Best Practices for E-mail Marketing

Despite the rise of social media marketing, e-mail marketing is still going strong. The great advantage of email is that it’s personal and private: people are willing to share their Facebook and Twitter profiles with almost anyone, but they won’t give their email to strangers that easily.

Discover some of the best practices for effective email marketing.

•    Be friendly to be personal

Put aside the formal tone when creating messages for your e-mail marketing campaign. But try not to be annoyingly informal either. Find the right balance.

•    Include a plain text message

Not all email users choose to receive HTML messages. For your e-mail marketing efforts to be effective, make sure your emails make sense as plain text.

•    Avoid multiple exclamation marks in the subject line

Multiple exclamation marks can trigger spam filters.

•    Send marketing emails at the right time

There’s no recipe for this – it all depends on what industry you’re in as well as on your audience. Emails to consumers are usually sent between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening. For best results, experiment with the dates and intervals when you send emails and monitor response rates.

•    Make the subject line persuasive

A good subject line dramatically increases the effectiveness of your e-mail marketing. Craft every subject line with care. Look at things from your audience’s perspective. What subject line would make them want to read the email?

•    Don’t send emails to people who don’t want them

In other words, don’t spam people who haven’t signed up for your newsletter.

•    Dispatch emails at regular intervals

Don’t suddenly change the interval at which you send emails. Weekly newsletters are probably the most common, but biweekly ones work as well.

•    Think of the preview pane

Many people use email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird or Outlook that feature a preview pane. Optimize the design of your email newsletters so that the essential information is visible in the preview pane.

•    Make the unsubscribe option clearly visible

Many email newsletters feature either no unsubscribe option, or an unsubscribe option that’s hidden somewhere at the bottom of the message. Masking the unsubscribe option doesn’t really make for more effective email marketing. Quite on the contrary, it can damage the image of your business or website.

•    Insert the name of your company into the From Name field

Alternatively, you may use the name of a person from your company. What’s important is to keep the name consistent. A familiar form name increases the recipient’s chances of checking the email.

In the end, remember that effective email marketing is always personal. Don’t make your emails sound like advertising. Build your e-mail marketing campaign with this in mind and you’ll see promising results. A marketing or SEO company can provide email marketing or article writing services that help you convert more from the get go.