Helpful guidelines for effective email marketing

Want to grow your business by getting more potential clients for a certain product or service? 

Email marketing is one of the most successful and cheapest ways to conduct direct marketing based on commercial messages to targeted group of people through emails. If done the right way, the results are really amazing and with minimal budget.

We created this guide to answer the following questions:

• How does the initial email collection occur?
• What rules should be followed when writing email campaigns?
• Which tools are appropriate to use?
• How can we reduce our costs from this type of marketing?

1. GETTING EMAILS

Getting the emails you will use for your campaign should be done very carefully. In order to optimize costs, it is imperative to make the correct selection of the email addresses that will become the subject of the subsequent campaign.

It is best to get emails specifically for the occasion and mandatory with the consent of the user. With the introduction of the GDPR in May 2018, we need to pay special attention to the requirements for the correct and lawful collection of emails – for example, you can put a form for signing up for your newsletter on your site, through which your subscribers can give their explicit consent that they wish to receive emails from you for advertising purposes. Once you’ve collected the emails, you need to organize and separate them by the right parameters for your future campaigns. This will make it a lot easier for you when you launch your email campaigns because it will allow you to screen out the right emails.

Collecting, organizing and storing emails takes time, but it’s worth it if you want your campaign to be effective.

2. RULES FOR WRITING ADVERTISING EMAILS

People in business spend much of their time writing and reviewing emails. The fact is that many of these people do not know well the etiquette of this type of communication. Due to the large amount of emails we receive and send, we can often make mistakes, and sometimes these mistakes are quite serious. The most important rules are: to have a professional email address, to be polite to people, to respond on time to received emails, to use classic fonts and to be careful with exclamation marks!!!!!!!!

These policies are vital for ad emails, but there are also some subtleties to make your campaign successful:

• The purpose of advertising email is to drive traffic, so place visible links leading to your product or service.

• The simpler and easier it comes to your site, the more customers will take the opportunity to check what exactly you offer.

• Never put important messages in images because a large number of people will not see them due to their email settings.

• Embed an option to unsubscribe users from your email database
  
  Users who do not wish to receive messages may report your ad as SPAM, which will damage your reputation. Therefore, offer them an unsubscribe link and you will avoid marking SPAM.

• Write short messages because the more information you try to fit into your email, the less of it will be read. Describe the most important thing you want to communicate to your readers and put a link to your site where they can read your message in more detail – this way you will generate traffic to your site and screen out those subscribers who are really interested.

• Do not send emails often and “at any cost” – only contact your subscribers when you have something important to tell them, otherwise you will annoy them and stop opening future emails from you.

• Before you start sending emails to your customers, make a test to check what the email looks like to different mailboxes – this way you can correct errors and “broken” emails before it’s too late.

3. APPROPRIATE TOOLS FOR ORGANIZING AN EMAIL CAMPAIGN

Sending personalized messages is easier with the right tool. Choosing the best email service can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing campaign. In the following sentences we will offer you some of the best email marketing services suitable for small and medium businesses.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers unparalleled support with live chat, email, community support, and a vast library of resources.

The platform also offers online training as well as live workshops. This allows small businesses to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it professionally.

Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial (no credit card required). Pricing then starts at $20 per month.

Drip

Drip is a powerful e-commerce, blogging and marketing platform. A wide range of tools is available thanks to the intelligent e-commerce platform.

What sets Drip apart from the competition are the smart marketing automation tools, more detailed email segmentation, list groups, and many useful features that allow you to reach specific audiences on your email list.

Drip is offering a free trial for up to 100 subscribers. Pricing then starts at $41 per month.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers. It offers a very easy to use interface with great tools and great support.

MailChimp is an easy way to create email, merge bookmarks, autoresponders, segment contacts into groups and analytics. You also have the ability to set up send times based on the user’s time zones and segment settings based on geolocation.

In a nutshell, it’s the perfect tool for effective email marketing and it’s completely free to the first 2,000 subscribers. Paid plans on the platform start at $10 per month.

Aitiss

Aitiss is a Bulgarian email marketing platform with intuitive tools for creating email campaigns. The platform offers interesting email templates, a drag and drop editor, automated emails, subscriber segmentation by different criteria, and real-time statistics of sent email campaigns.

You can benefit from a free Aitiss account if you have up to 2,000 subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails. The paid account offers flexible options to combine the number of subscribers and the number of emails sent.

4. OPTIMIZING THE COST OF AN EMAIL CAMPAIGN

One of the most common questions is how do we reduce our email marketing spend?

The key lies in audience targeting. All tools and platforms charge you for the number of subscribers you will be emailing. That’s why it’s crucial to spend more time separating your subscribers into active and inactive.

Inactive subscribers are:

• Those users who have not opened any of your emails in recent months
• Those users who have not clicked on any links from your email campaign

Make 2 separate tables, then monitor them regularly and update them as needed. One table of active users (the ones you’ll use for future email campaigns) and another table of inactive users, who will only eat into your advertising budget as they’ll take up unnecessary space on your lists.

If possible, update these lists each month.

If you would like to learn more about email marketing and how to optimize your campaigns, feel free to contact us at info@travelmind.eu  or by phone number 0879 998 500!