Email Marketing Strategies

Email marketing campaign is a very important component of a profitable online business. Email marketing campaign can include newsletters, special promotions, articles related to your offer, and recent news about your business.

Email is one of the most inexpensive and effective tools for online marketing. People usually check their emails every day, increasing the chances that your message will be seen and read. In order to succeed in email marketing, you need to learn how to write effective email that captures reader’s attention, doesn’t appear like spam, and turns readers into customers.

What is Email Marketing?

Effective email marketing can give you a lot of benefits. Your online marketing cannot reach its optimum without incorporating email into your campaign. Here are some of the benefits of email marketing:

Building a list: One of the main benefits of email marketing is to build a large list of prospects and customers. Having a list of thousands of subscribers allow you to send your message to a lot of people instantly.

It is important for you to have an opt-in list on your website for your visitors to subscribe. You’ll need to provide an incentive to create a sense of urgency for people to want to subscribe to your list. Your incentive can be an article, a free newsletter, discount coupon, or any special offer.

Building relationships: Email is a perfect tool you can use to build a long-term relationship with your potential and existing customers. In order to build relationships, you should send emails that don’t involve direct promotion of your products or services. Instead, provide valuable information related to the goal of your subscribers.
Sending newsletters: You can send out weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly free newsletters to your subscribers providing valuable and interesting information, tips, new product announcement, and so on to stay in contact and build relationships.
Special subscription newsletters: If you are an expert in certain field and willing to share extremely valuable information, you can charge subscription fees. For example, giving stock market investment advice on a monthly basis. You can send 2-3 back issues for free to show the value of your information before asking for one year subscription to your newsletter.
Increasing sales: Some visitors may not buy your product the first time they visit your site, and they may never come back. If you capture their email, send them some type of free report or free monthly newsletter, you will have the opportunity to get them to come back and buy the product or service you’re offering on your website. In general, the more email you capture, the better chance you will have to market your product or service.
Repeating sales: Email marketing gives you the opportunity to offer backend products to your exciting customers. Advertising emails are designed to sell by providing special offers, discount coupons along with product information, and powerful calls to action. By having permission from your customer to send them emails, you can keep offering related products.
Link building: Email can be used for your link building strategy. You can send email to site owners relevant to yours requesting a link to your site. You can have great success if you do it correctly.
Getting feedback: In order to improve your business, you’ll need to ask customers for feedback on the product or service they purchased. By sending out questions about what they like and how to improve your product, and to provide a review, you’ll have the chance to improve your business.

Email Marketing Tools

You will need the right tool for your email marketing to take care of distribution of your emails and to have a perfect analysis of the results. Never use Microsoft Outlook or regular email account to send commercial emails. Most email providers flag commercial emails sent to hundreds of recipients as spam and block such emails.

You will need a good auto responder to handle requests to subscribe or unsubscribe automatically for you. You should be able to write and prepare emails in advance and set the dates you want them sent. Use reputable email broadcast system such as iContact, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, etc.

GetResponse is one of the easiest email marketing tools with simple user interface and affordable price. It can help you create professional looking newsletters.

Constant Contact is better for handling several thousand contacts and to manage huge contact list, more suited for a large business. It has a number of templates and great social media integration, but not a simple user interface and more expensive than others on the market.

iContact has a simple user interface and great social media integration and reasonable monthly rate.

You’ll need to go through each site and search to find the best tool for your marketing plan. Check out to see how it integrates with other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that you currently use. Another point to consider while selecting email marketing tool is the social media integration, and to allow you in your email marketing anywhere from your mobile.

Use Proper Format

If you plan to have a successful email campaign, you need to use proper format that would appeal to your potential customers. Some of the formatting options that you can use are newsletters, articles, sales messages, feedbacks, surveys, etc.

Before you come up with the correct format, you need to:

Identify your target audience. Your potential customers will want to know how they will benefit from your offer. Try to fully understand the features and benefits of your product and then list every important feature and benefit from your prospect’s point of view.
Identify how you plan to market to your target market. Will it be through a series of articles? Sales message and coupon code with limited time offer? Asking for their feedbacks?
Create your marketing plan in advance. As you start with your email marketing, you may make some adjustments based on the responses you will receive and results of your A/B split testing. However, you will need to have a plan to start with.
Develop your website and your landing pages, and include an attractive opt-in form for your visitors to be encouraged to subscribe to your list. List the benefits people will receive if they subscribe. Include information that will encourage and excite visitors and make them curious about what they will receive by subscribing. Avoid hard selling your message, but make it a lost opportunity if they fail to act. You don’t want everyone to subscribe, but only the potential customers.

