An email marketing campaign is an effective way to market your products or services to your audience.But, if you get it wrong, your readers can become confused about your message or simply ignore it to the point that they don’t take any action.

So how do you run a successful email marketing campaign?

Start Building A List

Email marketing works because people have given you their permission to send them emails. So before you start an email marketing campaign you need a list of people to send your emails too. These could be people who are already on your database. If you don’t already have a database, you can start to collect emails from your website with an email opt-in form. To encourage visitors to opt-in to your email list offers them something of value (eg, a free report, discount voucher, etc) in exchange for their email address.

Get Email Campaign Software

Conventional email administration systems, like Apple Mail, Outlook, Windows Mail, Gmail, etc, are not designed for email marketing. You need to invest in specialist email campaign software, known as an autoresponder. An autoresponder can handle many more emails than you could ever process manually and enables you to send, obtain, manage and organise your email list of customers.

Have One Focus

Make your email focused on one item or one offer. Determine the one thing you want your audience to do after reading your email. Don’t overwhelm your audience with lots of different links to different items in your emails. Instead, provide one link for the focused information that you want to get across to your audience. You can always up-sell and cross-sell at the point of checkout.

Create Subject Lines That Spark Interest

Your subject line has to make the reader interested enough to open the email to read it. Then, when they open the email, the first line of text needs to grab their attention so they continue reading.

Always Provide Value

There are many different types of email marketing campaigns. Don’t just use your emails to sell. For instance, send your readers tips and guidance that helps them to put your products or services to their best use. Give your email subscribers something that no one else is getting just for being a subscriber.

Allow Subscribers To Opt-Out

Include opt-out information that is easy to find in every email that you send out. Don’t be concerned about people unsubscribing. It’s better to have a clean list of people who want to be there than a list full of people who begrudge getting your information.

Check Your Stats

When you have sent out your email campaign, your autoresponder software will provide you with information on who opened your message and who clicked the links. Use this information to target different sections of your database with more focused messages on your next campaign