With all the buzz about social media, it’s easy to ignore email in your online marketing mix. Is it worth spending your time writing an e-newsletter? Or should we just spend our time updating Twitter and Facebook?
The answer – email marketing is alive and well, and like so many things in online marketing it works even better when combined with social media. A recent survey of 500 million emails found a threefold improvement in click throughs when social media sharing links were included in email newsletters.
So we thought we would share a few tips for successful email marketing.
Be focused
It’s very tempting, as it’s so cheap and easy, to send to everyone on your mailing list. But don’t! Segregate your mailing list to those for whom it’s most relevant, and write in a way that will appeal to them rather than generically. Not only will this improve response but it will also decrease the risk of “overload” by recipients receiving way too many emails from you, many of which they find completely irrelevant, causing them to add you to their spam list.
Have clear calls to action
What are you wanting to achieve from your email campaign? Make sure that the email you’re sending makes the response you’re looking for easy to achieve.
Work alongside your social media
Writing an article in your newsletter, make sure that your recipients can comment on your blog or Facebook discussions. Can they share the article from your newsletter with friends on their social network, do you always feature buttons to allow recipients to become fans or followers? Considering all of these things when putting together your email will improve the success of both your email and your social media campaign.
Build relationships and prove expertise, don’t just sell
Don’t just use your email to hard sell your latest product, email is great for building relationship and especially for proving expertise. Providing great content not only proves your expertise in your industry, but also increases the chance of your email being forwarded on and kept for future reference.
Test, test, test
If checking your website across different browsers causes you headaches, it’s nothing to checking the appearance of your email newsletter, especially since Office 2007. Check out the email standards project website for more information. So make sure you check your email’s appearance in as many viewing platforms as possible including web based email. Also, as with any marketing, test different subject lines and content, both to reduce the risk of being spam blocked and improve open rates.
I hope these tips have reignited your enthusiasm for email marketing. If you need help getting an email marketing campaign off the ground, or to improve the performance of what you’re doing now, give us a call.