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Email Still Sells-How to Rock Your Email Marketing

Email marketing is a fabulous approach to contact your target market and boost your sales and rate of profitability. In any case, you can’t create powerful email marketing methodologies if you do not have any idea about your target market, whether you are into free email marketing or not. To make sure you have made the most out of your email marketing, there are things you might want to have in mind to rock your email marketing plans and strategies right from the beginning.

In the first instance you need to think about email personas. An email persona is an acceptable image of who you are offering to. Coming up with an email persona means that you need to build certain elements such as:

  • Typical age of your client base
  • Aversions
  • Their hobbies
  • Careers/vocation
  • How & where they invest their extra time
  • The place they call home or live

This in turn has a way of making sure you are able to see clearly the kind of clients you are engaging with. In turn, it will help you to serve and attract more customers as you will have the capacity to speak to them clearly and precisely in all your email marketing processes.

To start gathering new subscribers and leads you ought to do a number of things.

Customize each Call-to-Action

In the event that your site has a website you ought to incorporate a customized call-to-action box at the base of every blog entry. Your call-to-action boxes ought to likewise be emphasized all over your site including the landing page,

Every call-to-action ought to be customized in contrast with the specific webpage they are being offered on. For instance, if the most recent blog entry is about preparing chocolate chip treats you could come up with a call to action such as “Need to make formulas that are significantly more delectable than this one? Subscribe to our email marketing rundown for much more heavenly formulas”. This level of consideration and thoughtfulness regarding every call to activity shows imagination and is more inclined to urge those reading it to make a move.

Use mini surveys

Small scale studies are an astounding approach to get more email addresses from your audience. You can ask certain inquiries through your site. For example you can ask them “how regularly do you read our blog entries?” You can then welcome new visitors and leads to subscribe to your email posts. If your blog entries are customized particularly to your readership, there is a high probability that individuals will subscribe.

Accomplice with others

An alternate extraordinary approach to enhance your email marketing mailing list is to cooperate with those with very delectable yet bigger crowds than your own. This can be an amazingly fruitful (and quick) approach to enlarge your audience base as it provides a unique chance to do so. This includes developing very strong relationships with other bloggers and in the process your symbiotic relationship will pay off.

Top Steps of Boosting an Email Marketing Strategy

As you might already know, email marketing is very powerful and very crucial in any area of digital marketing strategy. Consumers across the divide use emails daily, with over 90 percent of them using email every day at least once. If you go by this, a half of them will be easily influenced by emails and making that vital purchase will not be really hard.

However, it is not easy to say the same for social network sites as popular as they might seem. Taking an advantage of such a great opportunity is everything and very important to enhance every marketing strategy while fine-tuning it elaborately. To ensure all the right email marketing methods have been modified and perfected, there are a number of things you can to do unlock such free email marketing potentials.

The email address you are using is everything

Today you will find lots of businesses using no-reply kind of address to send emails perhaps to avoid receiving thousands of replies and weird emails in between. If you are to succeed in email marketing, use of a no-reply kind of address is something you should not even attempt. Firstly, such an address tells your customer their feedback or communication is not wanted and can also damage your own deliverability and reputation. No one really wants to hear from a company or individuals who are not ready to hear from them. Sending from real email addresses transforms email deliverability without a doubt.

Subject line very vital

A subject line is very important area of email marketing and can either make it or break it. The subject line is exactly what your reader sees first and if they hate what is before them the email will be deleted fast. An intriguing subject line makes them to open the email immediately or wait until later. While creating a subject line, you might want to ensure it remains simple and about 50 characters or under, ask questions while ensuring they are great and write strongly while maintaining a conversational tone and do not forget to personalize although it should never be overdone.

Mind the position of the calls to action

Research has found that web users in most cases spend their time on the information appearing at the top of the page or atop a page fold. Essentially, as users look at a page their will to continue reading it usually wanes as they go down. This is why you need to specify what users should read at the email’s top part, albeit where your call to action needs to appear. Stories and other supportive details can complete the rest of your email.

Images should not be relied heavily upon

It is now official that over 50 percent of all email users do not even look at images since they have them blocked by default. It is possible to raise emails’ ROI by a half if emails are optimized in a way that emails can be blocked. To such an end, the use of web safe type of fonts and HTML text can help a lot. Alt text should always be used with images with a text plain version created with every email. However, sparsely use of images is a great fix as much as they are great at grabbing the audience and making the email to appear polished although they will end up blocked apart from loading very slowly.

