Effective Email Marketing

If you run a small business, you will fall into one of three categories; you’ve never looked into e-marketing, you’re overwhelmed by it, or you’ve mastered it.

In this post, I am going to talk to the first two categories, and give you a few tips to creating an effective email campaign.

When you first start your email campaign, you need to look at the bottom line, which is your customer and/or prospects. If you want to turn prospects into customers, you have a few options. You can go and see them, call them or email them. While the first two are the most effective, sometimes you don’t have enough hours in the day. This is where emails come in.

Emails are a great, time-saving way to build relationships with several customers at a time. You write one email, and send it to maybe 200 people. And, it’s free!

So, here are the tips!

• It may sound absurd, but don’t try to sell too much in your emails. As Sonia Simone said in her blog, the ratio of sales to ‘cookie content’ (value for the reader) should be 1:3. 3 parts value, 1 part selling.
• Get to the point as soon as you can – Don’t ramble on, because most people don’t have time to read a lengthy email, and probably won’t want to anyway! Keep it short, and to the point
• In relation to the tip above, read through your email 5 times, removing any excess words you can
• When you are selling something, install a sense or urgency, eg. ‘Only 20 left’ or ‘Limited time only’
• Most people think the more people you have on your email list, the more sales you will get. Not necessarily; you need people that have shown an interest in your product, and then you build a relationship with them
• Give them some free value – tips related to your industry, or maybe an e-book
• Write as if you are writing to an individual, try and make the email personal, to a certain extent
• It is not necessarily a good idea to have a fancy email with lots of graphics. Some email clients may not open them properly, or mark them as spam.
• It is a good idea, however, to have a few pictures included; this helps keep the readers attention while they are reading your email.
• If you are using emails, make sure you have a website, blog or social networking site to re-direct your readers to. It is always good to have a site where readers can get more information about you and your products

SA-SEO has recently completed a website for a very competitive Email Marketing and autoreponder service called QuicktellPro. They offer a veriety of features and benifits, very competitive prices and you can give the system a proper test run with a free account.

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