Design Techniques

In order to maximize the results from an email marketing campaign, you need to know some basic design techniques that will help get your message read.

Create an HTML email template that you plan to use. Include your company logo in the bottom. By using a template, your customers and subscribers immediately recognize your company, and that’s what you want to accomplish. If you don’t know how to create a template, use one from the email provider you have already decided to use for your email marketing.
Decide on the layout for your email. If you use your company logo as an image, beware that some email providers do not allow images to be seen, so add your company name or use your logo as a text. Don’t embed text in images. Use color to highlight important messages.
Avoid using a lot of graphic, including buttons and banners that ask users to click them. Use text links that redirect users to the information on your website.
Use a basic single font to ensure everyone can read your message. Remember that some email providers do not support special fonts. You also don’t want to confuse your readers with too many different fonts.
Use adequate white space around important text to make them stand out.
Use only one single topic for each email piece to make an impact and to avoid confusing your readers. Keep your message brief and simple. If you have a long message, use a text link to redirect your readers to your website where they can see the entire message.
Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Any dense and long paragraph may send your email to trash bin. Remember that most readers only scan email messages.
When you’re done with your email message, use the preview box in the template software to see what your readers will see when they preview your email before they open it.

Segment Your Audience

From the beginning of your email marketing, try to segment your audience into different categories in order to be able to manage all your emails. The categories might be prospects, customers, newsletter subscribers, type of prospect, product interest, etc.

If you have more than one target market, you also want to separate each one into a different category for your future follow-ups. Remember that while your subject line may speak to one group of people, it may not to another group. You should be able to sort your data based on fields of information, or create a totally separate lists.

Building Your Email List

Building a large list of subscribers is an important part of any successful email marketing. Avoid buying a list of email addresses because you run the risk of people not opening emails from an unknown sender’s name or even flag it as spam. In addition, many email marketing providers prohibit the use of purchased lists.

Your goal should be to build your list by including only customers and those who have given you permission by opting in or requesting to receive information from you.

Most people receive a lot of emails on a daily basis and reluctant to fill their inboxes with additional emails trying to sell them something. However, many people don’t mind receiving discounts or coupons if they first give you the permission.

In order to build your list, you have to come up with an incentive to encourage people to opt in to receive commercial emails, such as discounts and coupons, special offers, free newsletters, free gifts, free e-books, free valuable information, and so on.

You need to place an attractive signup form or a link to a subscribe page on every page of your website and in every email broadcast. Make sure to include “Unsubscribe” to every email you send to your customers and subscribers, and honor every request by removing people off your list. In fact, your email marketing provider should offer this feature to automatically remove those who want to be removed from your list.

Once your email list is set up, you want to start your email marketing campaigns after confirming every successful option to your list. Here are some ideas:

Providing additional information about the benefits waiting for subscribers to receive.
Discount coupon codes that can be redeemed online or offline if you’re marketing locally and have a physical place of business.
Free newsletters including valuable information with less than 20% dedicated to a sales message about your product or service you’re offering.
Sales promotion for a limited time period with an expiration data.
New product announcements.
Announcements about updates to your website.
Upcoming price increases.
Surveys and feedbacks.

You may come up with more, depending on your email marketing and type of your business.

Subject Line

Subject line is an important part of any email because it is the first thing your prospect or customer notices. If the recipient is not enticed to open an email based on the subject line, your email will be deleted instantly disregarding of how good the rest of your email is.

A good subject line is like a good headline of an ad or news story. It has to capture the recipient’s attention immediately and compel them to read your message. It must provide some type of incentive and arouse curiosity.

Most people spend less than 5 seconds to decide whether to open or delete a commercial email. That’s why the subject line is the most important part of your email, and without a good subject line, your entire campaign will be wasted.

