Marketing with email has been around for some time now. And there are many ways with which you can make this direct channel work harder for you daily for both personal and marketing purposes. How have you been utilising it to its maximum potential?

It will take work and dedication to get this set up, but the rewards are plenty. Opportunities for stronger relationships and good business lay dormant and ready for the taking.

Checking your inbox and getting leads, great feedback, and heaps of social media love is always a treat…

Click to open big opportunities with email!

People can sign up in different places, and due to different reasons. There’s your steadfast website that they could have visited because of a referral, maybe a helpful post you shared had a prospect like you on Facebook, or it could even be that someone was in a ‘shopping’ stage and clicked on you from Google’s search results. How do you strengthen your presence with email?

Here are our Top Three Tips:

1. Plan how your email strategy should work to get (and get to!) customers. Design for success, and remember to test first with your seed addresses.

Where are your customers and how are they currently engaging with your small business? What action do you want them to take once they have opened the emails? The key is to make everything as smooth and hassle-free as possible for your customers.

If your customers are using phones or tablets and your emails are not optimized for these platforms you could be losing opt-ins and future engagement and business. Consider forms that should be easy to fill out, or images that aren’t that heavy that they are quick to load. Competition for attention is stiff, and while you should be happy that your customers are clicking on your emails, it is even more important that your email content and design works around what you would like your subscribers to do in the end (i.e. read a full blog post, click on an offer, download an ebook, and so on). In exchange for their precious time, you must first do tests so that you can guarantee that the experience is a rewarding and pleasant one.

Don’t know where to start? Check out The Anatomy of the Perfect Mobile Email by Litmus below and start testing!

2. Make sure your emails are concise and personalized…and don’t forget the links and post-purchase messages!

Seth Godin says email is “the most personal advertising medium in history,” and “If your email isn’t personal, it’s broken.” Seth Godin rocks our socks off.

If you’re doing an email marketing campaign right now, stop and check your list for a moment. Assess and make sure anything that you are sending out matches your customer profile groups. Nothing turns off customers more than generic, fill-in-the-blank emails that are left wanting for correct context. Obsess about your customers and only offer content that is relevant to them with working links to your pages. Promotional messages are fine, but would you like it if every email you opened was a pitch to a product or service? Blasting templates are okay, but best practices in email marketing demand that you show genuine concern, real respect, and true one-on-one communication.

Personalized recommendations are bonzer for sales conversion—rates can increase by 15-25%, and click-through rates by 25-35%. And automating a post-purchase message can re-engage customers while enhancing the brand experience, certainly making you more personable and increasing outreach for customer service (don’t forget to ask for valuable feeback!). So dump the Lazarus files, and tweak your scripts to fit each customer psychographic group.

You can get some DIY startup help with sites like Campaign Monitor and their free templates, which will get you running custom email templates (announcements, newsletters, blog previews) in minutes. Here’s a sample dashboard for an email newsletter.

3. Hey, let’s check again, because permission is important and sales could be underway…

Sometimes people get content that they don’t ask for. And that certainly doesn’t help with customer outreach, much less sales. It is important that you should always ask permission first before sending your customers email marketing messages.

NOTE; Make it easy for customers to unsubscribe, and make sure your content and links adhere to the CAN-SPAM Act. Remember that clear, easy-to-find unsubscribe links are good, even if it is a means to end your email marketing relationship. The harder it is to unsubscribe, the more chances are for users to flag your email as spam, which measures against your sender reputation with email providers.

Check out How Small Businesses Use Apps to Drive Email List Growth by Constant Contact for awesome ideas.

Once they have given you the green light, by all means send great content their way. Exclusive deals, membership perks, and sage business advice will keep them tuned in. While you can amplify with Social Media, chances are your customer will be more attentive to a personalized email offer rather than an offer in a barrage of updates.

Use email with great customer service for campaigns that won’t quit on you.

Have you any more tips that can enhance the effectiveness of email campaigns? Let us know in the comments below and share this post if you liked it! Stay tuned for the last installment of our Fundamentals for Web Marketing Series.

Ta muchly! 🙂

Ink splat,

INKABLE