One of the most powerful features for any Internet marketing is Email Marketing. Used properly, it's a cost-effective push marketing channel that businesses like yours can use to reach new prospects and previous customers that have opted-in to receive communications from you. Here are 4 points I want to draw your attention to to help you become a better email marketer:
1) Keep Your Mailing Lists Clean
As an unfortunate aspect of the Internet, you will get people and automated spambots signing up for your email newsletters with fake or temporary email addresses. It's important to remove these from your email recipient lists on a regular basis. Your best protection is to ensure that you make use of manual verification strings when submitting requests. Repeatedly sending emails to invalid or expired addresses will result in ISPs flagging your legitimate email marketing efforts as spam. Using automated "unsubscribe" is a common feature of commercial email marketing systems that will reduce the likelihood of this after a email address bounces say 3 times.Thankfully, it's now easier than ever to keep your mailing lists clean with most commercial email marketing services such as iContact (learn more):
- Once you've sent out an email campaign you identify and remove all bounced emails from your mailing list with the tracking option for your campaign.
- Be sure that with your Email Newsletter sign-in boxes make use of a CAPTCHA field when you place them on web pages or templates to stop automated spambots from signing up with fake email addresses.
2) Let Your Recipients Use Their Browser Instead
When you send out your email campaigns, you are reaching out to a vast array of email clients out there with people using different versions of Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird along with webmail clients like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail too! Whilst it might be good practice to test on all the major clients to see how the images and layout of your email are presented try offering a facility to view the email within a browser. This ability will depend on the email email marketing system you are using and is not always a feature provided.
If you can include a hyperlink to this feature and when your recipients click on it, the email will be opened in a browser where you can be sure the images will download and the layout will be rendered as you intended therefore increasing your readability. If the web version is is located on yur own domain then this of course will also drive more traffic to your site as well as possibly making this email available to the search engines for viewing by a wider audience.
3) Let Your Recipients Tell Their Friends About You
Want a quick-win for expanding your email newsletter readership especially if you're sending some exclusive high-value content on a regular basis? Be sure to include some form of "Share with a Friend" type link.
Most commercial email marketing system will also track such sharing and enable you to capture such details for later follow up. This also can be an excellent means for identifying your raving fans.
4) Let Your Recipients Unsubscribe
Inevitably, people will want to unsubscribe from your email lists for whatever reason and it's important to provide them with this option otherwise they might just report you as SPAM instead which will red-flag you with their ISP.
Under Australian anti-spam act, you are required by law to provide an Unsubscribe feature. It does not have to be automated but this is certainly the only way to conduct yur subscription management.
Become Your Own Email Marketing Power User
With those 4 tips, I hope you've gained some insight into improving email campaign practices.
If you would like to know more abut how you can effectively develop yur own email marketing campaign please feel free to talk with us.
