Tag Archives for " email marketing "

0 Why Marketers Need to Continue Sending Emails

After every holiday it is common for people to clean their email inboxes. However, a lot of people keep asking themselves why marketers are always sending them a lot of emails of all kinds sometimes more than twice a day. The simple explanation is that email marketing works! Emails have stood firm as the most effective method of acquiring new customers today than social media. Emails are 40 times effective than Twitter and Facebook combined when it comes to acquiring new customers.

This is essentially because consumers in the UK and North America are still using emails daily. Also, the rate of purchases promoted by emails is still three times better than that Facebook, Twitter and the entire social media networks with the order value on average also 17% higher than that of social media.

This is not to say people should be bombarded with tedious junk mail. It is also important to indicate investment in social networks, mobile app messaging and instant messaging is very important for the modern marketer who wants to utilize any platform available. However, those marketers who are thinking about shifting their marketing budgets from email marketing need to think again because an inbox whose power has been harnessed is very important.

The click is important but the final destination critical

If you are a marketer obsessed with your email marketing and email visuals, copy or even the subject line, it is imperative to ensure you are not forgetting the important thing in all this; destination where a click of the email will be taking the contact. The email will be the first part in the entire consumer decision process. The email is essentially a process of interaction with products or brands and it is the prerogative of the marketers to make sure they know where the email will be sending the contact.

For example, it does not make sense to invest time and money on emails only to take a user to a generic or substandard home page. Rather, an email that takes a customer to a landing page customized for that purposes by sending him or her right onto the offer or item in the email will raise conversion exponentially, even by over 25 percent.

It is also important to remember out of all marketing emails sent 45 percent of them are opened in mobile devices. A lot of marketers do not really optimize these vital landing pages as they should. In case you think it is not a huge deal, remember Google has found out that out of all mobile site users 61 percent will not return to one they were unable to access with about 40 percent turning towards a competitor.

Sharing the information

Those small businesses who view each email as the perfect opportunity of learning about a consumer are poised to raise their total sales percentage without increasing email campaigns. The idea is all about capturing data and ensuring the learning objectives that come with every campaign have been defined before sharing them with the group mandated with marketing as well as the entire company. If something is not working, it is the prerogative of the entire email marketing team to know why.

Relevancy-personalizing every message

With the social media and other platforms competing with emails, it pays to be as personal as possible. It has also been found that the most effective emails are those personalized or customized to a specific clientele. This is why it pays to build a targeting engine that ensures your email marketing campaigns reach the right people. For instance, a retailer of home goods reported a ten times boost in response rates after adopting a personalized method of sending emails founded on catalogue and on-site shopping behaviour of users. You should aim at making your free email marketing campaigns as effective as possible and personalizing emails is a perfect way.

0 Email marketing-Why not to use Do-not-reply Email Addresses

Email is a two way communication channel. If you want to speak to your subscribers, then you ought to give them an opportunity to speak as well. When you send an email from a do-not-reply address, you are simply telling subscribers that “we just don’t care and if you may, please keep your opinion about us to yourself”.

When it comes to email marketing, your subscribers are your potential customers and there is no justifiable reason why they should be insulted with no-reply addresses, whether you are using free email marketing platforms or not. Here are a couple of reasons why no-reply addresses are hurting you and why you should stop using them now.

Address book

The best way to ensure emails are delivered to subscribers’ inbox is by having them add your email address to their address book. There is no reason why a person would add a no-reply address to their address book. It also means that you could be loosing subscribers to your email list on a daily basis.

Not everyone wants to unsubscribe

Not all recipients look for an unsubscribe link. Some will simply hit reply in an attempt of asking to be unsubscribed from your mailing list and when this isn’t possible, they will report the email as spam and this will hurt your email reputation.

Out-of-office email replies

The main reason why you use no-reply addresses is perhaps to avoid getting out-of-office replies. It can be tedious and time consuming to wade through thousands of replies searching for one with genuine information, but in the long run that genuine reply will give you insight on the subscribers’ opinion of your product or service.

