Dos and Don'ts for Email Marketing

Email marketing never fails to show promise. Though this marketing tactic is far from fresh, it’s continually proven to be an effective strategy for maintaining relationships and nurturing leads. However, marketers can’t help but feel a little impersonal and disconnected with this marketing approach compared to some others. It’s understandable how many emails go unopened, deleted or ignored.
 
To help you combat those “should I or shouldn’t Is,” we’ve compiled a list of dos and don’ts for email marketing. If there’s at least one thing you should take away from this, it’s the fact that email marketing remains an effective tool for reaching customers and should be utilized.
DO:

• Grow your list organically. Sure, this takes more time, and you’ll probably need some incentives to get people to give you their email addresses. But with this approach, you build a list of people who have interacted with your brand and will have an interest in your newsletters.

• Send educational material. One of the purposes of writing content is to show your audience that you are a trusted authority. Display your credibility by including educational content that addresses common customer problems. Don’t have anything in the works? Include the latest links to an upcoming webinar or a SlideShare presentation.

• Make your emails mobile friendly. More people are checking their email on their mobile devices, so the last thing you want are emails that don’t load properly. Send emails that are optimized for mobile devices so that they read easily, have clickable links and load quickly. This also shows that you’re not behind the trends.

• Create an email marketing calendar. This should look similar to your content calendar and include the material you want in the email and hard offers. This prevents your email newsletter from turning into a sloppy, last-minute project.

• Utilize drip marketing. When people sign up for your newsletter, they only see the emails that are coming now, not anything from before. Drip marketing fixes this issue, at least partly, by assigning a series of emails that are sent out to new subscribers at certain intervals. This ensures that key information you want to reach all customers will, regardless of when they sign up.

DON’T:

• Buy your contacts. It’s the fast and easy way to get a lot of contacts, but this is largely ineffective. You’re essentially sending out your newsletter to people who may not know who you are, and some will have no problem flagging your emails as spam.

• Overdo the emails you send. This is easy to do since people on the receiving end are fairly quiet, but too many emails may get you on the unsubscribed list. You may even want to narrow down how many emails are included in your drip marketing campaign since you don’t want to bombard new subscribers.

• Treat your email marketing campaign separately. As you build out your email marketing calendar, think about your other marketing efforts and how they can build on each other. For instance, encourage email subscribers to sign up for your Facebook content or company blog. All of your marketing efforts should complement each other for maximum exposure.