Email Marketing How to Do It Effectively

The secrets to email marketing - how to do it effectively - are very easy to learn.  You have to start off with a good list of real contacts who actually want to read your messages.  Email volume is increasing by the millions every year.  With so many messages, yours can easily get lost in the crowd, deleted, or relegated to the spam file.  Here are some simple tips to help ensure that your next email marketing campaign is more effective.

Start with a healthy list
Email marketing with a list of contacts that are just going to delete your messages is not going to be very effective.  You need someone to actually see your message in order for it to resonate.  A little known fact about email marketing is that the average open rate is only about 20%.  That means the average campaign misses 8 out of 10 contacts on their list.  Other useful metrics are click-through and conversion rates.  This tells how many people clicked on the links, signed up for the offers, or bought the products in the email.  If your current list fails according to these metrics, then it is likely to be stale.

Keep You Content Fresh
Nobody want to get a email that is the same as the last several dozen.  Those emails get sent straight to the trash file.  Be humorous, shocking, or just different.  Whatever the style of your message in the past, do the opposite.  Selling something?  Then, give something away.  Email marketing - how to do it effectively - must be aimed at getting people to actually open and read your messages.  Offer something different and you curious people will have a look.

Use real photos
Stop using stock photos.  People can tell.  Instead, use apps like Instagram to create real pictures that feature your product or service.

Be real and simple
Don't use jargon or buzzwords.  You are email marketing with people, so act like one.  Simple and realistic communications are more likely to get read.  Even y our calls to action should be stupid simple.

Create moments for sharing
An advantage about email marketing is that it can go viral if you create a shareable moment.  Include social networking buttons and links to make sharing easy.  You can also make your email more social network friendly by including tweets and posts from your customers.  People would much prefer to get a email from a customer who has used your product or service than to hear the same message from the company marketing department. To be of any benefit to your business, your email marketing needs to be part of a comprehensive marketing campaign that includes other strategies like social media marketing. 

Before you begin, you need to set out a thorough marketing plan aimed at your target audience.  Make sure to specifically define your target audience.  That alone will help to increase your conversion rate.  Simply sending email messages to as many addresses as possible will not get you the desired results.  Rather, it will waste your time and your resources. 

Email marketing requires strategies that make it more likely that the messages will be read.  Everyone's email box gets inundated with too many marketing messages.  As a result, these messages get ignored.  This makes email marketing more difficult than before. So why do people still use email marketing?  Because, when done effectively, it still works.  Email marketing is very cost effective, when done correctly.  Follow these tips and reassess every email marketing campaign you have running.  Your email campaign is bound to become more effective.