Email Marketing FAQ’s

Email marketing is a powerful way for businesses to reach customers directly. By sending information directly into each person’s inbox, you can be sure that your message will be seen. Even if the reader doesn’t open the email, they’ll still see your name and company each time you send an email, so you’re always communicating directly with your audience.

Recent statistics show that email reaches three times more people than Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s a significant difference. Social media marketing is wildly popular, and becoming even more so every day, but with social media sites such as Facebook if you were to make a post for your followers to see, Facebook would only reach a small portion of your users. If you have users opted into your email list everyone on that list will receive that message.

Although it may be tempting, resist the temptation to purchase an email list. Organic growth is the only way to get an email list that will be beneficial to your company. Email service providers won’t allow you to use purchased lists, and the people on those lists aren’t likely to be interested in your products or services since they didn’t opt-in for your specific list, so they’ll also be much more likely to mark your messages as spam.

To grow your email subscriber list, offer your audience an incentive in exchange for signing up. You can put this offer on your site, social media pages and landing pages to get people excited. Just get the word out, and leads will automatically qualify themselves by opting in.

Any type of content that will appeal to your target market and help to boost sales. This may be an eBook, white paper or video, as well as other items such as webinars or coupons.

For some businesses, a newsletter is the best way to communicate with customers. For others, another form of communication may work better. Newsletters usually feature several different pieces of content such as recent blog posts and current specials. But it’s perfectly fine to send an email featuring only one piece of content, or an individual marketing message that speaks directly to your audience’s needs. Experiment with different methods of communication to see what works best for you and your customers.

It’s important to send emails as frequently as possible without overwhelming your subscribers. The frequency with which you send out email campaigns is largely contingent on the niche you are targeting with your marketing efforts.

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this question, testing of different times and days can help you find the most effective time to send emails. As a general rule, weekends and mornings tend to be the best times to send emails, because many people are more likely to check their email then, but it is important to do your own testing and see what works best for your audience.

If you want your emails to be delivered, you need to avoid certain no-nos. For instance, spam filters might flag messages mentioning Viagra, or written in all caps. But the rules are more sophisticated than they used to be, so one or two mistakes probably won’t land you in the spam folder. The best way to avoid it is to write not like a salesperson, but like a friend – the tone of your emails, and even the vocabulary you use, will automatically be different.

A/B testing—also known as split testing—can help you determine which email design works best for your audience. There’s no one right answer, and even though some people swear by the gorgeous, eye-catching images of HTML emails, others maintain that simple text looks best in every email program and is never blocked like an image can be. Once again, it all depends on your particular audience and their preferences.

When writing an email, it is important to keep in mind that the average person spends only 20 seconds reading each message. Before you send your email, be sure that its most important information and links are located at the top of the message so they can be seen without having to scroll down.

The best advice we can give you when it comes to writing marketing emails is to keep in mind the following: The purpose of every email you write is to deepen your relationship with each individual subscriber. That means writing to them as if they were friends or at least real-life people, rather than sounding like a used car salesman.

If you have sufficient resources to write extra content for your subscribers, and if you are able to divide your niche into several different segments, then by all means, segmenting your email list can be a great way to personalize marketing messages.

The open rate and click-through rate are the two most important metrics for email marketing. If your emails aren’t getting opened, subscribers will never see your full marketing message. And if they’re opening them but not clicking through to your site, your emails aren’t converting.

To get subscribers to open your emails, craft a compelling subject line that draws them in. People will be more likely to open an email when they see it in their inbox if the subject line intrigues them.

When writing the subject line for an email, be sure to make it concise and accurate, but also catchy, so that readers are intrigued enough to open the message.

Remarkably, people are more likely to do something if you simply ask them to. By placing a call to action in your email and specifically asking subscribers to “click here” or “shop now,” you’ll see an increase in click-through rate.

The call to action should be clear and simple. It should be in the top portion of the email, for those who do not read all the way through, and again at the end for those who do. It should spell out exactly what you want subscribers to do, such as “Click here to download our report.”

When creating an email signature, be sure to keep subscribers informed of who they are receiving messages from. If your From line features a company name, be sure that it is clear which company you are communicating on behalf of.

Commercial email marketers must include a “unsubscribe” link in each message, as well as their physical address or P.O. Box, and honor any subscriber’s request to unsubscribe. A noncompliance penalty of up to $300 per recipient may be imposed by law enforcement agencies.

If you have the time, resources, and expertise to design your own marketing emails in-house, then by all means do so. But if you’d rather hand those tasks off to an experienced expert who will design and write them for you, then outsourcing is the way to go. If you’d like help with your email marketing efforts, we here at EDS would be happy to oblige! We can help you come up with an effective email marketing strategy, and then execute it for you so all you have to do is sit back and reap the benefits. Contact us today to get started!