Email Marketing 101
When you’re in the beginning stages of planning your company’s marketing strategy, it’s important to include a variety of elements in order to reach a large target audience. Some of these elements include print and internet advertising, social media, and email marketing. Email marketing provides a convenient and inexpensive way to foster ongoing relationships with your client base. It should also be used as a tool to educate customers, announce specials, to maintain relationships, and attract potential new business. In order to be successful in email marketing, it’s important to understand the basics and properly utilize them.
Email marketing is not always an easy process. Without the proper knowledge, despite the best of intentions, your message can easily end up in the junk folder. Developing an e-newsletter strategy is just the first step. Next, compile your mailing list and choose the best e-newsletter service that works best for your needs. Finally, the most important part of the task is figuring out how to entice your subscribers to open or view your newsletter and keep them from opting out. Producing and sharing quality content is the basis for expanding your customer relationships with your audience which starts with your email subject line. The subject line is one of the most important essentials of your email because it’s what influences your recipient to actually open it. Your subject line should make an effective and thorough statement—you can be straight to the point and tell them exactly what they’re about to open, or come up with a catchy call-to-action.
Other components of your email such as your headline, personalization, images, and social media are just as important. Your headline is the next most important section of your email and it should clearly explain to your audience what you’re presenting. Adding a personal touch to your emails can also encourage your audience to want to keep subscribing, which can be as easy as just adding the recipient’s first and last name. Utilizing images in the body of your content can not only make your emails more visually appealing, but they also break up large bodies of text—it’s best to follow the 80/20 rule which consists of 80% text and 20% photos. Following this rule will also reduce the chance of your e-newsletter going into someone’s spam box. Finally, it is a good idea to include links to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or other social media platforms to open up all avenues of communication.
Implementing these basic fundamentals of email marketing will not only be beneficial to you, but your target audience as well and it can ultimately help grow your digital reputation. At McCauley Marketing Services, we help you develop email campaigns and create a stable email list and produce content that your audience needs while conveying your message efficiently. For more on the latest marketing tips and email marketing updates, follow McCauley Marketing Services on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter!