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Because consumers can access the email at a time convenient for them, as well as choose to reply or not reply, email marketing has grown as a priority option for marketers today.
The most effective approach is to create an informative newsletter that is emailed out to your customers on a regular basis. Included in this newsletter are the first paragraph or two from articles posted on your website with a link to the rest of the story on the website. Customers scan the stories, find one or more that interests them, and click through to read the remainder of the story on your website. Customers arriving at your website in this manner are pre-qualified as interested in some element of what you offer, because they had to proactively click on a link to get there.
Here are four tips for creating an effective email marketing campaign:
1) Build Your List. If you have not collected email addresses for your customers, consider sending a direct mail piece where you announce your new email newsletter and ask customers for their email address. Make sure that your staff is collecting an email address with every customer or prospect with whom they interact. Prominently place a “Subscribe to our Newsletter” box on your website, preferably visible on every page of the site. To speed up the process, consider offering a premium of some sort, such as a white paper that requires a registration of name and email address to obtain it.
2) Informative Content. Again, an effective email newsletter program must include high-quality, educational content. The good news is that you can set up a system in which the content is written once, and then excerpted and linked to with your other tools of marketing.
3) A Quick Read. Most people scan a newsletter to look for topics that interest them. Once they find a particular item they like, they’ll click through to get the full story on your website. Long-form email newsletters are still used by some, but most studies suggest keeping emails in short form will yield better results.
4) Link Location, Location, Location. Links from your email newsletter must lead the reader directly to the story upon which they clicked. Don’t just dump them on your home page as this will disorient the readers and will look out of
context, leaving them in limbo.
Tomorrow, I’ll conclude our series with “Five Tips for Social Media Marketing.”
Click here to read my previous posts, “Treat Your Website as the Foundation” and “Four Tips for Making a Blog Part of Your Marketing Plan.”
Ted Green ([email protected]) hosts a widely read weekly CE business blog at Strata-gee.com, the online home of The Stratecon Group, his marketing and strategy agency for the tech industry.
