5 Simple Principles for Your Email Marketing
As the popularity of email marketing has grown, email inboxes have become increasingly cluttered, making it more difficult than ever to grab the attention of consumers. As a result, your email marketing should follow the 5 simple principles listed below to give your messages the best chance of getting read and acted on by busy consumers, and to allow you to make sure your list contains valid email addresses so it can reach its full potential.
1. Put your best foot forward. Your subject line can make or break your campaign. If it doesn’t pique the interest of your contacts, it only takes a second for them to hit the delete button. Keep it snappy and leave your prospects wanting more – a desire that can only be satisfied by opening your email.
2. Keep your text short but sweet. In this day and age consumers, for the most part, don’t have the time or inclination to read lengthy emails. Get to the point quickly and keep your paragraphs concise and your language pithy. If you have more detailed information that you’d like to impart to your contacts, offer them a link to your website, or to download a white paper. This allows you to get your point across without losing your audience, while offering more detailed information to those who want it.
3. Incentivize your audience. Nothing motivates consumers like getting a good deal or a bonus of some sort. Even if the incentives you provide aren’t tremendously significant in terms of savings, just the fact that you are offering them is likely to improve the results of your email marketing efforts.
4. Keep your list clean. Designing great emails is one part of the email marketing process, but if your list is weighed down by a bunch of bad email addresses and inactive contacts, it can defeat your efforts to maximize the results of your campaigns. Make sure that you are checking your email software bounce-back reports on a regular basis so that you can check email address validity and remove bad addresses. It is also highly recommended that you clean your email address lists with a bulk email list verification tool (like ListWise), before you send your campaign.
5. Reach out to inactives. In addition to getting rid of bad emails, dealing with inactives is another important element of getting the most out of your list. An excessive number of inactive contacts on your list can reduce your open rates and cause you to spend resources fruitlessly. Send reactivation emails to entice your inactives to become active again, and if they don’t respond remove them from the list.This combined with the use of email list scrubbing services (again, like ListWise) should keep your list full of contacts that are ready and able to act on your email marketing messages.