Email Marketing Tips

Any home based business can benefit from using email marketing newsletters to increase sales. Even if you have built a fairly large following on eBayR, EtsyR, or similar website vehicle for selling your unique products, you can benefit from reminding past customers of new items or sending out special pricing on overstock, unique crafts not offered publicly, or shipping offers.

The mere fact that you may be using the most popular retail sites and/or have your own store pages won’t necessarily bring previous buyers back or bring new customers to your product pages. To do this you need to communicate with them on a regular basis by creating and sending an email marketing newsletters. You can build your email lists by offering incentives to current customers to share your newsletters, and by having a signup form on your website and sales pages.

Now, the next step in building your home based business is to find a provider of web-based email marketing software, especially one that offers html email marketing templates that you can add on to with the all-important photos of your work or resale items. And don’t forget the links back to your eBay store or business website.

Make sure you use a ‘call to action’ above the fold of your email marketing newsletters. And to make them even more appealing, offer a savings incentive like free shipping.

Speaking of incentives – your email marketing newsletters should contain special deals for your subscribers to forward your offers to friends and family or include Buy One, Get One (BOGO), free or half-price sales for your repeat customers. You know your business better than anyone and know what you can afford, and in this tough economy, almost everyone is looking for value-added offers and sales to stretch the ever-shrinking dollar.

You should also try some of the new web-based widgets like eVoiceSpot that let you quickly and easily create e-commercials complete with images, background music, and voice-overs. This one in particular allows you to embed the presentation on your eBay pages, Facebook profiles, and in your fully functional html email marketing template.

For many businesses, well-designed and carefully written email marketing newsletters are an integral part of their marketing strategy because they help to build customer trust and repeat sales.

If your business hasn’t started an email marketing newsletter here are a few suggestions to help you get started.

Your Mailing List – Anticipate Growth!

The first step for your new email marketing newsletter campaign is to choose an email marketing company that will grow with your business. Look for one that has several account options that allow for small to very large email lists. This would include sliding scale rates based on the number of emails sent per month, unlimited send based on the number of subscribers in an account, and/or bulk send options designed for businesses that send out 100,000 or more emails but only once or twice per year.

Security for You and Your Customers

An equally important element in building a successful email marketing strategy is providing your subscribers with reliable and recognized security measures that can only be ensured when you use web-based permission email marketing solutions. This guarantees the email marketing company that you choose fully complies with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and provides you with opt-in subscriber features. Anti-spam policies vary, however, the best email marketing services clearly state their policies and procedures for dealing with suspected spamming. This is your guarantee that your emails will not end up in your subscriber’s junk folders. Click here to learn more about these policies.

First Impressions – Start with the Subject Line

What is the most compelling information in your newsletter? Is it a sale, upcoming event, or new information about your business? Have you just launched a new website or are you launching a new product? Whatever this information is, take a few moments to craft a concise and compelling teaser line. Make sure you don’t exceed 50 characters, including spaces. This will ensure the entire subject line is displayed, helping to increase your open rates.

Better yet – make your subject line your call to action and then make sure that this is followed up in the top half of your email marketing newsletter by repeating it and then provide a link or links for your follow up!

Remember- Quality Not Quantity!

You don’t have to include every word of an article or include complete product specs in your newsletters. In fact, a few lines about a product or a paragraph or two from an article along with links to more information work quite nicely in peaking your subscriber’s interest. And don’t forget to test your links to make sure they take people where you want them to go.

Pictures are still worth a thousand words.

Well, maybe not a thousand words but they are very valuable for introducing new products, people, and places. These too should be linked to either larger images that include more detail, to the full article text, or more information.

Once you have created a couple of email marketing newsletters the process will get easier and you will be well on your way to creating your own email marketing best practices and building your business.

Are you taking full advantage of the internet and exposing your company’s brand to a large cross-section of consumers, or are you reserving that spiffy new ad campaign exclusively to magazines, newspapers, billboards, and your website? If you answered yes to the last question, then you need to consider expanding your brand exposure beyond traditional print media with email marketing newsletters.

Today’s email marketing companies offer html email marketing templates that are highly customizable with a user friendly system that makes it quick and easy to add branded banners and footers to your email promotions. The affordability is one of the best reasons to ramp up your brand building with email marketing newsletters.