Replies also give you an opportunity to clean up your email list by removing inactive addresses and also update personal information of subscribers.

No-reply address makes you look rude and arrogant

Using a no-reply address sends a negative message to subscribers and it makes you seem out-and-out rude and arrogant. By using a no-reply address, you are telling your subscribers that they ought to listen to you but you don’t want to listen to them. You are also telling them that you don’t care of their opinion and they should shut-up. This is a negative in email marketing and should be stopped.

Legal requirement

Most countries do not allow no-reply addresses and there are rules in place for such practices. You are required to have a working address where people can reply to you in case of inquiries.

It is not easy to deal with thousands of email replies, and that is why you use no-reply addresses. Though this makes your job easier in the short-run, you tend to lose more subscribers in the end. It is easy to lose people’s trust than it is to gain it. Adding a reply address will help you maintain subscribers for longer. If you must use a no-reply address, leave some reply information at the footer of your email otherwise it is best to avoid no-reply addresses at all costs.

0 Email Marketing-How to Make the Most of Email Newsletters

Email marketing is a sure way of driving up your sales while at the same time establishing a strong relationship with your customers. It Keeps customers up to date about your existing products and the release of new products which end up making the customers loyal in turn driving up your sales margin. Effective email marketing can make or break the relationship you have with your customers depending on how you use it. Here are a number of things you should put into consideration while writing and sending email newsletters so as to get the most out of it, whether you are practicing free email marketing or not.

Plan and write ahead

Failing to plan and write ahead of time might make you to compose a poor newsletter which may turn out to be a total turnoff for your customers and they may opt not to waste their time again reading poorly written newsletters.

Be engaging and personal

You should customize the newsletter in a way that each of them carries the name of the person it is intended for. It’s also recommended that you write the newsletter like you are speaking to an individual as opposed to a group so that your customers can feel you are speaking to them on a one on one basis.

Delivery time is vital

You will need to create a schedule for distribution that is regular and consistent so that your customers can always be looking forward to receive your newsletter. You can have a weekly or monthly delivery but monthly is the most recommended as it will keep your customers waiting for it eagerly as opposed to weekly where it might actually bore them because it will end up looking like spam.

Promotions

You can offer promotions for your email newsletter readers as a way of encouraging others to subscribe to your list. It will also make sure your customers actually read your email newsletter as they may not wish to miss out on the promotion.

Professional design

A professional design of your email newsletter makes a great impression to customers while also making the email newsletter attractive to peruse or even read.

Make it about the reader

Don’t just talk about your products throughout the newsletter. Provide some information on how your customers can actually make savings or just anything you can think of as long as it will make their lives better.

Make it mobile-friendly

Don’t ignore this part as most people these days read their emails through their mobile devices, from Tablets to Smartphones and anything in between. If the email newsletter can’t be supported on a Smartphone then you might actually be locking out a large number of your customers from accessing your newsletters.

Update your subscribers list

Before sending your email newsletter, ensure that people who unsubscribed from the newsletter are not included in the list of recipients as there is nothing as irritating as getting an email from a source you unsubscribed from two or so months ago. Ensure no new subscriber is left out of the list.

Social media network icons and pages

You should include your own social media network icons to get more social following. Display these icons at the top of the page since not many people read your newsletter to the last word on a page.

0 Email Marketing-How to Get More Leads

Are you an internet marketer looking for the best way to generate leads through a perfect email marketing strategy? Is your plan the best method of generating leads through email marketing? Well, if all these inquisitions are creating a problem on your mind, then you have come to the right place. Here are a number of quality dos you might want to know when it comes to applying an effective email marketing technique that will in turn generate more leads for you, whether you are into free email marketing or not.

