Don’t be fooled by people who say email marketing is dead! Email Marketing has been around for years and whatever the speculations by online markets that social media is the new path to take, email marketing still achieves superior results when compared to most other forms of marketing (including social media)
But you cannot expect your Email Marketing Campaigns to just work, you cannot just sit down one fine morning and decide to send a blast email out to your list and expecting it to achieve your goal (sales, more opt-in).
Unless you do it properly, you might just frustrate your readers and burn your list.
Here are some key ingredients that separate a successful campaign from an unsuccessful one:
Ingredient #1: Plan your Email Marketing Campaign
A successful campaign needs to be planned well in advance, you need to decide on a few key things:
- Why are you sending this email?
- What actions (if any) you want your readers to take?
- Who you will be targeting the email to?
Answering some of this key questions will help you plan the content of your email and provide relevant information to the right people.
Ingredient #2: KNOW why you are writing the email… What is in it for the reader? What is in it for you… what do you want the reader to do?
Why are you writing a particular email… Is it to inform the customer of a new product… is to inform them of a promotion you are running?
Is there something you want the customer to do… maybe click on a link… or call you… or download a file?
If you want your customers or prospects to do something then ask them to do it… they can’t read your mind! (You’d be surprised what a difference in conversion rates this simple tip will make)
Ingredient #3: Segment Your Customers and Prospects (or you could end up losing sales)
Not everyone in your list of customers and prospects are interested in everything you sell. Try and group them into different segments… and then send different emails based on the needs of each group.
Outlook has a very powerful feature called Categories that you can use to segment your contacts. Unfortunately it is not as easy as it could be to do email merges with this!
Ingredient #4: Write your Emails in a way that gets into their Inbox (and not Junk Emails) folder.
As much as possible, try to avoid the use of words such as “Free” in your Subject line. Try to keep your email subject simple yet informative.
We often get asked by prospective customers if our Email Merge for Outlook can guarantee that their emails end up in Inboxes instead of Junk Mail folders.
Email Merge does many things to improve your chances of staying out of SPAM folders but guess what… if your email is basically spam then chances are it will be blocked.
Are there tools available for Email Marketing?
Yes, there are online email marketing services that you can use but these generally incur monthly fees and are more applicable if you have larger lists.
If you have a small list and you would like to do your email marketing directly from Outlook, then you may want to look at Email Merge PRO for Outlook.
EmailMerge Pro lets you send out your emails directly from Outlook, it can personalize each email and it can even maintain different marketing lists for you (making it easy to segment your list).
Do you have your own special ingredients for a effective email marketing campaign? Share it with us and our readers by leaving a comment below.
