Every blog should invest heavily in email marketing. Email marketing is a form of marketing that allows you to communicate directly with your audience while cutting out the middle man. Unlike social media marketing, you are not reliant on a third party to pass on your message and you won’t lose all your hard work if your members decide to delete their account.
Moreover, email marketing will help you to convert your readers far more efficiently than any other form of marketing and the simple reason for this is that email marketing is much more personal. These are messages that will end up right in your visitors’ inboxes – just as though they were messages from a friend or relative.
But in order to do email marketing right, there are a lot of things you need to keep in mind. Read on for some of the most important pointers.
Be Personal
Tip number one is to make sure that your emails are personal in tone. We have already just discussed that email marketing is more personal in tone – and you thus need to match that tone in your writing if you are going to make your emails more engaging and interesting.
But this has another advantage too – it will help you to get past not only the spam filter more efficiently but also the ‘social’ and ‘marketing’ email boxes found on Outlook and Gmail. Use the recipient’s name (most autoresponders include this feature) and make sure that your messages use a regular letter-type structure.
Maintain Your List and Target
Your ‘Sender Reputation’ is a score that is linked with your IP address and/or domain in much the same way that a credit score can be linked with a particular account. The idea of a sender reputation is that it will reflect the quality of your emails on a whole and whether or not you should be allowed to ‘get through’ to your readers.
There are many things that will cause you to get a bad score. One of these things is your bounce rate and if lots of your emails bounce, this can badly affect your score. Another thing is your open rate and if none of your emails get opened, this too will hurt you. The same goes for complaints of course.
So that means you need to focus on the quality of your list more than the size. Are these people who really read your blog and who really asked to be hear? It’s why you must never buy contacts. Likewise, if you have people who never open your messages – delete them!
Use the Right Incentive
An incentive is a free gift like an ebook or report that you give away to new subscribers. This is a great tool for encouraging people to sign up but it’s important to be very careful when using it. The reason for this is that the wrong incentive can actually harm your mailing list. If it’s too valuable for instance then people will sign up only to get the free gift and then never open your messages subsequently – very bad for sender reputation!
