Although social media is generating a deafening amount of buzz these days, don’t forget that email remains a powerful and inexpensive marketing tool. Here are a few simple tips to quickly improve your email marketing:
1. Use the subject line to your best advantage. You’ve got less than 50 characters to grab your customer’s attention with essential information and an interesting promise of what’s inside. Include your company or brand name and work to avoid words that may appear “spammy” ("free," "buy now").
2. Be careful with graphics. “A picture is worth a thousand words”, but its worth nothing if the recipient’s email program blocks the image! Use that pretty shrimp cocktail photo to your advantage, but never use graphics alone for vital information such as your phone number. The pros at Lyris, Inc. suggest that you “use graphics to reinforce messaging, not for messaging itself.”
3. Check every link! Make sure that everything’s working before you hit send. Along that same line – don’t use an image as the only link to something important, in case the image is blocked.
4. Send email at an appropriate time. Mondays and Fridays are generally not great days – people are too busy, or thinking about the weekend. Stick with mid-week, even picking a consistent day to get your customers accustomed to looking for your newsletter, market report, or other announcements.
5. Don’t over do it! Derek Figueroa, C.O.O. of Seattle Fish Company says they limit their mass emailings to three a month – a market report every 2 weeks, and a monthly newsletter. “We don’t want to jam up people’s inboxes with too much information. We’re also going to be giving people the option to subscribe to one or the other – or both – of the emailings, depending on what kind of information they need.”
Do you have any other tips on how to best utilize email to market your company or promote your products? Let us know what works for you!
