Reaching Out To Your Email List

Email marketing has changed the way many companies do business. If you have built up a list of email addresses which is ripe for marketing purposes, the last thing you want to do is let this opportunity to grow your business slip through your fingers. The eternal question for a lot of email marketers is this: “How do I avoid losing customers through over-enthusiastic marketing while not losing out on custom because I was too cautious?”. Being measured is the absolute key here. It is important to get the approach just right if you want to have the best results.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. How do you strike the right balance? It requires you to think about your reasons for sending an email to a mailing list. It requires an equal amount of thought to go to what you put into the email. You want people to read these messages, and knowing how you react to spam, you will be aware that that is no easy thing to ensure. Email marketing depends more than anything on being a skilled communicator.

It will probably come as no shock to you that people tend to skim read, and if they haven’t got to the meat of the message within the first few lines they are likely to either delete the email or return to their inbox to read something else. They are unlikely to come back to the email you sent them if they feel that it was unimportant. Therefore it is important in all email marketing to hit the topic right away. It should be mentioned in the subject line – if they delete your email without even opening it then it might as well never have been sent – and you should get on topic right away, which means in the first line.

If you have a particular gift for writing in an entertaining way, then there is no need to shy away from doing so. If you can offer customers a deal and make them laugh in the same email then there is every reason to do so, but retain an aspect of relevance the whole way through. Don’t give them three paragraphs of gags and finish the mail with “Oh, and by the way, printer cartridges are no at 50% off until July 1st!”. They are more likely to close the email thinking “Funny guy!” than “Printer cartridges 50% off!”

Email marketing when done well can really boost your conversion rate and return on investment – an investment that it next to non-existent given the fact that email is free. But if you don’t make it work for you then you are better off not doing it at all. If you send out emails for no reason that the neutral observer could understand, you will find that you start getting bounceback messages from some addresses – and from there, it is a short leap to no-one reading at all. Email marketing is a powerful weapon, but it can backfire.