3 Questions to Ask Before You Send Another e-mail Campaign
Recently I was consulting one of my clients and he was asking me how to set up groups in Outlook to send his e-Newsletter to. WHAT!? Needless to say I helped him switch his contact list over to Constant Contact (which was super easy) and got him rolling using their service so that he can now monitor all kinds of stats. (click through, what’s hot, who marked it as spam, etc) If you are not getting any feedback from your online activities how will you know that it is working? Constant Contact even gives you a FREE trial. There are some things to think about before you signup and send out your first successful email campaign.
What are the main e-mail marketing strategies?
The two main e-mail programs are designed for two major purposes. Promos are short, to the point e-mails with flashy images. These typically encourage the viewer to take immediate action. Immediate action can be a wide variety of things such as make a purchase or download something now. The other e-mail program are newsletters which push out much more information to boost your viewers trust and increase your credibility. By offering good quality FREE information to your viewers about your niche market they will view you as the authority on the topics thus trusting you when it comes time to make a purchase. This program works on a long term basis. You can mix the two programs but keep in mind the intended goal when hitting the send button.
Who should I send my e-mail campaigns out to?
Consider every contact point with your customers as an opportunity to gain their e-mail address and permission to send them your e-mail campaigns. Offer incentives that are exclusive on your e-mail campaigns to give people a reason to sign up.
There are e-mail address lists that you can buy but I would highly recommend staying away from them, in most cases they are scams and if they are selling lists to you that means the addresses have been bombarded with other e-mail campaigns. Just stay away.
By using Constant Contact you can also have a signup box on your site that they provide. This will make it as painless as possible for users to signup and their info will automagically go into your database. Once in there you can manage if you want to separate them into groups to pinpoint a specific niche group. Very powerful tool!
How often should I send out a campaign?
The rule of thumb is to send out an e-mail campaign at least monthly and no more than twice a week. If you wait longer than one month your target audience might forget why they signed up in the first place and if you are slamming them with daily campaigns they will most likely get fet up with them and unsubscribe.
