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Email Marketing Essentials
Not all email content achieves the sender’s objectives. Some end up annoying the reader and being marked as spam. Good email content results in an exchange between the sender and their recipients. The first step is effective subject line writing. This not only gets your email opened. Having a distinct writing style or voice gets your emails read, while meeting your objective of sharing a quality message gets it shared.
However, before sending bulk emails, one important task that you should accomplish is to ensure your reader is expectant of your email. And you do that by creating credibility which ultimately builds into trust. One reason many emails are never read is they come off too strongly with their selling language-beating the reason for newsletters, to share news.
In order to change this, there are some simple steps that one can follow to create better responses to email and achieve higher open rates. Here is how.
1. Don’t Spam
This should be your first policy. Never send unsolicited emails to potential or regular clients. Just because you have done business does not mean that you should email them your newsletter without their consent. Ensure that everyone on your email list accepted your offer to email them consciously. Well, for your first message, ask your reader to white list you so that your emails never get sent into a spam folder.
2. Use A Single Warm Personal Message.
This allows you to create a strong rapport from the beginning. If you can get a hold of email sending software that also inserts names-even better.
3. Observe Anti-spam Policies
Some organizations, especially in the business world are keen on specific phrases and words that appear in emails-referring to these as spam triggers. This is usually not a major issue since these days spam filtering has become more sophisticated. However using specific phrases will still increase the likelihood of your email being marked as spam depending on the spam policies of the organization you are sending to. Spamassassin is a very popular free spam filtering software and it allows the administrator to control the spam score for certain phrases. You can find a list of standard spam triggers – not all of which are automatically activated Spamassasin – and their scores on http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_1_x.html.
4. Trigger A Conversation
There should always be someone to check on correspondence as a result of your mailing and reply. Best case scenario – it should be you. Growing this conversation is important so that your brand takes on a life of its own among your clients.
5. Always Use Irresistible Subject Lines
Email subject lines should be handled with the same care and ingenuity that newspapers and tabloids give to their top page spreads- well maybe with more professionalism and truth 🙂 Each subject line should be useful, specific, unique and urgent. Lacking these elements may mean little or no attention from your readers. The headline should provide the value of reading your email at a glance and should show urgency when needed (not the urgency of getting a discount).
