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Mon, Dec 19, 2011

Email Marketing Tips


Some marketing gurus are suggesting that email marketing is “old school” and no longer very effective.  Others maintain that it’s as effective as ever.  I’m not going to argue either position here (though I tend toward the latter one).  But if you’re going to do it at all, here are the raw basics:
•    Messages must only be sent to “opt-in” recipients (people who have signed up for your email list, or otherwise given explicit permission for you to market to them).
•    Messages should be short, not more than 200-300 words in the message body.  The “less is more” rule applies here.  The longer the message, the less the probability that most recipients will read all of it (or maybe any of it).
•    Messages should be frequent.  How frequent?   The correct frequency will depend on your audience and the nature of your business and your content, but mostly it will depend on the agreement you have with your subscribers.  If they know they’re signing up for daily messages, then daily is OK.  But don’t ask them to sign up for a weekly message then hit them with something every day — they won’t like that.  In any case, once a month (or more) is too seldom; you’ll lose continuity with your subscribers.
•    Minimize the number of images in your message.
•    Never put critical information inside an image.  Sometimes, for various reasons, images will not display to the recipient and your information will be lost.
•    Your messages should contain interesting and useful information (much like blog posts).  If your message content is 100% sales pitch, you’ll lose audience pretty quickly.  Use a website landing page for your “pitch”, with a link from your email message.