Paragraphs, Bullet points and subheads

It has also been ascertained email users scan their emails by taking a lot of time looking at the sentences, especially the beginning ones for something vital that stands out. Using this knowledge lets you add headlines, including mail calls-to-action at the email’s top plus parts of the email towards the left side. Subheadings and bullet points make the content to be highly readable and less intimidating.

Video in Your Emails-Know This First!

Video, however you use it will always engage your audience in a special way. It is a wonderful choice of content to engage your email subscribers wherever they are. Its ability to grab attention is legendary and gives your message a whole new dimension capable of generating a lot of interest than written words alone. The millions of video content out there on demonstration videos, tutorials, presentations, products and trainings are a testament to that. However, should video be embedded in email campaigns? Is it a wise choice?

The efficiency of video in marketing is undoubtable but there are a number of reasons why embedding video in the emails of your subscribers should not happen for the time being.

Firstly, avoid embedding video until you have gained the best technical knowledge on adding the right code in emails that embeds the video. Also, remember not many email readers actually allow video to continue playing within their email. Remember the video code embedding it to the email will most likely be caught up by filters and will not enter the inbox of the subscriber.

Video also takes some time before downloading and might not even open and it will make subscribers very bored and frustrated. It might make them to delete the email without a second look of the video or clicking any of the included links. Embedding a video in the email will hardly get you the vital click-through details you might want in contrast with recipients clicking to have a glimpse of the video.

What to do

You can utilise your video’s first frame using it as an image with a clickable link to the video on the internet, which can be a YouTube Channel or a web page, among others. Ensure the image comes with a play icon or button making it obvious that following the link will let the recipient view the video and you can state this obvious fact through hyperlink wording.

While using Email Mojo, the images are not embedded in your emails and using the method where the link is on a static kind of image rather than embedding a video will ensure the mail has a small file size meaning that it is light and easily delivered.

More smart ways of grabbing attention

If you can afford it, animated gifs can be used as the image link with some kind of movement to draw the viewer’s attention or just stress on the topic. If animated gifs are well made they are very not heavy in terms of file size, just a few KBs. However, the animated gif need to be looked into carefully so that it does not become slow to load just like video. Remember very few email clients actually let the animation to play, such as Lotus Notes and Outlook 2013 and under that only display the animated gif’s first frame instead.

You can carefully look into the amount of time you will use in making animated gifs by ensuring you have the real number of your contacts using Lotus Notes or Outlook 2007-2013 by looking at a previous campaign’s client data. If the percentage is very high you might want to go for non-animated types of images and link from them. At the same time, let the gif animation creator know a section of email readers will not be viewing the animation so that the vital message you would like to communicate can appear in the first part.

Essentially, providing links to view a video is perhaps the best chance of seeing your email into the inbox of your subscribers as well as knowing clearly the individual interested in viewing the video, especially because of our live reports.

Management of Email Bounces-Some Vital Facts Worth Noting

Those who have experienced bounced emails will tell you that they are not exactly what they insinuated at the start of the email marketing process. They cannot be ignored for a long time, especially if they are continually piling up. Once they are a pile and increasing, you will have a major problem in your hands. In every online marketing process management of email bounces has never been an exciting area, but very critical if you are to clean your list to raise the success rate of your email marketing campaigns.

Email bounce indicates an email sent did not reach the contact on the list. A number of reasons exist on why this is so and it is worth noting bounces are different and should be handled differently. You will find there are soft and hard mail bounces.

In soft mail bounces, the problem is often temporary and could be due to full mailboxes, undelivered or server failure, message sent when the contact is not around or auto replies during vacations. Hard bounces indicate a more permanent problem such as an address out of date or an email address that does not exist.

Soft bounces are issues easy to observe since the issue could resolve itself without any problem. Not so for hard email bounces except to replace/remove the bouncing email address immediately.

Viewing email bounces

Email Mojo reports will give you a chance to track email bounces easily in your account. This allows you to peek at certain email campaigns and to export easily the bounced address list so that you can go ahead with the monitoring of the email addresses with issues that can be resolved and to replace the defunct ones.

Where to start with bounced email addresses

The first thing you need to do is understand the reason why the email bounced before determining whether the issue is permanent or temporary. In case the problem is a permanent one such as the email address does not exist, look at the address again to ensure it is correctly spelled. Probably the address is out of date in case the contact has switched to another email provider or job. In case you can contact them in another way, talk to them to ensure the information, above all, is up to date.

