What is the best email marketing strategy for you and your company? There are many different guidelines you can follow and many different paths you can take. If you follow these best practices you will experience far improved results over what you previously experienced.
To really do a good job with you small business marketing, you must have a strategy. Once for every part of your business.
When developing your email marketing strategy the most important thing to remember is that you need to build your list the right way. This means that you have to create a list that is based around permission. Your list needs to include only those people who have expressly permitted you to add them. This might keep your list size down, but a large list is not important or useful.
A high quality, targeted list is far more effective. Sign people up on your website and send them an immediate confirmation email so you know they are especially interested. If you have a storefront, gather names onsite and add them manually to your list. Whatever you do, be sure you have permission and try to gather as focused a list as you can.
Another email marketing strategy you should follow is that you need to develop a consistent approach to sending out the emails. This means that you need to build expectations for what people can expect from you. Not everyone wants to be inundated with 5 emails a week. Alternatively, if you only send out an email once every 6 months, most people on your list will have forgotten about you.
You need to develop a happy medium where you stay in people's minds but don't overwhelm or annoy them. You can also give people the option at registration of how often they would like to be contacted and which kinds of messages they would like to receive. This will help keep people happy from the start.
It's also important to use an email marketing strategy that makes your messages compelling. This also starts back at the signup process. You should offer a reason for people to signup for your list, some kind of advantage they wouldn't get otherwise. It might be a weekly guide filled with tips about your market or it might be special or exclusive savings on products or services.
Once you gave people a reason to signup, you then need to give them a reason to open up your emails instead of browsing past or deleting them. This means developing engaging, short and accurate subject lines and addressing your messages appropriately. It also means capturing their attention at the top of the email and providing a call to action so they don't just read your message but do what you want them to do.
Building your own email marketing strategy largely depends on trial and error. You'll need to see what works for your specific target market and line of business. However, if you follow these best practices you'll be able to tweak your campaigns for maximum results.