Make your email marketing stand out

While some forms of marketing are never guaranteed to reach your target audience, email marketing can... and does.

If done correctly, email is a brilliant tool for nurturing relationships with your audience, getting closer to them in order to convert them to customers or clients.

But a word of advice, the number of unsolicited email newsletters that arrive in our inboxes these days means that the good ones really do stand out from the crowd.

You don’t want to see recipients heading for the unsubscribe button – so if you’ve managed to succeed in securing new email subscribers (and by law you have to make sure people have opted in as part of data protection laws) give them what they signed up for – high quality, useful and original information.

Your audience is full of busy people, snapshot paragraphs which will entice them to click a link to a larger article on your website will work perfectly. And don’t use shouty capital letters – it could come across as a little aggressive and could be treated by some email servers as junk!

Some tips on producing the newsletter:

First impressions count.

So, keep it simple, to the point, and give the reader a reason to want to explore further. Mix up email subjects with varying content and offers – don’t keep using the same lines, readers will get bored.

No essays – don’t write reams of copy in the body of your newsletter.

Be friendly – treat the conversation as though you were talking to someone face-toface, so be courteous, polite and use the type of language you adopt in your business as a whole.

Email marketing is an extension of your business messaging, it simply provides another very useful online marketing technique to talk to your audience. This will allow you to get closer to them and build their trust.

There is no excuse for errors in email marketing. Check it many times, get someone else to check it and test a sample send first of all before launching it on your entire database. Mistakes smack of unprofessionalism and don’t promote your business in the best light.

A big concern is while businesses think or know they should be email marketing they don’t give enough thought to how they address their audience. This is PR – every online message you send out is PR and reflects on your business reputation so it’s worth remembering that when you start your next email marketing campaign.