An effective email marketing campaign can be a little difficult initially, but with some practice and with the right tools and techniques it gets to be very easy. And very effective. Here are some tips on how to create an effective email marketing campaign.
1. Autoresponder
You need special software to manage your email marketing campaigns. Known as an autoresponder, it provides an efficient way to gather, deliver, monitor and review your emails. This would be impossible to do yourself with a regular email program like Outlook, Gmail, etc.
2. Create an Effective Plan
Have a plan of action before sending out an email marketing campaign. Think about your niche, your offers and most importantly, the action that you want your readers to take. Test every email by sending it to yourself to check links, grammar, and spelling carefully. Don’t let your subscribers get errors, find them first. Don’t complicate your message by overwhelming readers with a bunch of different offers and topics in the same email.
3. Quality
Credibility is your most important resource in email marketing. If you’re an affiliate marketer, only promote only those products you believe in. Your subscribers will blame you if you recommend a product for them to buy and the product is a junk. Don’t just send continuous offers to your list. Send useful free information and other freebies too. The more value you provide to your subscribers, the more they will want to open your emails.
4. Subject Line
Almost one-third of email users open emails because of the subject line. Exciting subject lines boost open rates but can be risky if they don’t mirror what’s presented inside. Words like, “News,” “Limited Time Offer” and “Last Chance” in subject lines significantly increase open and click-through rates.
5. The Sales Funnel
It takes approximately 7 communications with a prospect before they make a buying decision. Email is the perfect way to send these communications. Your autoresponder software can send out a series of emails on auto-pilot when a prospect joins your list. This is your sales funnel. It’s simply a set of steps where you move a prospect through a sequence of emails or follow-up and your prospect decide to buy from you.
The Right Content for Your Email Marketing
Email marketing may include sending email advertisements to your email list, publishing and distributing an e-newsletter and sending informative emails with a soft sell approach to encourage recipients to make a purchase or visit your website.
These emails may be the first impression potential customers are receiving for your products and services. Superior content will give the potential customers a good first impression which may make them more likely to purchase your products or services.
You may be a decent writer or you may have a staff member who you think can do a good job creating the content for your email marketing but unless you or your staff member is a professional writer by trade, the quality of the work will likely not be of the same quality as a professional can produce.
This can be very damaging especially if your competitors are hiring writers to create their content. Your emails will likely not be viewed as favorably as the emails written by professionals.
The content you decide to include in your email marketing efforts is largely a matter of personal preference but there are some methods which have traditionally been more successful than others.
The type of content which may be effective often includes informative articles, short useful tips, links to relevant websites, advertising for complementary products and even some subtle forms of advertising which are meant to persuade the recipients of the email to either make a purchase or visit your website.
Full-length insightful articles which are likely to be of interest to the members of your email distribution list are an excellent idea for your email marketing campaign.
These articles are a good idea because they will likely contain information which the recipients of your email will appreciate. Additionally, these articles give you the opportunity to include information about your products or services in the copy of the email.
This can be a subtle form of advertising when it encourages the recipients to purchase a product or service or visit the website without actually asking the recipient to do so.
Short product reviews can also be very useful and helpful when you include them in your email marketing campaign. These reviews can help to attract a great deal of attention especially when the reviews focus on the products you offer and provide favorable reviews for these products.
This type of information can either be subjective in nature or can remain objective by simply specifying the features of the products and offering other concrete pieces of information as opposed to opinions of the products.
Advertising is often a quite important part of an email marketing campaign. This advertising may either be direct or indirect in nature. Direct advertising may include banner ads or other graphical advertisements which encourage website visitors to click through the link to reach either your website or a sponsor’s website.
Indirect advertising may apply to content in the copy of featured articles which subtly encourage visitors to make a purchase or visit your website. The indirect marketing in an email marketing campaign is usually supporting the products or services you offer while direct marketing will likely promote products and services offered by sponsors who paid to receive advertising space on the email.
Once you have sent out your first batch of emails, you can take some time to evaluate the effectiveness of the first email before you send out the second batch. This will be useful because if you determine the first batch was not very successful you can solicit feedback and make changes to the second email before sending it out. If the second email is more successful than the first, you can conclude the changes you made were beneficial.