If you are not sure whether the problem is temporary or permanent, it is important to take a look at the bounce frequency. Essentially, it is all about removing those email addresses that have ongoing issues and will affect the open rate of your emails positively while lowering the number of email bounces.

Dealing with future bounces

It is common to have a few email bounces here and there but you should pay attention if you realize the email bounces are way too high. Here are a couple of things you can do.

Update form

Begin by sending your contacts a form to update their profile, something you can encourage them to do without any problem.

Run a fresh opt-in campaign

You can also run another opt-in kind of campaign not only to get permission to keep sending your email campaigns to the address but also to have the contact respond to the email confirmation so that the email address can be added to your list. It helps in cutting down the email bounce rate since invalid addresses are removed from the list.

Test email campaigns for spam

In case you realize email messages are going to junk or spam folder than the inboxes of your contacts, go back to the email content you are sending them. Lots of symbols, punctuations and hugely promotional language such as ‘buy now’ or ‘$$$’ or ‘free’ is sometimes filtered as spam.

Regular bounce review

To have a very low email bounce rate requires that you keep checking the bounces constantly. It is not prudent to let bounces to add up; at some point they will overwhelm your email marketing campaigns.

Even as you use free email marketing solutions and others, know the lower the bounce rate the confident your contacts are receiving your messages and the hard work and resources you have put into this is not lost.

Reasons Why Nobody is Opening Your Emails Hurting Your Conversation Rate

You’ve spent your valuable time crafting emails only for them to end up unread. This is quite a frustrating experience and you’d want to change it against all odds. So, to make your email marketing campaign a success, you’d first have to understand why it fails.

Customize content

No one will open an email if it is not of any relevance to them. You have to know your audience and what they want so as to be relevant while clearly knowing that no one will be concerned with your emails if they lack customization. Rates have been dropping among email marketers, even those using free email marketing platforms and the reason this is happening is because leads want and desire customized content. People are not ready to labour through total junk that is so bad, whether intended for them or not. Essentially, it is important to at least know something about your leads or audience and what they are really want.

Responsive emails for mobile

Three years ago or so you could have been forgiven for not optimizing email marketing for mobile but not today. In 2013 alone, more than 50 percent of all emails read and opened were opened through mobile devices, a trend that is rising on a daily basis. Your website, emails and newsletters have to respond to this critical change otherwise your leads will continue plummeting.   A large part of the population today uses mobile phones to read their emails. If your newsletters are not optimized for small screens like that of Smartphones and Tablets, chances are that you are missing out on a large part of your audience.

Email subject

The subject of your email is enough to make a person decide whether he should read your email or not. If the subject line is not enticing enough, they will just skip over to the next email. The subject needs to be interesting but it should at the same time not sound like a pitch for sales. Be specific and unique to your business and if you can get personal, it is even better.

Format congestion

This is a great turn off for email recipients. A complex email will often go unread. So make yours easy to absorb such that readers can quickly scan over it and still get the message.

Not too many emails

Do not overstuff your subscribers with emails. 1-4 emails every month should be enough or you could tailor the frequency depending on the relationship with your subscribers. Over-sending emails turns out to be a bother and nuisance to the recipients and they may end up redirecting your emails to spam and at that point you will have lost them for good.

Timing is everything

Bad timing could also be the reason no one ever reads your emails. Study your audience carefully and determine the time that they are likely to check their inbox. This will help increase your open rates.

When you emails end up unread, it is because there is something that you are not doing right. Take some time, re-evaluate your strategy and then make the necessary changes.

 

How to Make Sure Your Emails Are Not Caught In Filters

If you have engaged in email campaigns before you must know the important part of that process is ensuring every email has made its way into the directed inbox. The sad part is not every email will be delivered, but there are a number of things you can do avoid the scourge of the spam filter even as you incorporate free email marketing concepts.

Monitor delivery

As you set a test group, do not forget Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo accounts. Email clients using these accounts are over 80 percent of all email clients targeted at any given time. You will without a doubt be satisfied emails are delivered and even rendered properly throughout.

Trigger words and phrases must be monitored

To boost chances of an email being delivered into an inbox, there are phrases or words to avoid and watch out otherwise, it will be directed to the spam filter. Of all the things you do avoid using such words as pharmaceuticals, investment, guaranteed, free and samples, among others. Overuse of certain phrases need to be avoided like special offer, money off, free delivery, satisfaction guaranteed and other salesy phrases that appear in sales copies often.

