November 5, 2007
Is Your Email Marketing Making the Impact You Expected?
As with any marketing concept or technique, there are loads of
opinions about how to design an effective marketing campaign.
When developing a marketing strategy, considering various
techniques that have worked well for other people is certainly a
good thing to do.
However, your specific business, your target market and what you
are trying to accomplish through your marketing campaign will be
central to developing an effective marketing campaign for your
business.
Before you even consider sending out email marketing messages,
there are some tasks to be undertaken to make sure that your
marketing efforts aren’t wasted.
First of all, you absolutely have to know your target market and
its characteristics. This knowledge can be gained through market
research.
The demographics of your target audience, such as gender, age and
median income, will play a role in crafting your messages in a
manner that will appeal to the audience receiving them.
Learning the target audiences buying patterns can be helpful as
well. Are they impulse shoppers? Are they bargain shoppers or do
they value quality over price? Answering these questions will
help you to develop an appropriate copywriting strategy for your
marketing materials.
Another important factor in designing an email marketing campaign
is to obtain a list of email addresses for individuals in your
target market. Just any old list isn’t going to be effective.
You need an opt-in list of individuals who actually want to
receive information about the products or services that you are
promoting.
Sometimes you can buy a so-called opt-in list of email addresses
for people who have requested information that you may be
providing, but honestly, I don’t consider that to be an opt-in
list.
Rather I consider people who have provided their contact
information specifically requesting information from your company
to be opt-in candidates for receiving email promotions.
In my opinion, to build your own opt-in list you should offer
something of value, such as a newsletter or free reports to
website visitors.
When and only when they opt to receive such information, should
they be added to your opt-in list of subscribers who receive
email marketing messages from you.
Your messages should also contain an opt-out option where the
receivers of the message have the option to be removed from your
mailing list.
Otherwise, your messages may be considered to SPAM (unsolicited
email) which is not only annoying, but is also illegal now.
When you send SPAM, you also stand the risk of having your email
address or server blacklisted with internet service providers
which will effectively shut down the delivery of your email
messages.
When writing your email marketing messages there are some
important copywriting techniques that you can use to increase the
effectiveness of your campaign.
First, consider personalizing your messages by using the
recipients’ names and ensuring that the information they receive
is actually something they have indicated that they have an
interest in.
Be sure that your messages contain compelling benefits to the
reader along with a clear call to action that creates a sense of
urgency.
It is also important that the format of your email is able to be
read by all recipients. So, the format of the messages is
something to consider.
If you use plain text, it is a little more difficult to call
attention to specific portions of the message; however, most
anyone will be able to open and read the message if you send it
in plain text format.
If you use HTML format or even rich text, there will likely be
some recipients that are unable to open or read your email
messages.
Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope,
fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing
advice you’re getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing,
or a website owner who wants to make more money from your
website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your
internet business at http://BiznessTips.com
