Email Marketing Tips
When it comes to digital marketing, email is a very important tool. It allows you to directly reach your customers in a way that’s cost-effective, timely and relevant – if you’re doing it right.
These tips and links will help you get – and stay – in your customers’ inboxes. Before you start, make sure you understand the basic email marketing terms.
1) Get a Robust Email Service Provider
Depending on the scale of your email marketing needs, you may need to think about upgrading to a specialized email service provider (ESP). Make sure you choose the right one for your business – services range from no-frills basic to targeted campaign planning.
2) Be CAN-SPAM Compliant
The CAN-SPAM Act is a law for the regulation of commercial email. If you break it you can be subject to class action lawsuits and fined up to $16 000 per email in violation.
For example, For the People lawyers are investigating social network giant LinkedIn for an email security breach; not even the largest companies are immune to email law. So make sure you’re operating legally.
3) Don’t Use SPAM words
The use of certain words and phrases in your emails will cause detection by your customers’ ESP SPAM filters. Most of these words are common sense – things like “4U,” “see for yourself,” and “act now” are all sure fire ways of landing in the junk mail folder.
4) Always Get Permission
Don’t buy email address lists. Most people hate unsolicited email and anything you send to someone who doesn’t want it increases your chances of being flagged as SPAM. Once you have a client’s email address, confirm they want to be on your mailing list, with a double opt-in. It may seem counter-productive, but again prevents SPAM flagging.
5) Apply for White List Acceptance
Ask clients to add you to their contact list or address book in the welcome email that you send them when they sign up. This prevents you ending up in their junk mail and means they’re sure to see your carefully planned marketing efforts.
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6) Make it Easy to Unsubscribe
This tip may come as a surprise– but most people will flag an email as SPAM rather than go through a complicated process to unsubscribe. You want to avoid getting tarred by the SPAM brush. If you set up customer expectations from your very first email (letting them know what they’ll be receiving and how often), you can reduce the chances of people unsubscribing.
7) Maintain Your Email List
Most email service providers penalize you if a lot of emails get returned undelivered. Remove bad email addresses to stop this from happening.
8) Use an Irresistible Subject Line
An accurate, relevant subject line is likely to pique your customers’ interest and encourage them to open your emails. This component is also included in the CAN-SPAM Act.
9) Use Plain Text or Simple HTML
Plain Text email can be opened and read easily. This is what you want from an email – save fancy HTML for your website – email should be all about getting people information quickly. Read five reasons you should create plain-text emails for more information.
10) Forget About Images
A lot of ESPs disable email images for privacy reasons, so including them is often a waste of time.
11) Keep It Brief
People scan online text, including emails. Split up your text with headings and bullets, it hooks the eye and makes your emails easier to read and more engaging.
12) Keep It Relevant
There are thousands of articles out there on writing useful web content; make sure to read them for useful tips. Ideally, you want your customers to find your emails indispensable. If you use the advice available to you, this will be far more likely.
13) Mobile Optimize
A study by digital marketing company Knotice found that in the second half of 2012, the percentage of emails opened on mobile devices soared to 27 percent. Mobile devices have considerably smaller screens, so creating narrow emails makes them easier to read.
14) Send a Test Email
If you’re not using an email marketing platform then it’s important to send a test email to make sure what you’re sending looks good in your customers’ inboxes. Set up test accounts on the major ESPs (Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and Yahoo) to catch any formatting errors or broken links before your email goes public.
15) Personalize
Personalizing emails increases customer engagement, as they’re more likely to read something that is relevant to them. Being able to do this depends on how you obtained their address in the first place. Some email marketing platforms make doing this simple, so again, consider using one.
16) Remember, an Email is an Email
An email is an email, which means it’s a brief overview of information, not the source of information itself. You don’t need to include a précis of your latest blog post in the body of your email, just let your customer know it’s there.
17) Make Click Through Easily
Email marketing allows customers to immediately click through to your website. Whatever you want your customer to do, keeping your links in the immediately viewable part of your email increases the chances of an impulsive response. Check out more tips on how to keep your customers clicking through your website.
18) One Call to Action
Ask people for one action per email, whether it’s clicking a link, purchasing a product, or providing details. Make the action time-limited when appropriate, it creates an ‘act-now’ sense of urgency.
19) Make Sure Your Link Looks Like a Link!
This tip is especially important to the above tip. If your customer can’t see where you want them to click, they won’t bother. Links should be underlined at the very least.
20) Spell It Out
Email is not the place for subtle marketing. You have a small space to tell your customer what you want them to do “click here” is perfectly acceptable in a marketing email.
21) Be Sparing
Don’t hammer your customers’ inboxes with useless emails. Quality rather than quantity is the key to maintaining your valuable position in their inbox. Annoy them and you can quickly be downgraded to junk.
22) Use a Working Address
Sending your emails from an address your customers can reply to makes communication simple. Using an unmanned inbox says that you do not want a two-way relationship with your customer, and that’s the last thing you want them to think.
23) Reply
If a customer gets in touch with you, it’s good practice to reply in a timely fashion. It makes them feel valued and increases your brand’s reputation. Also, make sure that your email includes things that make it easy for your customer to reach you – a prominent phone number for example.
24) Ask For Feedback
Ask for and use feedback. Let your customers tell you what you’re doing right and wrong and act accordingly.
25) Use Analytics
Compare the results that you’re achieving with the goals you set out to achieve. You can always improve!
Adria Saracino is a marketer and blogger. When not sifting through over 150 emails per day and going manic over the “M” mute button in Gmail, you can find her writing about style on her fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.
