Despite everything being said to the contrary, many people are still using email marketing in preference to taking up advertising on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Email marketing has been with us for some time now and many businesspeople feel comfortable with it because they believe they understand how it works. However we must be careful that we don’t become too familiar for if we do we could easily undo all the effort we are putting in with these disastrous mistakes.
Don’t Bother About Spam Laws
Your email campaign can become a disaster if you ignore spam legislation. In the United States spam laws are affected by both federal and state legislation. Ignore either at your peril. Europe also has spam regulation to be aware of. One of the most frequent infringements of spam regulation is caused by the instigator of the email campaign not placing an ‘opt out’ or ‘unsubscribe’ option in the body of the email. Any unsolicited email without such an option will instantly be regarded as spam. To have your entire email campaign seen as spam because of such a simple omission is actually bad business, as who would it hurt to have such a option included in the first place.
Ignore Good Spelling and Good Grammar
Newsletters sent out via email can also do you more harm than good if they are badly written with spelling and grammar mistakes. If your content looks cheap and nasty it will not get read and if it is not read the whole process will have been a waste of your time. If you are unable to string a few meaningful words together without it looking like a primary school production, have someone else do it for you.
Don’t Double Opt-In
On the surface you will go to sleep at night with the belief that you have sent out so many thousand emails to potential clients. You feel you must be successful with some of them. Wrong! The majority of them will finish up in the spam folders of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. All three of these most popular email accounts have mastered to art of filtering out spam mail.
One way of beating a spam filter is by including in your email an ‘opt-in’ option. This makes your email recipient friendly. Opt-in must be used with something worthwhile and of value. You might use you opt-in to offer your email recipient a discount on some product if they agree to receive your newsletter every so often. In this way it is they who ask you to send them such information and your email from then on is no longer unsolicited.
A double opt-in will work even better in avoiding automatic spam filters. It will also weed out the more casual taker and leave you with a more likely prospect. All a double opt-in does is ask your email recipient to confirm that it was actually them who opted-in in the first place. It could also be a good opportunity to offer another bonus as an upgrade on the first. The secret is in thinking creatively to increase your email marketing success considerably.
Direct Everyone to Your Home Page
Sending an email newsletter campaign with a link to your home page can also be a turn off. People like to go directly to what they are looking for. If, after all your previous work in making your email spam free and offering bonuses you fall down at the last hurdle, it has all been a waste of time and effort.
No doubt your email or newsletter will be highlighting a certain product you have to sell. If this is so have the link URL go directly to the page on your website that contains that specific item. Many people are not going to go to the trouble of flipping through all your pages to find what you have been talking about. If they land on your home page they will often leave immediately. If they land on the page where the item and all its details are located, they will look and read, This heightens the chance that they may also buy.
Once You Have Produced Your Copy Forget it From Then On
It is just as easy for you to give quality to your emails, newsletters and websites as it is for a large multi-national company. There is no excuse for lack of quality. The time you spend on providing your readers with quality will be time well spent as if your copy is shabbily produced your email recipient will most likely discard it immediately.
You will need to constantly upgrade the content on your emails just as much as upgrading the content material on your website pages. People will notice if copy becomes stale and once they do it can be a serious turn off. This also extends to the use of images. A good image can make your email more attractive, but when the average person is going through his or her email there are usually quite a number lined up. This means there is often not a lot of time available to open all the images. If you do use an image keep it small so that it will download quickly.