Subject Line

To be factual and upfront here, the subject line of your email matters a lot. It will determine if leads are going to read your email or not. One of the best ways to captivate or engage your leads is to create a subject line that practically addresses their business problems or needs. On this note, it is expedient to make your subject lines actionable such as ”download our latest tutorials” or ”attend our IT Forum”. You can as well personalize your subject lines to pass effective and touching message to your leads.

Brevity

Do you know that prospective visitors and leads are bombarded with massive amounts of email on a daily basis? For this reason, it is a good idea to keep your email brewing with succinctness while at the same time engaging and very concise. Do not forget that the more you bombard prospects the more they switch off from your emails and the first thing they will do when you send them quality and informative emails next time will be to delete or spam them without a second look.

Imagery

Using images along with your content is a great way to pass quick message to your leads. Studies have shown that the human brain captures image message faster than pure text. To be on the fast track, ensure to garner the beauty of your email with images. However, sometimes you might want to stop embedding video to your email and if you must share one offer your leads a link to the video on another page off the email.

Social integration

It is a good thing for your leads to spread the sent email on their social network. This will even give more people the opportunity of understanding the value of your email. For this reason, you can always incorporate social media links within your email. This will help your leads to further share the message in what is called word-of-mouth advertising. You can incorporate social media links on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter just to mention a few.

CTA

Finally educating your leads about the service or product is highly important. The best way to help your leads understand about the product or service is by making them consume the content. This can be done by an effective CTA (call to action). This can be in the likes of “register”, “download”, “try now”, or “read”. You will have to give your leads a way of instantly taking the next step. With all the points above, you are sure to draw more leads through email marketing.

0 5 Reasons Your Emails Have Refused to Get You the Results You Need

Having an email campaign is usually very important when it comes to promoting a business product to as many people as possible. However when it comes to spending and writing quality content, returns may seem to be very small as the open rates just do not show progress. There are usually a number of reasons that make potential clients pass your emails and go to others, whether you made the most of free email marketing or not.

The subject line on email is boring

This literally means that the title of the email is not enticing enough or captivating. To make email marketing successful, ensure that it does not sound too promotional and salesy in the process. Terms like “free”, “$$$” should be avoided at all costs, as they always seem like spam.

Also, rather than sell the steak simply stick with the sizzle, a rule that is very clear for those who write ad copies. To ensure that you are writing or coming up with an email that sells itself, you must avoid a number of things, for instance focusing on the service or product’s features such as how the product looks like, its shiny attributes or how a button or dongle works.

Impersonal email address

Email marketing emails should be seen as human by the email address being used. This literally means that instead of using the businesses name only you might want to use the writers name together with the business name. This usually helps to let the person reading the email know that it was written by someone and not an email response created by the business.

The subject line doesn’t talk of something specific

When it comes to the subject line of an email, talking about the uniqueness of the business is a must. The email marketing subject should centre on specific uniqueness of the email product being promoted and what it offers.

Emails sent at the wrong time

Basically the most common mistake done with email marketing is sending the emails to the recipient’s inbox at the wrong time. Many tend to send emails Monday or Tuesday, however this should not be done as people are usually swamped with work. It is better to send emails in the afternoons when the week is ending, as people are generally bored and the opening rates are highest then.

Long subject line

People generally are bored very quickly with emails, and thus when an email tends to be too long they move on to the next thing. Using a short email subject line that is catchy is Key to get the opening rates for the business. Personalization of an email address and enticing preview of the first lines, together with a short catchy subject line is vital for any successful email marketing campaign.

An email can also have a number of testimonials, especially if the email is mostly written as an ad copy. Keep changing your testimonials with new ones with every email you submit and avoid sending the same testimonials you have submitted for a decade.

0 Email Marketing-What Makes Subscribers to Unsubscribe?

Email marketing is one of the most popular and most effective ways of growing your business. It is also the best way of cultivating the best relationship with your subscribers, leads and audience who have decided to opt-in in your mailing list. You definitely want to maintain your subscribers and to ensure you are always marketing to them all the time when you have something to promote to them and perhaps to provide them with an occasional newsletter. However, there are things that make subscribers to desire to leave your mailing list.

