We know. There’s so many email marketing tips available out there. You can read the top five to the top 100 tips and every tip is valid in its own right. However, we love keeping it simple and breaking down these tips to some core basics. We’ll first address a few reasons of why email marketing is great for your business. In a nutshell, it’s a direct voice to your customers that you can provide direct offers to and also gain real time metrics on their interaction with your efforts. Are they opening the email? Are they clicking on call-to-action parts in your email? Are they buying from you? Email marketing is a low-cost way to promote your business and its products or services to existing or interested customers.

Think about the lifetime value of a good customer. That is so valuable! If they’ve purchased from or hired you before, you have an excellent chance to get them back! Follow these five email marketing tips to get started today:

  • Find a great email marketing company to start your account with. Our choice? We personally love either Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. We find that the building and design tools offered on these platforms make it easy to create beautiful looking emails. There are different prices depending on the size of your customer list.
  • BUILD YOUR OWN LIST. Notice that we put that in capitals? It’s because it’s so important. You want to effectively reach people who are interested in your company and it does no good to try to send communications to every email you can get a hold of – not to mention, this is not allowed! So please, create a proper opt-in on your website and if customers sign-up at your place of business, have them check mark to opt-in. This will serve you well in the case that the opt-in of a customer email is ever challenged.
  • Frequency is something you want to establish early on. Establishing a good frequency that suits your type of customer and your workload and time available is important. Even from your own experience, you know which companies send daily emails that just annoy you, while there are companies who send weekly emails that give you enough current information without overloading you throughout the week. Everyone’s emails these days just receive a lot of spam on top of valid opted-in emails, but nevertheless, email overload just makes people go nuts. We recommend a weekly email at most. If you’re hesitant on your ability to keep up with the frequency, then start with 2x per month. Every other week should allow you enough time to plan what you intend to promote in the email and time to design the communication. Only when you’re comfortable with your initial frequency can you begin to think about increasing it. Make an email marketing calendar that sets some due dates on gathering your ideas on content so that you are ready to create and send the emails off on time.
  • Be mobile friendly. Now, we don’t mean that you need to worry about your Mail Chimp or Constant Contact email not being mobile friendly, but what we mean is that how your email looks on desktop will look longer (more scrolling) on a mobile phone. Before you send your email out, be sure to always test your email on both your desktop and mobile devices including iPads.
  • Making your images count. A lot of people turn off the auto download of photos on their phones to save on their data usage. Therefore, it’s so important to label your email images with descriptions so that the description loads in case the image doesn’t. You don’t want just an empty space with an image icon on there because now the email recipient doesn’t even know what the visual is about. If you’re putting the effort into creating the emails, then it only takes a few seconds to type in an alternate description for the image.

Any questions? Feel free to ask!