Smart Business Email Marketing

Email marketing today is one of the primary ways businesses keep in touch with partners and customers. However, managing your email marketing can be time consuming and stressful. Trying to stay up to date with the constant changes in your email marketing list can be very daunting. Also, there are the challenges involved in creating and sending effective email messages. How do you make sure that people will read it? How do you get them to reply? How do you know how many recipients have replied? The good thing is that you don't have to do all this on your own. A cloud-based company that specializes in b2b communications can make your work a lot simpler — and your campaigns more effective.

Components of a successful email:

Subject line: Though it may seem like just a small part of your email marketing campaign, it is actually one of the most important ones. About 40% of the decision of a recipient to open an email depends on the subject and sending address. It won't do you much good if they do not open the email. Therefore, it is imperative to spend some time discussing the subject line and making sure that it is accurate and effective.

Call to Action: How compelling and interesting recipients find your call to action will determine the other 40% of reply to your marketing campaign. A call to action is an offer you make to the recipient to make them respond. It could be a technical document or an opportunity to sign up for a free webinar. Or it could be “Please email me at….” Or “Please contact me at…” or “Register for the event at….”

The best call to action in marketing via email is that which contains links in the email. This allows you to track the response to the email automatically and see how well your call to action is doing.

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Content: The images and text in your email should be useful and informative to recipients. Email marketing texts should be concise and well written. While recipients anticipate that an email newsletter should be fairly lengthy, they expect other types of email to get to the point as quickly as possible. If your email is very lengthy, the reader will just stop reading - perhaps before they get to the important information.

Visual appeal: Any images you include in your email may seem like a no-brainer, but they are important to make your email visually appealing. Comments on photos are one of the first things your subscribers will read in an email, so they contain a lot of call to action. You also want your emails to be well-organized, attractive, and visually appealing. You should be able to draft nice looking emails for your clients in either plain text or html - because some subscribers will only read emails in just one format. Good email marketing firms will have tools and templates to help you create attractive email messages.

Avoid Spam: If your emails are flagged as spam, they will not reach your recipient. Worse still, it could be a CAN-SPAM records violation. To avoid getting caught in a spam filter or being sent to a spam folder, make sure the title and subject line are accurate. Include a valid unsubscribe link. Certain words are more likely to trigger spam filters; you must know what they are so you can avoid them. Spam labels can harm the reputation of your business and the acceptance rate of campaigns in the future.

Features of a successful email marketing campaign:

You've created a fun, engaging, and visually effective email that you want to send to your email marketing list via your email marketing software. What now? You can take the time and effort to send it yourself. You can also hire a company to do it for you. Such companies greatly simplify the process. They will maintain your subscriber list, and delete unsubscribe requests and invalid addresses. They will provide easy-to-use templates that will help you create attractive emails. They will keep track of responses to your email campaign. They will also record recipients who opened emails. They can monitor your campaign results so you can have more effective email marketing campaign the next time.

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Subscriber management: If you always send emails to invalid addresses and you don't honor your unsubscribe requests, the deliverability of your emails and your reputation could be damaged. Your email marketing tool should automatically delete unsubscribed emails and invalid addresses - along with any contacts that should be blocked globally. But you also need email marketing software that examines the emails that bounce and finds out the reason for such. Sometimes technical issues can be addressed so that the email can be successfully resent.

Targeting recipients: If you send a reminder email, usually you will send it to everyone who subscribed to the first list. What if you could send it to the subscribers who didn't reply to the first email? This way you don't have to bother the people who have responded already! Or what if you could only send emails to subscribers who recently visited your website? Anyone would want an email marketing tool that can provide that level of targeting? By monitoring the behavior of your recipients and designing your email marketing campaign accordingly, your chances of success will be greatly increased.

Saving emails - Since you likely already have a list of email addresses, you'll need an email marketing tool that allows you to easily import your list into their service. The email marketing service should also have the ability to create a database with information about these addresses. They should provide simple ways for interested persons to add their email to your list of subscribers, for example by using an optin form on your website.

Reporting - Every campaign is an opportunity to learn more about your customer base. But if you don't collect the information you won't learn. Find an email marketing solution that will generates a detailed report for you. You need to know how many subscribers responded to the call to action in your email, how many people read your email, how many bounced back, how many unsubscribed, and if any were caught in the spam filter. You need reports that have the flexibility to show you data for days, weeks, months, years, etc. This information is invaluable in helping you plan your marketing strategy and mastering your next email marketing campaign.

Spam - You need a service that complies with all regulations of CAN-SPAM and adheres to best practices. Go for a service that tests all elements of your email (title, html markup, tags, links) for spam triggers. You need a service that can detect the likelihood of a spam flag and suggest necessary changes that need to be made. A good email marketing tool can also log the number of messages that have been held in spam filters and help you avoid that occurrence in the future.

Design: You need an email marketing software that will help you design effective and engaging messages. Look for one that has templates for newsletters and other types of email that you can customize for your business. If you need to design in another program, you need an email marketing tool that will allow you easily paste emails created in MS Frontpage, Word, or other html editors. Find a service that is intuitive, easy to use and offers WYSIWYG editor. So you know that whatever you see on the screen is exactly what your recipients will get.