How to Create E-Mail Marketing that Doesn’t End Up in the Junk Folder
Most people will be familiar with e-mail spam and in fact the concept of junk mail is much older than the internet. Direct marketing has been a popular promotional method for decades and for many businesses it can be a way to significantly increase sales. The main obstacle that faces most e-mail marketing is that most of it goes straight in the trash without being read and success hinges on finding ways to entice your customers to open your promotional e-mails. There are three essential factors to consider before committing to an e-mail campaign; the suitability of e-mail promotions in your niche, the kind and quality of the e-mail content and the frequency of the mail outs.
Not all products or industries are going to be suited to using e-mail marketing and before you invest in creating a campaign around e-mail circulation it is good to have a clear idea of the goals that you are setting for your e-mail marketing. It may be useful in some industries for the purposes of exposing their brand for a relatively small cost and in others it could be a digital version of a weekly brochure of specials. Finding the most appropriate use for e-mail promotions in your overall online marketing strategy is the first step to having people actually read it.
The quality of the content is going to be the deciding factor in whether people read it or not. Having a headline that doesn’t sound like the opening line of your sales pitch but which is still enticing enough to encourage people to read it is vital. It should clearly express the nature of the content and tell the reader of the benefits of reading on all in six or eight words. The content of the e-mail should be more engaging than a straight sales pitch and because e-mail is considered to be a very personal medium, the writing should address the reader and include them in the story with informative and interesting material. If you are in an industry that has a lot of trends and gossip to follow then a regular e-mail that includes all of the buzz can be a way to introduce your sales pitch copy in a relevant way. Company newsletters that discuss the latest topics of interest in your niche can be used to build your reputation for expertise in your industry. For some businesses a simple list of discounts for the week may be of sufficient value to their customers to keep them interested.
The third consideration for e-mail marketing is the frequency with which you send out your promotional material. If you look in your own junk folder there will be a number of spam e-mails there that come every day and don’t have enough value for you to read them that regularly. Most businesses probably don’t have enough good quality new information to share in a daily e-mail and it is better to have one weekly e-mail newsletter go out that is full of valuable information than it is to have five that have little in them to interest readers. If you can maintain the level of interesting content then people are more likely to look for them on your mail out days because the information in them has previously been useful to them. As with all of the different forms of online marketing now, the focus of e-mail marketing is on giving the reader something of value in order to begin a professional relationship with them. When it is used well, e-mail marketing can be the best way to develop those relationships with your customers.