Request addition to safe lists

The most important step you must take at the beginning of your email campaigns and sending newsletters and other information via email is requesting every subscriber to add your email to their safe list of senders. This will guarantee the server does not block any email form you after catching it in a filter. Filters are always learning the behaviour of subscribers amidst being updated often; remaining in a safe list of sends will make sure every email sent is delivered.

Stop excessive punctuation and capitalisation

In an email, the excessive use of upper cases and lots of unnecessary punctuation is tantamount to shouting at an individual. This is also something spammers do all the time and avoiding such practices will make the email to avoid the filters right into the inbox.

Over bolding text is a no-no

Bolding text excessively is also a spammer’s standard practice and need to be avoided. If some text or phrase must be highlighted, you might want to link them to a relevant PDF or web page. Underline the text, change its colour and it will stand out. Descriptive links also enhance CTRs (click-through rates).

Embedding images should stop

If you want an email to be so huge and hard to deliver, embed images. You can however arrange with the email service provider to have images downloaded after emails have been clicked open. Email service providers allow this to happen so fast that chances are no subscriber will notice any difference.

Use an email service provider such as Email Mojo with a higher delivery rate

Obviously, you will find lots of ways of accomplishing high and speedy delivery rates into the box. Choosing an email marketing platform to launch your campaigns is perhaps the most reliable-their delivery rates are much higher. This means email templates will be tested for the highest delivery while using servers with a great reputation, feedback will be monitored, bounce cleaning will be automatically done to maximize delivery rates as HTML coding by the system is effectively done in optimized styles.

 

 

Top Creative Ways of Growing Email Marketing Lists to Grow Any Business

By growing your email list, you can be sure of adding extra email subscribers and improving chances of growing your brand, service or product. If your list has not been growing as fast as you would like or if you would like to enhance your email marketing results you need to keep on adding your email list. There are a lot of creative and fun ways of enticing all manner of people to keep joining your list while engaging with the content before them. A couple of tweaks on the signup form can get you the extra subscribers you are actually looking for.

Every opportunity must be leveraged

You might want to know every page appearing on your website presents an opportunity of engaging your audience while convincing them to join your list. These opportunities have to be seized whenever possible since no one really has a lot of time to draw the attention of visitors. About 55 percent visitors spend on average 15 seconds maximum on a site, sometimes much less. This is why it is very vital to do all you can to ensure the signup form remains close to the centre or at the front.

Unless visitors are watching video, they will not even stick around for a long time. If there is a video on the page, have an opt-in placed below it. Already, the video has the attention of the visitor and by placing the opt-in below it chances of the individual signing up will rise.

Interactive forms are wonderful

You can decide to add the opt-in form wherever you want, but elements that are eye catching should be added to it. Do not forget you only have a few seconds of catching the attention of the visitor and it is important to make the most of it. Adding animated gifs to the form will draw the attention of the visitor. You can even decide to adjust the feel and look of the opt-in so that it can appear as live chat that asks a specific question concerning the content of the video, post or product. You can try as many questions as you can until you have that specific one question visitors are responding to in droves.

Call to action need to be visible

The worst thing you can do is keep the call to action further from the sight of the visitor and expect to reap big. You can easily transform this by adding the form to sticky footers and headers and ensuring it remains on the screen always. Those who have been to Amazon might have noticed the button “Add to Cart” appears on the screen always. This means every visitor can easily add a product to the cart at any moment without the need to scroll down to the tip of the page or the top. It will likely ensure the visitor buys the product he or she is looking at.

Do not be vague

Being as specific as you can and avoiding contradicting or remaining as vague as possible is very important. For example, everyone has a lame ‘contact us’ on their site and it is not a clear call to action like “book a massage”, “get this product now” or “enjoy quality discount pedicure”. Make the call to action specific to directly relate to your content or product offered for improved results. OutsourcedEmailMarketing.com allows you to track subscriber behaviour; knowing how they joined a list can help you in targeting the email content in your campaigns accordingly, transforming your engagement.

Responsive design is everything

As you might already know mobile browsing is very different from browsing normally on your PC, particularly in this age of Tablets and Smartphones. The mobile browsing screen is not big and entering sign up text might take a longer time. As you choose or create the right opt-in form, do not ignore this vital fact. Rather than put lots of fields on the mobile form, limit it to one or a couple of fields while adding a huge CTA button for joining. This will help each mobile user to reach you well through a single button rather than typing a lot of details through their small Smartphone screens.

