How often do you communicate with your current customers and prospects? If you’re not regularly doing so, you’re missing out on big opportunities.
Social Media, SEO and Blogging have all come along and email marketing may seem out-dated to some, but it is still a powerful tool that should be central to your online strategy.
If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve put together a quick guide on creating successful email marketing campaigns…
- Have a flexible email marketing package
Before you get started, make sure you’ve got the right tools. Your email marketing system should be fully flexible, enabling you to brand email templates to your business’ requirements and keep contacts in a structured, easy to manage format. A great email marketing program will also include an analytics feature, showing you detailed results from your campaign, such as open, click and unsubscribe rates - Have a permission base list of email subscribers
Nobody likes spam, so make sure everyone you’re going to be emailing actually wants to be contacted. Don’t waste your time or money on purchasing data, these contacts haven’t opted into receive your emails so you’ll end up with high unsubscribe/ complaint rates and a lot of unhappy people. Invest your time and effort into naturally building a mailing list, a great method of doing this is to add a sign-up form to your website. - Have great content that individuals want to receive
Write about something that is relevant to your business, and that people will genuinely want to read about. Nobody is going to read huge blocks of text in emails, so keep it short and sweet, with links going back to your website for them to find out more if they’re interested. Find the right balance of images and text; too much of either will over-crowd your email and images can cause problems with spam filters, so plan your content carefully. Remember to include plenty of calls to action and your contact details, so readers have a clear idea of what they need to do next - Consistency is key
Decide how regular you want your email communications to be; once a month, quarterly, yearly? Set yourself a reasonable target date and make sure you stick to it. Recipients will then know when to expect your communications
If you’d like any help with your email marketing, then IRUN can provide you with a fully flexible CRM Email Marketing system and all of the tools needed to get you started