E-mail marketing: Don’t be an e-diot

E-mail marketing or advertising can help you sell your product to thousands of people with one click. But it takes real art to be successful in email marketing. We list a few things that any internet marketer would, and should, already know but would still do well to be reminded.

What day is it anyway?

This one simple trick can do wonders for your business. Be careful of the day you are sending an email on. If it is a business email meant for merchants, send it out on business days, when they are more likely to check it quickly. But the average Joe who returns home after a hard day’s work doesn’t want to see an ad in his inbox, even if he signed up for it. So if you are selling directly to consumers, send out the email on public holidays.

Don’t buy lists

Buying a list might seem to be a quick way to jump into email marketing, but any veteran in the field knows it takes months to build a commendable email list. Most of the lists with a price tag on them are completely useless. Others are not much better. Make a respectable site that users love to read and allow them to opt-in for your emails. Not only does this makes the receivers of you email more receptive to you pitch, but also gives you an extremely targeted audience.

Also, when using an opt-in list, you’d do well to use a service like Aweber to easily manage your subscribers. Such services also ensure that your emails are not regarded as spam by mail providers.

Maintain focus

When sending out email, it is important not to bombard the readers with information. You might have a lot of great things to tell them, sure, but make sure you concentrate on marketing one, and only one, product/service. You don’t want to take the spotlight away from your star performer. If users see that you email is too long to read quickly, they will skip it entirely, including your flagship product.

Inform, don’t sell

It’s no secret that salespersons are among the most hated people on the planet. Most people hate them with a vengeance. There is a single reason for this – they try to sell things to people before they are interested in them. In your emails, tell people about why the product is great and how it will help make their lives easier. Don’t start the email with a link that screams ‘BUY NOW!’. It will do worse than not getting you a single sale. It will cause you to lose subscribers.

Make it jump out, but don’t scare the readers

This one should be a no-brainer. Yet it is surprising how many marketers can’t even get a simple subject line together. Smart people don’t read emails that shout their sales pitch in the subject line. The subject line should give people a reason to read the mail, not a description of your product. The rest of the mail should be just as well writer. Don’t send them a wall of text. Include images and an attractive template (nothing too big, you don’t want people to give up before the mail loads). And ensure there are absolutely no errors in your mail, grammatical, factual, or otherwise.

Next time you feel like clicking on the send button, come here for a minute and read the headings again. Don’t send out a mail before you have done that.