Three Tips for Easier Email Marketing
By Stuart Ayling, Solutions Found                                                                   

Email marketing has a perception of being quick and easy. Just cobble together some words. Whack it into an email… and send. Right?

If you have experience using email as a marketing tool you’ll know the reality is much less glamorous.

However, there are some easy things you can do to make progress with developing your email marketing program. The following three tips are from one of our featured resources, a recent book called Email Marketing: an hour a day by Jeanniey Mullen (founder of the Email Experience Council).

Buy the book from our Tools page

And to help you with creating emails using HTML email templates we have provided our HTML How-To Guide covering the basics of how to use HTML commands to manipulate text and create the visual result you want.

Download the free HTML guide here (PDF 150KB)

Tip#1 – Always be asking for email addresses.

This may sound obvious, but it is forever being overlooked. Don’t be scared about asking your customers. They wont mind if you do. Always have an email opt-in box on all your customer detail forms, order pages, and web pages.

Tip #2 – Current affairs can give you headlines.

We always advocate creating a strategy for your email marketing communications. Part of that strategy can be to react to current events, news, industry developments, survey results and new data. Look at current affairs from the perspective of your customers - what impact will it have? Then communicate to them about that. Share your insights.

Tip #3 – Focus on click-to-open rates.

The click-to-open rate is the percentage of readers who actually open your email and click on a link (any link). The current benchmark is that results under 25% are poor, and indicate you really need to do some work to improve readership. Calculate the click-to-open rate by taking your total number of ‘opens’ and dividing it by the number of people who clicked. If you cant get that sort of data from your current email system, try the free trial of Constant Contact.



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