Making It Easy: Email Marketing Best Practices

Email is where your Business Begins and Ends

Often, fresh email marketers want to reduce costs, and thus opt for controlling their email marketing campaigns by hand without the use of software. Now, although initially this is possible, what inevitably happens is that their list grows.

First to 100, then 300, then 550 and before they have time to realize the mess they’ve gotten themselves in to, they’re unable to keep up with their list management. In order to maintain your sanity, it is important to automate many of the repetitive email marketing tasks from the very beginning by using good email marketing software.

Which Email Newsletter Software to use?
Ultimately, what new email marketers should really do is read a few email marketing reviews and invest in email newsletter software that helps automate the more repetitive tasks. Things like managing un-subscriptions, performance analysis, email design and email scheduling are just a few of the benefits of sufficient email marketing software.

Generally, prices range from $10/month all the way to a couple thousand if your list is very big, but chances are that you will be in the $10/month range for quite a while as you begin to grow your list. There are a variety of software programs available and I recommend you look at Aweber Email Management. Ultimately the point of email marketing software is to help you focus on two things, increasing your Optins and writing great content to get more readers.

Testing Newsletter Delivery
One of the most important tasks of any email marketer should be concerned about is performance testing. This involves segmenting or breaking down your list and then trying various calls to action, content layouts, button and ad placement and so-on. Again, new email marketers should review an email marketing software comparison After making a few changes and then sending a fresh newsletter, recording the results. Then alter it again to see if your readers increase or your sales from the emails increase.

Over time you will notice that a certain combination of text, calls to action and layout consistently perform the best. This is one way professional email marketers get such great results, it’s because they test!

Now, it’s not very easy to test your emails on your own, especially as your email list balloons, but great email marketing software will help automate this aspect by literally tracking exactly which subscribers open and respond to your emails. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest benefits of email marketing software. You now know what got them to open, and what offer got them to take action.

Content is King!
The other important benefit of email marketing software is that it lets you focus on the meat of your newsletter, the content. Now, there are many different theories on what makes great content for an email marketing newsletter, but generally, it’s important to consider your audience first.

I notice that many new email marketers focus their newsletters too much on their own business, which of course is important to you but boring for most everyone else. Remember it’s important to consider your audience and make your material unique and interesting to them.

Simply including a poll, a few links to beneficial “how-to” articles or even interviewing someone in the field and providing a download to the audio file in the email will do wonders for your conversion rates and subscriber retention.

Remember, nobody cares enough about your business to spend their free time reading about it in every single newsletter.

Ultimately, you want time to focus on boosting your business, not managing every nuance of your email campaigns. Fortunately, there is great email marketing software available that can help you save time from the very beginning.