Do's and Don'ts of Email Marketing

In my last post, I told a cautionary tale about how email marketing, when done incorrectly, can backfire. Instead of firing up your email and hoping for the best, follow these tips designed to help you keep your email marketing campaign on track:

Do:

• Consider your target audience and their wants and needs when creating your email marketing campaign
• Create separate campaigns for different audiences aimed at their specific needs
• Make sure that every email you send out provides value for that target audience
• Feature others and provide useful information or links - even if it isn't to your own products, services or content
• Make it easy to read: use language clients and potential clients can understand
• Send emails often enough to remain top of mind
• Schedule your emails to be sent on a consistent basis so readers know when to expect them
• Use email marketing to announce upcoming events, new services or general news about you, your firm and your strategic business partners
• Include photos and other graphics
• Give it some personality
• Provide opportunities for your audience to comment or respond
• Include your contact information and links to your website and and other online activities
• Be sure that your recipients have consented to receive your newsletter or other emails from you (better yet, have them sign up themselves or affirmatively confirm they're opting-in)
• Use a professional product or service like Constant Contact, Aweber or InfusionSoft to send out your emails, keep track of your statistics and open rates and manage your list
• Make sure your email campaign complies with the CAN-SPAM act
• Provide an unsubscribe link
• Be clear about who your email originates from

Don't

• Send every email to everyone on your contact list, regardless of whether the content is appropriate for them or their business
• Make it all about you
• Send dry, boring emails full of 'legalese' or jargon
• Overload your audience with constant emails
• Send emails haphazardly or so infrequently that your audience forgets who you are
• Miss the opportunity to inform your readership of offline activities and events
• Make it difficult to read with too much text and not enough white space
• Used 'canned' campaigns or newsletters that fail to show off your knowledge, expertise and your personal touch
• Limit your campaigns to one-way communication
• Send emails from your personal email account
• Share email addresses with others - even inadvertently. If you MUST use an email group, don't allowing the addresses to be seen by everyone in the group

Please share your own email marketing stories and add to my list of do's and don'ts by commenting on this post!

Comments

[Email Marketing Services]

That's a long list of knowledge. Thanks for all the reminders.

[Legal Advice]

Thanks for sharing with me such a nice information,i really like this blog so much because it gives me lot's of knowledge.

[Gloria]

Hi, I think your post will surely teach a lot to those email marketers. Now email marketing is commonly used by businessmen but not all of them succeed. They should really care more about the feeling of the recipient. The existence of some useful email marketing services, such as Comm100 Newsletter---a tool that can send emails and newsletter effectively, makes it easier for marketer to send business emails to the inboxes of the targets. However, if they can’t come up with good email contents, the results may turn out frustrating.