Despite the meteoric rise of social media, email is still one of the best methods for getting your message into the hand, or inboxes, of your clients and prospects. Hopefully everyone is employing an email service to send out newsletters and marketing messages. Other email clients are fine for transactional messages, but fall woefully short for broadcasting your marketing messages—if for no other reason, you will not have any idea how successful your efforts may be—if at all.
But using a service is also not the answer in and of itself. The preliminary goal is to get your email opened, and the final goal is to get the recipient to click through and take action on your message. When creating your messages, give your email the best chance of hitting a home run with these 5 tips.
- Manage your engagement. No one likes an email that doesn’t interest them. If you are going to send them information, sent them information. If you are sending travel specials, send them travel specials. Make sure you are clear about what they can expect when they get an email from you.
- Build your list responsibly. Sure you collected names and emails at a travel show; but that does not necessarily give you permission to add them to your marketing list. Make sure you always have permission; otherwise, you run the risk of being labeled a spammer.
- Choose a reliable service. A reliable service will require you to email responsibly. They will not tolerate irresponsibility and they should monitor problems such as bounce rate and complaint rates before they escalate for you.
- Create good content. It sounds silly, but poor content will likely get you tagged as a spammer. Always look at your emails before sending and make sure you would want to receive it. As with most things online—content is the king.
- Manage your complaints. Take any complaints seriously. Include an opt out link on all marketing messages, set up an “abuse” email address in case you are hacked so you can be notified, and remove unsubscribes immediately.
Marketing email is not rocket science; however, effective marketing email is quite a bit more than a copy and paste into an open Outloook window.