Email marketing puts the ability to connect with potential and existing customers at the touch of a button. Despite this simplicity, deciding how to approach and manage the process of email marketing can still be a challenge for businesses looking to leverage the channel to communicate competently and achieve a high return on investment.
Choose the best ESP for your needs
An email service provider (ESP) hosts email marketing software online, which is specifically optimized to do the heavy-lifting for bulk newsletter sending. Before you start emailing, it's vital that you choose the best ESP for your business.
An effective service provider should offer customer support and training both online and over the phone in addition to providing all the tools and tutorials necessary to help you easily create a campaign. Your ESP should also offer a pricing plan that fits your budget, as well as a reliable sending infrastructure with multiple high-speed connections and hardware redundancies so you can send at any time or volume.
Build a relevant list of contacts
The mailing list is the most important element in the success of your email campaigns. Responsible email marketing is based on permission, and a permission-based list built by yourself always yields the best results since you're providing people with content that's relevant and interesting to them.
Permission provides a foundation for delivering value, because the people on your address list have raised a hand and said "I'm interested in the emails you send." What you really want is the biggest possible list of individuals who have asked to hear about what you offer -- and not just a lot of random email addresses.
Leverage contact data for better targeting
Sending irrelevant or generic emails can be risky, as these may provoke recipients to ignore your messages or mark them as spam. We all know that subscribers have individual likes. Keeping this in mind, as your list grows, it becomes important to identify groups that share similar interests and use segmentation (the practice of clustering addresses) to improve your results by sending appealing content targeted to their specific wants.
In addition to studying campaign reports to see what people tend to click on, consider using a service that gives you access to subscribers' social profile data -- thereby letting you in on more relevant information. This is likely to increase your open and click-through rates, improve website conversions, and even sales derived from promotional mailers.
List improvement delivery rates
Internet service providers expect senders to keep their email lists "clean" (i.e., clear of non-existent or defunct addresses and full of real, active email addresses). It's a sign of a "good" sender, since spammers typically don't trouble to update their lists. The higher the proportion of emails you send to "dead" addresses, the more your sender reputation suffers.
Habitually remove bad or regularly bouncing email contacts. Eliminate duplicate addresses manually if your ESP does not do this automatically as well as fake accounts, addresses that were entered as a prank, or ones that look like bogus usernames. Also, search for and correct simple data entry mistakes like misspelled domains (geemail.com or hotmole.com, for example).
Design newsletters with mobile in mind
With email inboxes more crowded than ever, at least half of the battle is in finding ways to stand out from the masses with the quality of your design. And with the growing number of people checking emails on mobile devices, there is also an increasing need to optimize emails for the small screen.
Subscribers tend to connect visually with email newsletters and size up whether they want to read in a matter few seconds -- so let simple, direct, and to-the-point rule your design. This includes appropriate image use and balance and a few bold elements to help arouse more interest.
Accommodate mobile subscribers by having single-column design layouts, tighter subject lines, bigger buttons for links, and an overall narrower message width that allows for easy up-down scrolling. And, of course, test to make sure the email renders on popular mobile devices.
