Social media may be king these days, but that doesn’t mean that business email marketing is outdated or ineffective. On the contrary, when handled correctly, email marketing is still a very valid and relevant way to get yourself noticed by your customers. In fact, as of the summer of 2013, business marketing related email volume had reached an all-time high. So, how do you get a slice of this very successful pie?
Begin with your hosting company. In order to achieve the basics of email marketing success, you need to make sure that your emails are being routed to their destinations. This means that you need a host who offers business email solutions, as they’re the hosts that can handle the large email server traffic that a company like yours might generate.
Now you need a decent emailing list. Think quality over quantity. Don’t purchase a list of 5,000 when less than 10 percent of them will bother to open your email. Start with the contacts you have, and make it a goal to get more than 25 percent of them to open your email. Engaging headlines and promises of exclusive deals and coupons should be no-brainers – these are the things that will interest your recipients.
When crafting content, once again focus on quality. Don’t stuff an email newsletter with paragraphs worth of content and an entire bullet list worth of links, because next to no one is going to scroll through all of that. Instead, use large, bold fonts to highlight important tidbits, use real photos instead of stock pictures, and get right to the point with call to action terminology.
Pick a routine with your email and stick with it. Weekly email newsletters are a good frequency to set up, but before you commit to emailing your customers once per week, make sure you have enough ongoing and interesting content to share with them on a weekly basis.
Last but not least, make your email newsletters shareable right from the email client! Use share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Pinterest. You’d be surprised at the number of email newsletter readers who will readily share or pin content if the option is made available to them.
