Marketing Talk - Email Marketing

Is email marketing dead?

Or do you just have to know how to do it right?

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.

Email Basics


A few basic things you should know about email:

•    One of the best things you can do for your professional image is to install a Signature that automatically appears at the bottom of each message that you send.  It can be text or graphics, but ideally it should be colorful, noticeable, and contain useful information – your name, your business name, and all contact information including website address and social media links.  You might need a geek to help you with this one.

•    The “From” field in your messages should not be blank, or contain incomprehensible jibberish, or display your email address.  It should display your name.  If this is not currently the case, then change the settings in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) to accomplish this.  Get a geek to help you, if necessary.

•    After you’ve sent an email, there’s no way to recall it.  The damage is done.

•    Email messages are capable of doing a lot of damage.  Don’t type anything into a message that you wouldn’t want the whole world to know.  That message is going to archived somewhere for approximately forever.

•    Be very sure what you want to do before you choose Reply or Reply All.  If you get a message that’s obviously addressed to multiple persons, and you wish to send a reply to the sender only, don’t choose Reply All, because that will send your message to all recipients.  Which can annoy a lot of people and make you look dumb.

•    Don’t mark an email as Urgent unless it really is, in which case you might want to just call the person.

•    Make email messages short.  Say exactly what you need to say, then stop.  People don’t have much time these days, they’re very impatient, and they get annoyed easily.  Be brief.  Be concise.