Here are some basic tips to keep in mind:

Keep your subject line less than 17 characters because many people use their smartphones to check their emails. In general, the subject line should be less than 50 characters because many email systems truncate the subject line up to this number of characters.
Never use a misleading subject line to get people to open your email. You will lose your credibility and trust if you attempt to trick your subscribers.
Try to keep words and symbols associated with spam out of your emails. Avoid words like “free”, “promotion”, “sale”, discount”, “just for you”, “hottest deal ever!” and “$” signs. Doing so will cause many filters to block your email and send it to junk mail.
Do not use the same subject line over and over, but come up with something new and different.
Use good subject line that describes the most important benefit of the message, such as: “Exclusive Offer-Limited Time Only,” “20% Off All Items For 10 Days Only,” “No Shipping Cost Through December.”
Use powerful words, such as: “New” “Discover” “How to” “Proven.”
Insert contact names to help build and continue relationship.
Modify the subject line into a question which speaks directly to your subscribers, such as: “John: Are you happy with your current job?”

When you send out emails, make sure to address it to the owner of the email address. Also, try to personalize your emails to make your customers feel special. Most email marketing software provides the option to automatically include the names from the database into a default header. In addition, most software allows A/B split testing to try various subject lines to determine which one works best.

Writing the First Line in Your Email

After the subject line, your first line is extremely important to the success of your email marketing. It is also the toughest part of email marketing. Your readers will decide whether to read the rest of email based on the first sentence.

In order to increase the chance for your email to be read, start the email with a personalized greeting by referring to the subscriber or your customer by his or her first name. Your customer will feel that the content is being written exclusively for him or her.

Avoid starting your email with a generic greeting such as “Dear Sir,” “Dear Madam,” or “Hi.” You want to make your recipient feel special and build relationship. So try to insert contact names in the beginning of your email to make your readers feel you are speaking directly to them. After greeting, your first line should start with the best offer right away. You must communicate directly, clearly and effectively to make the connection.

When you start your email marketing you have customers and prospects waiting for you to offer solutions to their problems and their needs. You must fully understand your target market in order to be able to communicate with them effectively.

You need to know why they have purchased a certain product from you and why they have volunteered to subscribe to your list. They are your best asset and a reason for you to be in business. Try hard to treat them with respect and give the best service you can possibly give.

You have created a subject line, so continue with that without boring them. The first line of your email can also be a question to increase their curiosity to want to know more. When you begin your first line with a question, make sure that you have a solution.

Write Good Content

For your email marketing to be profitable you need to make your message more personal and address your customer by their names. Before your write your content, put yourself in your customer’s shoes by asking yourself what would appeal to your customers. And then build your message around the needs and interests of your customers.

Try to write about topics you are knowledgeable or willing to research thoroughly to become expert. Do not give advice that you’re not certain. You have to write quality content to keep your readers interested. Avoid making your message too generic and boring. Avoid too many exclamation marks. Try to make your message clear and direct.

Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Use bold, italic, numbers and bullets. Don’t underline a text message except for links. People don’t like long and dense text emails, but usually scan your content to see the important points that benefits them.

Never use all capital letters. Don’t tag your emails as “high priority” or “urgent” when they are not. Be sure to check the spelling to make sure everything is correct. Don’t rely on your computer’s spell-checker because they’re not 100% reliable.

Call to Action

Your email message is incomplete without compelling call to action. There must be a purpose for your email marketing. In order to make your marketing profitable, you want your readers to take further action. It is your job to encourage them to do so.

Make your call to action noticeable in your email. Be direct and tell people what to do next, whom to contact, etc. Don’t use buttons or banners on your emails, but try to provide text links anywhere feasible within your content in bold font to make it noticeable. Remind them again at the end of your email.

If you want your readers to take immediate action, create a sense of urgency by mentioning the deadline, such as: “25% discount if you order by December 15.”

Time Your Email

Never attempt to bombard your customer’s email account with marketing offers. Advertising email more than once a week can be very annoying to most people.

Try to stick with a consistent schedule such as every other Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. Your subscribers will begin to look forward to receive your emails and that’s exactly what you want to accomplish. During peak sales period, you may want to send out two emails a week for a short period such as two weeks if you have a special offer with a deadline.

For additional articles written by John Stanford, see alliedpublishing.com/online-marketing. John Stanford is the author of Ultimate Guide to Successful Online Marketing published in 2019.