In fact, those using our Email Marketing plans or not will benefit from the platform’s responsiveness to Tablets, Smartphones and other mobile phones.

This is How to Follow up With Newly Added Customers and Influence Them to Return

Every serious business has reaching and attracting new customers as its top priority. Such an organization is always looking for ways of expanding its audience, forging new connections in the process growing the business. However, the tough nut to crack is always what follows after attracting an additional audience or after delivering a wonderful experience to all first timer consumers or customers. Getting the new customer to return is not easy as most businesses have come to realize.

Relationships take time to build

Obviously, making a lasting first impression is everything and a very vital step towards building a long-term relationship. Nonetheless, you must do a little more to let your customers know how crucial they are and continue gaining as much loyalty as possible. After taking time to build relationships with the user of your products or services via smart email marketing, you can expect them to respond to your move by returning into your site. Some will even let their friends, acquaintance and strangers to know the kind of great experience they had.

Keep adding more subscribers via online opt-in forms and even at your online store and reach them out with the kind of information you know is valuable to them. New customer follow-up is very important and you can do it easily.

Warm welcome is everything

A welcome email helps a lot in building up the momentum. Our tool allows you to customize a welcome mail using content, logo or branding. After new subscribers have joined your list the welcome mail can then be sent to them automatically.

In the welcome email, you can ensure contact details have a personal signature, guarantees of both data security and privacy, a summary of the things the customer should expect inside future emails, including a friendly and very warm introduction.

Incentives and thanking the new customer

It is important to thank the new subscriber or customer for purchasing your services or goods and it will show them how vital they are and matter a lot. Always remember a personal thank you is everything followed by an incentive or reason to return. Think about offering an original ‘thank you’ with a video appreciating what the customer has done in a couple of seconds or simply have a fun staff photo embedded.

At the top of the email, the image of all employees or some of them can be shown projecting their gratitude to the customer. Together with the email a discount of a specific amount should be included to help in the next purchase for the precious customer with an expiry date. The expiration date is to motivate the customer to shop again soon in your store.

Auto responders and new relationship nurturing

With an auto responder you have a very unique tool to create personalized series of automated emails sent to every subscriber added into the list. Just like the welcome email, Auto responders are special in that once you have set them you can forget about it. You even decide on the frequency within which to send auto responders, design email series and add relevant subscribers to your list.

It is in the area of new contacts that the usefulness of Auto responders is clear since they definitely require a holistic introduction into your brand, services and products right from the beginning. It is a chance to provide vital information displaying your obvious expertise in your niche as you constantly remind the contacts the easiest way of connecting with your store or yourself.

Additional help

Avoid leaving the customer after the first great experience with your brand. Chances are some are not really aware of all the great services or products you offer. People can be nudged to return by providing them with extra information on the specialties of your business. You can even indicate the different seasonal products or service that could aid your customer in solving certain complications at a specific period of the year.

Make these offers irresistible by providing them cheap or at a discount to the new customers or come up with a starter up specially made for every one of them. The tone of the email at this time should not be too promotional, showing how much you want to help the customer deal with his or her interests, needs or problems. You can also ask the customers a number of questions or request them to ask you to understand who they are, betters ways of remaining connected with them and the things they are interested in.

Invite customers back

With certain events in a couple of weeks or months you can easily return the customer into your business as well as meeting and connecting with loyal customers. Once you have thought about or confirmed the events coming up later in your company, design creative ways of involving the new audience in any of these upcoming events.

It can be hosting open houses, conferences with guest speakers or partnership events with non-profit entities and customers should know this in your emails. Customers can be offered event registration beforehand to have a chance to follow them up with a reminder just before the beginning of the event.

Promote social channels

Don’t be shy to share your social channels with every new customer while offering them a chance to look into your content and a chance to further investigate what your organization has been into in the recent past. It gives them a chance to know your business better, whether they have been with your for long or not.

Social media also allows you to know what people you have never met think about your products or services. Also, the way you interact with subscribers or customers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social network sites gives them a chance to know your business better. Sharing links to your social presence and the web is also a wonderful way of driving followership and increasing traffic.

Remember as you might have already realized that social media and email work best if used together and each email sent should contain channels to your social media at the bottom.