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5 ways to make email marketing work for your business

Email marketing has proven itself to be a successful form of contacting your clients in order to generate business – but only if used correctly.

If you’re looking to make email marketing work for you then you need to make sure you taking the right approach towards it. This means using an email marketing tool to create more effective emails and targeting appropriate markets.

Here we look at five ways to improve your efforts.

1. Don’t be spammy

No one likes to receive spam emails and if this is what your messages look like then your consumers will instantly switch off. Know what your consumers want to see and give it to them.

A staggering 69% of email account holders report messages as spam based on the subject line only so it’s important you pay as much attention to this part of the email as you do to the main body. Personalised subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened and email marketing experts Enabler claim personalised emails boost click-through rates (CTR) by 14%.

2. Keep it concise

You should choose your words very carefully when constructing emails. Try and keep your subject line within a 10 character limit as these have an open rate of 58% and use appropriate buzzwords to attract interest. These include the following:

• News
• Alert
• Bulletin
• Sale
• New

You can also boost rates by giving your email a time stamp – but you need to tread carefully. The use of “daily” and “weekly” in subject lines increases interest but labelling your email “monthly” could actually hurt figures.

3. Use more than words

Few consumers will be turned on by an email full of block text so make sure your message is conveyed in more than just words. Pictures and videos are known to work well but even adding social sharing buttons can increase engagement with your audience. In fact, they increases CTR by a whopping 158%!

4. Ensure your message can be opened

There’s no point constructing the perfect marketing email if your readers can’t access it. Nowadays, the popularity of smart devices means emails aren’t only read on PCs and laptops – they’re accessed via smartphones and tablets too.

The thing to remember here is that emails designed for access on computers may not open correctly on mobile platforms. You need to make sure your email design is set up for mobiles so that you don’t alienate an important part of your target market.

A massive 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices but only 11% are optimised for mobiles. More shocking is that 69% of users delete emails which aren’t optimised for mobiles.

5. Keep your email lists trimmed

Successful email marketing doesn’t just rely on the messages themselves – it also depends on your email lists. Lists which contain 10% or more unknown users get less than half of their emails (44%) delivered by ISPs.

By suppressing any account on your email list which hasn’t engaged with your messages in over a year will actually increase the deliverability rate of your emails. This occurs instantly and by as much as 3-5% so it’s worth doing!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Grant Pettersson .