Email is a great way to reach out to new prospects, existing prospects and customers alike. You can reach a huge number of people at once with email, as opposed to communicating with them one by one over the phone. However, email has a major drawback – it's easy for the recipient to delete it without even reading your carefully crafted message. So to get real value from your email marketing, you'll need to prepare emails that will pique the prospect's interest enough to delay that itchy 'delete' finger.
Like phone campaigns, email campaigns will live or die by the lead list. A poorly chosen list full of irrelevant leads will not generate a good response no matter how wonderful an email you design. Be sure to use only opt-in lead lists – that means that the people on the list agreed to receive emails from you. Using non opted-in lists for mass email mailings puts you in the position of sending spam, which can lead to a bad reputation with your prospects or possibly even fines and other legal complications.
Your emails should be as personalized as you can make them. Always send them from the same email account and sign them with the same name – this gives recipients the feeling of having a real person as a correspondent rather than a faceless company. You should include the recipient's name at the top as well as any other customized details that you can work into the body of the email (for example, their company name).
Don't bombard your recipients with too many emails or too much information in each email. A good starting place is one message every other week with at least three useful tidbits of information. These tidbits can be ideas for using your product, industry-related news, interesting quotes, etc. As a general rule, the more frequently you send out emails, the shorter they should be. You can tell if you're sending too many emails by keeping your eye on your list's unsubscribe rate. A few recipients will unsubscribe from your list after every mailing, but if that rate starts to climb it's time to cut back on frequency.
If you're having a hard time coming up with ideas for content or attention-grabbing subject lines, try subscribing to a few of your competitors' email lists. Newsletters related to your company's industry can also be a rich source of ideas. You can also use material from your company's print advertising and press releases. Finally, stay on top of new product releases or upcoming model changes so that you can communicate these details to your subscribers.
With HTML emails, you can include all kinds of visual and even auditory extras such as video, animation, and so on. However, very dynamic emails will take a longer time to download and many email clients will block these parts of the email by default. Your email should be designed to look reasonable with text only as well as with the full set of images.
Once you have a design you like, don't change it unless you have compelling reason. A consistent look and feel to your emails will help your subscribers to recognize them at a glance. If you do decide to try a new design, test it first by sending the new version to a subset of your subscribers and seeing how they respond. You can use the same technique to test new subject lines, copy components, or even sales offers.
By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com/
Like phone campaigns, email campaigns will live or die by the lead list. A poorly chosen list full of irrelevant leads will not generate a good response no matter how wonderful an email you design. Be sure to use only opt-in lead lists – that means that the people on the list agreed to receive emails from you. Using non opted-in lists for mass email mailings puts you in the position of sending spam, which can lead to a bad reputation with your prospects or possibly even fines and other legal complications.
Your emails should be as personalized as you can make them. Always send them from the same email account and sign them with the same name – this gives recipients the feeling of having a real person as a correspondent rather than a faceless company. You should include the recipient's name at the top as well as any other customized details that you can work into the body of the email (for example, their company name).
Don't bombard your recipients with too many emails or too much information in each email. A good starting place is one message every other week with at least three useful tidbits of information. These tidbits can be ideas for using your product, industry-related news, interesting quotes, etc. As a general rule, the more frequently you send out emails, the shorter they should be. You can tell if you're sending too many emails by keeping your eye on your list's unsubscribe rate. A few recipients will unsubscribe from your list after every mailing, but if that rate starts to climb it's time to cut back on frequency.
If you're having a hard time coming up with ideas for content or attention-grabbing subject lines, try subscribing to a few of your competitors' email lists. Newsletters related to your company's industry can also be a rich source of ideas. You can also use material from your company's print advertising and press releases. Finally, stay on top of new product releases or upcoming model changes so that you can communicate these details to your subscribers.
With HTML emails, you can include all kinds of visual and even auditory extras such as video, animation, and so on. However, very dynamic emails will take a longer time to download and many email clients will block these parts of the email by default. Your email should be designed to look reasonable with text only as well as with the full set of images.
Once you have a design you like, don't change it unless you have compelling reason. A consistent look and feel to your emails will help your subscribers to recognize them at a glance. If you do decide to try a new design, test it first by sending the new version to a subset of your subscribers and seeing how they respond. You can use the same technique to test new subject lines, copy components, or even sales offers.
By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com/
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