Certain steps need be followed very carefully otherwise subscribers will click unsubscribe. Here are a number of common email marketing mistakes you should know and perhaps do right, whether you are into free email marketing or not.

Dispatching too many emails

Sending too many emails is the most common reason behind your mail list unsubscribing. There should be a proper limit in the number of emails sent because too many emails on the same subject or uninteresting subjects will irritate your subscribers. Similarly, too much or too little promotion can make compel them to leave. Some marketers send emails every day and others feel they should not send often. To be on the safe side, there must be an equal balance between too much and two often depending on your business and offer to the customers.

Inconsistency

Ensure the same email id or sender’s name is used throughout your emails to your customers to avert confusion. Always send some email templates so that your brand can remain consistent within your mailing subject. Trust in online email marketing is very important especially in bringing customers up to speed and boosting the engagement rate.

Poor or confusing subject lines

Generally marketers emphasize on content but neglect the crucial subject line, which is very vital. This is because customers open mails depending on the subject. Subject line gives the reader a reason to keep reading or open the email and follow the message it contains. So if the subject line is missing or way too poor, then everything inside the mail is wasted.

Call to actions

Make sure that you have incorporated your call to action several times in your email because many customers skim through emails. It has an unconscious effect of compelling subscribers to do something, especially if they have opened the email.

Not verifying before hitting send

Ensure emails are read through, proofread and revised before you send them to your desired customers. Also make sure your email is readable within the common email platforms spread across the internet and beyond such as Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Also make sure it is attractive and useful.

Your content is repetitive or boring

Some email marketers send emails to their customers repetitively to grab their attention. Instead of grabbing their attention, it ends up compelling the customers to unsubscribe.

Your emails aren’t relevant

This is a very common cause behind unsubscribing. Customer usually search for the unsubscribing link if they realise the information is very irrelevant.

Avoid using no-reply emails

Before some customers unsubscribed they first try to reply with their concerns. Give them a chance by having an email that they can reply to immediately.

0 3 Main Reasons Why Nobody Opens Your Emails

An email campaign is one of the greatest backbones when it comes to promoting a new product, a program, service or any other thing. This is mainly due to the fact that many people use emails, with studies suggesting that over 900 million emails were sent in 2013 alone. It is a great way to get the people who do not have time to look at other types of advertisement especially those who believe in the professionalism of emails and privacy of their messages and what they do with them.

In which case email marketing helps to cover up all the other marketing channels and take sales to a whole new level, even if you are into free email marketing. However, as one starts the email marketing campaign there is always likelihood that most of the emails will be ignored. Below are some reasons why nobody is opening your emails.

The subject is not appealing

This is actually in a literal sense where subject line might not be telling the audience what it shall do for them. When the subject talks of the company or the abilities of the product in question, any one seeing or reading it immediately makes up his or her mind that it just another promotional message. Instead of going for more open rates, think of wordings on how the product will help the people reading the emails and ensure its not too salesy but an email with a message that helps.

Wrong timing

Sending emails to people at the wrong time is a main contributor to why nobody opens your emails. With meetings coming up back to back on Monday and Tuesday mornings, this at first may seem as a good time to send emails as people will be reconfirming their schedules. However the truth is that they will see the email as a nuisance and you definitely do not want that. Instead, wait for a time where things are going slow, and people do not have much to do and are typically bored. Do it at the end of the week or even on weekends and people will open the emails much more.

Lack of personalization

When it comes to reading emails, people generally want to assume there is a person at the other end of the line who cares about them, knows their names and cares to address them through their names and through the content. However, when a product name or a company name is used, this usually drives the readers away right from the start due to the simple reason that the email looks like it has been automatically generated by a company or brand that does not care.

It is much better to place in a name of an actual person in the company who heads the campaign itself before the company name as the email address, this way the emails will have a higher chance of being opened as it relates to people and clearly has been sent by a human.

0 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.

0 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.

0 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.