How To Rock Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the less expensive ways of marketing. This is one of its greatest advantages. This and the fact that you send messages to people who opt to be contacted by you! Which means that the conversion rates are high! It is targeted marketing at its best. You get to control who sees your email and what they see!Emails are easy to create (great tools available for this), track and measure. Both in terms of sales and user engagement. So you know how many people viewed your message. You will know what works. And what doesn’t.When there are so many advantages to email marketing, how do you make sure that you totally ace it?Optimize for MobileMobile use has overtaken the mighty desktop. Consuming email on the go is quite the norm these days. According to a study by Litmus, the email analytics providers, of 250 million emails, as much as 53% of email opens happen on mobile devices – cell phones and tablets. The study also says that 71 percent of people will delete an email immediately if it doesn’t display correctly on their mobile device. Designing emails that are optimized for mobiles is no longer just an option – it is now essential. A necessity.Some hints –Use a single-column design that lends itself to the vertical scrollUse short subject linesBold headlinesOptimize images – let them not be too heavyCTA buttons must be large and visible. Easy to tap.Make sure it works across a variety of devicesUse responsive designHere are some more great tips –Make sure that you segment your email database. A one size fits all kind of thing does not work. Your customers are different individuals who are interested in many different things. Based on what you know your customers will appreciate, you can segment them and engage with them more meaningfully. For example, if you are selling a retirement plan, it certainly won’t work on students, for instance.Images look great but they take time to load – they are heavy. Some email clients even block them. It might work best to limit the use of images to a bare minimum. And never ever use an image to convey important information that is not included in the text. All images must have Alt text and title text included. And you can link all your images back to your website. That way, even if the image doesn’t load, the image will link it back to your site.Don’t send emails from an “account” – marketing@xerago.com – send it from a person. Sending mail from an account is terribly impersonal in this day and age. Avoid that.Your subject line is where the magic lies – make it as compelling as you possibly can! This is what will entice your readers to open the mail and read further. Offers and deals work best!Keep your subject lines short – less than 50 characters. Or else, the line can get truncated.Make sure that you call to action buttons in the email stand out and are easy to use. Many people read emails on their phones – make sure these buttons are big enough for thumbs to tap on!Personalize – Learn about your customer and personalize your email based on this. But this is tricky – a little too much and all kinds of alarm bells would go off and the customer is wary at least – rather than pleased.Keep things brief – don’t make your readers scroll through tons of text – give them a little with a link to know more. And ensure that it links back to your homepage or website (the relevant section – don’t make him search!)Ensure that all the important information is in the little preview text that the reader can see before he actually opens his email. This will have a great impact on whether he would open an email or not.Study your email campaign – check to see what time works best for which segment and send the emails out at those times. Optimal open times are very important.Very important – give the customer the option to unsubscribe. And manage their preferences – like how often they would like to hear from you.Track and measure EVERYTHING.TEST and TWEAK everything – test emails before sending them to your lists. Make sure it works on all email clients. Find errors and correct them when you test your emails.Don’t do anything that would qualify your email as spam – that can keep you out of the customer’s inbox for ages!It is a good idea to do a HTML version of your email and a text only version of it – some people opt to read only the “text only” versions of it.Your email template should ideally be less than 600 pixels wide. And make sure there is a link within the first 100 pixels.Clean up your email list every now and then and remove addresses that don’t work. If there are many undeliverable email addresses, email providers will flag you as spam.And ask your customers to add you to their contact lists so the mail won’t get sent to the spam folder.