I hope you are using email marketing to reach out to your customers or fans. I personally love email marketing. You have someone who has visited your website and taken the time to submit their email address because they want you to send them emails about you or your product. If you have a email list but have not used it, or use it very rarely get off your butt and do something now! Here are 10 tips that will help you get your email list off and running.<\/p>\n
Ten tips to e-mail newsletter success<\/p>\n
1. Make it meaningful: Readers should get something from bothering to open your newsletter. It doesn’t have to be a lot \u2014 if they learn one new, useful thing, they’ve benefited. Discounts and sales are always enticing.<\/p>\n
2. Keep it short. People have limited time. The recipient needs to be able to get something valuable from your newsletter in less than a minute.<\/p>\n
3. Use a descriptive subject line: It’s not particularly exciting to just see “This month’s news” or “This month’s specials.” Instead, indicate what they’ll find right in the headline. “This month’s Special \u2014 50% off all Outdoor Furniture.” Studies show subject lines with fewer than 50 characters are best. Avoid subject lines that will get you blocked. Spam filters block subject lines with words like “free” or dollar signs or all caps.<\/p>\n
4. Send it regularly. Once a month or every two weeks is ideal. More than that is probably overkill, unless you’re providing real news.<\/p>\n
5. Maintain your branding. Make sure your company name is very visible. Use the same colors, fonts and taglines you use in the rest of your branding.<\/p>\n
6. Only send it to people who’ve signed up. This is called “Opt-In” and most e-mail newsletter services will send to your e-mail list only if people have signed up to receive it \u2014 or have given you their business card.<\/p>\n
7. Provide an “unsubscribe” option. Once again, this is required by most e-mail services \u2014 and it’s the law.<\/p>\n
8. ABSOLUTELY use an online e-mail newsletter service. There are a bunch of great, inexpensive services, such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response and Emma. It costs about one cent per person per mailing. There’s even a free service, Mail Chimp, if you’re sending to fewer than 500 recipients. Newsletter services provide templates or design services, making it easy to design your newsletter. They manage all technical aspects, so you don’t have to deal with software and continually clean up your mailing list, deleting “unsubscribes.” They’re amazing.<\/p>\n
9. Use Analytics. e-mail newsletter services generally provide a great deal of information about how well your newsletter is doing \u2013 who’s opening the newsletter, how many people are clicking on which links, and so on. Look at this info to learn what your readers respond to and keep experimenting to continually improve the effectiveness of your newsletter.<\/p>\n
10. Encourage sign-ups. Put sign-up links on every page of your website. Gather business cards for newsletter sign-ups at trade shows or networking events. Make sure all your customers are on your list. Let everyone know. It doesn’t take much, just a simple reminder, like “Sign up for my free business tips newsletter at www.PlanningShop.com.” See, that was easy!<\/p>\n