clients is a technical task in itself.
I have an Inbox folder called bad emails. I see the senders of these emails as potential customers and email them back.
The biggest threat to email in the future is Millenials and to a lesser extent gen Y. Both these groups seem to be much less inclined to look at their emails even though they have email accounts.
By Rebecca 23 Apr 2014
I would have to agree with the last statement of not sending more than one email a week, some people sign up to quite a few different things and have a lot of emails coming into their inbox already and if you are sending a lot of emails then it’s going to get annoying.
My suggestion is to make sure it’s not a long email, a paragraph or two at the most anything more than that most people will lose interest, although you can create more than one email list, so that way you can have a list with people in it who prefer the long emails and a list of people who prefer short to the point emails.
By Claudia Dieterle 24 Apr 2014
Yes, I think email marketing is still useful. The 2 most important points are a good headline and a personal form of address.
By Vinay 24 Apr 2014
Exactly, Mr. Sherwood. The important words here would be “when done correctly.”
Good article.
By Brad Miller 01 May 2014
All the spam gives email marketing a bad reputation. Email marketing works and it’s a great, modern tool that every company needs to use.
I don’t like telemarketing calls, junk mail, billboards, ads in my Facebook, or spam emails…But I have responded to all of them at one time or another.
I have clients the don’t want to be part of the problem. I tell them that if they send someone an email and get a client, they are providing something useful to the customer. That’s a good thing. It’s easy to unsubscribe.
By the way…I called my webhost and had them filter my email before I get it and that amost eliminated all of my spam!
By Curt Franke 01 May 2014
Although you alluded to it, I would add that it is [almost] always beneficial to create a subset of your contact database based on segmentation and targeting so that your email content is both meaningful and relevant to that group. Batch and blast is [almost] never a good idea.
By Buddy Hannon 01 May 2014
It’s all about the list. When you have a list of people that you have grown of people that you have interacted with and they have a good opinion of you, well then you are Golden. To our list we have an open rate of over 50%, with the occasional unsubscribe and a fairly good click though rate. We do In person and interactive on-line training and 25% of a class that starts on Monday came from one of my email campaigns.
Like we both said, it’s all about the list. If the list knows and trusts you, you can not lose.
By Amanda 10 May 2014
It will never be a waste of time and here is why
1. Its greener and cheaper than direct marketing
2. It has very measurable data for each campaign you send
3. You will get an open rate of approximately 20% compared to 1-2% that direct mail gives you
4.Checking emails is the first thing people do in the morning, and on average 72% will check their emails a minimum of 6 times a day.
5. Your data base is constantly growing, it will start out the size of your contact list and will grow as people sign up or your add them.
6. It is responsive so can be viewed on all mobile devices even if you website is not and can be totally branded for your business.
These are just a few reasons, feel free to read more here:
http://www.the-soap-box.com/index.php/emailers
By ปั้มไลค์ 05 Jun 2020
Like!! Really appreciate you sharing this blog post.Really thank you! Keep writing.