12 Email Marketing Tips Crucial To Your Success – Part 2

Monday, January 23rd, 2012 at 9:37 am

Best Practices

I hope you found the e-mail marketing tips I gave you in my last post useful and to complete the picture, I just want to share with you what I consider to be best practices to be used in conjunction with them.

Email Marketing Best Practices

Personalize Your Subscriber Emails
Make Your Subscriptions Double Opt-In
Make It Dead Easy to Subscribe
Let Them Know What To Expect
Provide a Thank You Page
Have A Support Address

Personalize Your Subscriber Emails
Message personalization with most autoresponder services is very easy to do and it will increase your CTR or conversion rates dramatically. When your visitors think that you’re sending them a personal message they’re 10 times more likely to actually read the content of your email and then click through and buy the products you’re promoting.

Make Your Subscriptions Double Opt-In
When you create your confirmation e-mails, I would strongly advise you to use double opt-in so you can be sure that the person subscribing is indeed the owner of that email address. This way you minimize spam complaints as you know it was them that signed up for your information. Include confirmation links at the top and bottom of the e-mail and in the body, have some information explaining what benefits your visitor will get in return for confirming their subscription. This will increase conversion rates drastically and is one of my top recommended email marketing best practices.

Make It Dead Easy to Subscribe
For a successful campaign and to get a large number of subscribers onto your list, you’ve got to make it as easy as possible for them to sign up. You can do this by using a pop-up, lightbox, pop under, or some other means of making sure that they see and complete your opt in form. If you make it difficult for people to sign up, they will simply leave and you just lost a potential customer that could have spent hundreds of dollars with you over the years.

Let Them Know Exactly What They’ll Get As Your Subscriber
Going back to the last tip I gave you, let your subscribers know exactly what valuable benefits they will receive in return for subscribing to your list. This should be something of high quality and perceived value that’s going to help them in one way or another or solves their problems.

Provide a Thank You Page
Creating a ‘thank you’ page is more than just good practice in email marketing because it fulfils more than one function and if you don’t take the time to create one, you’re leaving money on the table. A couple of things you can do is obviously tell your new subscriber to look out for useful and informative emails from you and most importantly, to whitelist your email address so your messages don’t end up in their spam folder. You can also reassure them that their details aren’t going to be shared and don’t miss the opportunity to put some affiliate banners or links to your own products on the page as well. You may not get a lot of clicks but even 1 sale out of 100 is money in the bank and there’s nothing immoral or wrong about that providing you actually know the products to be good and useful to your subscribers.

Provide A Support Address & Unsubscribe Instructions
Finally, there’s one area of e-mail marketing where I see many marketers fall down and that’s failing to provide their subscribers with a support desk URL or support email address. Not having any apparent way to contact you makes new people to your list nervous so whether you’re sending an autoresponder series, promotional email campaign, e-zine or newsletter, you must give your subscribers a way to easily contact you and ask questions. If people can’t ask questions on anything you’re promoting, you can’t possibly hope to realize your full potential in your e-mail campaigns.

You must also always provide an easy way for people to unsubscribe from your list without having to jump through any hoops. If they want to leave, let them. You could take them to your own ‘unsubscribed’ page containing some affiliate or product links to try and get an extra sale but either way, don’t bury your unsubscribe link below 50 or 60 blank white lines at the end of your mail. I think 5 blank lines is a maximum to use. Unsubscribes are part of the marketing game so you just have to deal with it.

Thanks for your time and I hope this made sense to your list building efforts.

Regards,
Chris

Best regards,