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Tracking the emails is one of the best ways to get more leads. I think every point you made is perfectly suited with AWeber! I use it, and I know it’s easy to subscribe and unsubscribe.
I never heard Can spam act, I think it’s really powerful law. I stumbled upon a post once about email marketing subject lines, it has included a large number of email lines which will make us look dumb and spammy!
We need to take care of our subscribers and we should provide easy to unsubscribe options. It’s better to provide a link before the sign up form saying why should you subscribe to the list…
BTW great post Adria!
Thanks Rahul!
I’ve heard great things about AWeber, but personally use Mail Chimp. What do you like about AWeber?
I find subject lines to be the hardest, as they can be tricky to get right but affect open rates significantly! What “recipe” have you found to be the best for subject lines?
Well Rahul, I haven’t started email marketing yet but I have read about it a lot and I have subscribed to more than 100 blogs. I want to ask one thing from you. Why there’s an option to unsubscribe below every email we receive?
There must not be unsubscribe option there! 😛
Email marketing is a great way to give your readers something extra than what’s on your blog, I highly recommend it! The unsubscribe feature needs to be there, however, so you don’t violate SPAM laws.
Well, Those are awesome tips, but let me know one thing. I’m planning to start with Mailchimp on my blog for first. I know Mailchimp isn’t for affiliate purpose. The question is will I be able to move to Aweber after some time without losing any subscriber?
What is Mailchimp?.Is It any kind of Plugin for wordpress & How should i use this.
You can check out mail chimp here 🙂 http://www.mailchimp.com
It’s a online software that allows you to create email lists and newsletters for free. I don’t think there is a WordPress plugin, but you can embed a sign up form on your blog. Good luck!
I prefer Emma for email marketing… better-looking than MailChimp or Constant Contact, easy to use, and the analytics are great.
Thanks for jumping in Kim! I never heard of this, I’m going to check it out!
You will LOVE them. In addition to having a great platform, their customer service is outstanding, provided by real people who genuinely care about your work. Best money I spend every month, and I use it for all my clients.
Awesome! Good customer service goes a long way with me, I can’t believe how many people don’t find this important!
Ehsan,
By switching over, you’re probably going to have to import the contacts you made on Mail Chimp into Aweber when you’re ready to switch, but I’m assuming it’s going to be relatively easy to do that. However, not sure you’d be able to transfer over old newsletters, you’ll probably have to start anew. Here’s an article from Corbett Barr on why he switched to AWeber from Mail Chimp, but I do still use Mail Chimp as I find it’s good for my needs right now:
Thanks for sharing Corbett’s article here. I knew it that is the reason I didn’t started from Mailchimp.
Thanks for the response Adria.
No problem!
How Should I Choose any Robust Email Service Provider Can You Help Me How should i Start Email Marketing
You can start by using Aweber for only $1 for first month, after that it’s $19, but if you still don’t have sustainable income online then I can recommend to use mailchimp or simply google feedburner.
hope this helps you
Great post Adria, I can recommend Aweber since it’s very easy to create beautiful forms in seconds.
Also after some campaigns you can track anything from opens clicks to links that are clicked.
It’s price is a bit too high, but if you know your plan with it, it can be the best ROI.
thanks for sharing
Hopefully that helps Anuj with getting started on Mail Chimp, I put a link to a great article on why a site owner switched to Aweber from Mail Chimp, but I still use Mail Chimp because I like it’s ease of use and the fact that it’s free. Hopefully that article helps you decide! James W seems to know a lot about Aweber, can you jump in with any other pros and cons between the two services? Do you have experience with Mail Chimp, James?
Sure, Mailchimp seems a bit harder to set up for many, but it has better solution for people that start, since it offers up to 2000 people on list for free. Aweber is easier to set up and start, just create form, paste the once in sidebar or into post and that’s it, but we can only have 500 subscribers monthly for price which is more expensive. But at the end if you start getting huge numbers of subscribers the prices on both services come to pretty much same, maybe a dollar up or down in difference.
Ah, so maybe it make sense for Anuj to start with Mail Chimp and get going with that until he gets enough subscribers to move over to AWeber if he wants to?
Free usually looks like it.
The natural and best way ever. 🙂 Simple and effective tips.
Thanks Ashwani!
well iam totally newbie regarding to marketing as i feel its bit difficult. but these are really helpful
Well if you have any questions, looks like you have a lot of marketers here 🙂
Hi Adria ,
I really enjoyed reading this article which is well explained in my viewpoint. I like #13 point. This is certainly by far the most smart and correct posts I’ve come across shortly concerning E-mail Marketing , with the stress on “Mobile Optimize” – Now i am sharing this to all my social connections.
Keep it up and Good luck.
Thanks Amrik, glad you enjoyed it! I find that people struggle with the concept of mobile, treating it just like a shrunken version of their website. However, user intent is very different when on a mobile, and a newsletter needs to reflect this just like a website. Good luck!
hiii Adria Saracino
very nice tips will help me a lot thnx for share
No problem, thanks for your kind words!
E mail marketing is a wonderful way to grab potential buyers from lists, when we send offers and awesome E mails. Al we do is to follow these steps to ensure people click and read our messages.
Agreed! Have any tricks of how you convert those readers into buyers?
Email marketing is very inexpensive way to get enough traffic to your blog and it is usually preferable. The tips which you have explained here are quite good and I really appreciate them.
Thanks for your kind words Rohit!
Nice info. I am making my 0wn email list. Hope i will get success