A few email marketing companies are now building in links and widgets for sharing email promotions on the most popular social networking sites. Once brand recognition is established through your email marketing newsletters you can then count on adding a large percentage of new business given the built-in viral capabilities of email marketing solutions.

Most companies realize the benefit of building consumer trust and your brand is your promise to your current and future customers. Therefore, you should also trust the email marketing company you choose and offer that same level of confidence to your customers by using web-based permission email marketing solutions. The security that is associated with this type of double opt-in subscription management lets potential subscribers to your email marketing newsletters know that their security is important – bumping the trust factor up a notch.

Predictability is another factor in building trust in your brand. Consumers don’t want to be buried in constant email from any one company or organization but a majority like to be offered relevant information and sales on items that they are most likely to be interested in. To make sure that you are offering both to the majority of your subscribers look for an email marketing company that provides the tools to create, send, and post a consumer survey on a website. Questions can range from product preferences to delivery frequency. In this way segmented subscriber lists can be created, which will help with subscriber retention when they receive special offers for products and services they have indicated they will be most interested in – along with how often they want to hear from you.

Using email marketing best practices will help you build brand recognition and consumer trust while it helps grow your business without breaking your marketing budget!

The use of "free" has become a marketing staple for Internet businesses, from free shipping and handling to the BOGO or buy-one, get-one free offers. Of course Internet shopkeepers didn’t invent this but have expanded on it from the early days of retail marketing.

So let’s take the "free" aspect of Internet marketing one step further and consider the reality of free email marketing. First, consider the difference between the restrictive costs and processes that go into the old paper trail of direct mail, newspaper and magazine advertising and the nominal costs associated with email marketing newsletters.

Okay, email marketing isn’t exactly free but if you're using the comparison above then it really is almost free! No matter what avenue you take there are constants with any marketing plan. From the time it takes to create images, write your messages, and plan weekly sales to the delivery of your promotion to customers, there are costs associated with any marketing plan.

However, with email marketing newsletters once it is completed it can be sent out immediately to one or one million customers – no wait time for printing, assembly, and delivery. No muss – no fuss!

There are several email marketing companies that offer a wide range of services to make your email marketing newsletters more streamlined in regard to creation and easy-to-track results so you can assess the effectiveness of this part of your marketing plan. Comparatively, there is no reliable method to track traditional print media marketing.

If you use web-based permission email marketing solutions then you are bumping the effectiveness of your email marketing newsletters up a notch by adding another layer of security that your subscribers will respond positively to. You may also want to add a disclaimer to your sign-up forms that states you do not share customer information with any third parties. This will go a long way to building your subscriber lists, as your current subscribers will feel confident in sharing your newsletters with friends and family.

Your email marketing newsletters will also be a great asset to building traffic on your website as subscribers will be more inclined to click the links as they read your newsletter. And those are the links that you choose – helping to take a bit of control over the content your customers see first.

And don’t forget customer feedback. Adding survey links to your HTML email newsletter templates tells your customers that their complete satisfaction in your products and services is important to you. This builds trust and, best of all, repeat sales!

The average open rate for a mature email marketing newsletter campaign is between 20 and 30 percent. Although open rates can and will fluctuate depending on the type of business or the time of year or holiday season.

To make sure that you’re maximizing the chances that your email marketing newsletter will be consistently opened by your subscribers there are a few things you can do:

Use trusted web-based permission email marketing solutions as a first best step to ensuring your email marketing newsletters are received by your subscribers. A variety of email marketing companies offer web-based email marketing software. They also offer html email marketing templates that render perfectly in all the most popular email applications.

Subject lines are a first impression – and if it doesn’t make a good first impression – your email newsletter will be a victim of the delete button. Take some time to create a subject line for your email marketing newsletters that is a call to action and relevant to the context of your promotion or the information included. Try splitting up your subscriber list and send each group the same email marketing newsletter with different subject lines. In this way you can compare open rates and determine what works and what doesn’t.

You may also want to experiment with delivery on different days of the week and times of the day. If your customers are mostly from the corporate world the chance of getting your email marketing newsletter deleted with the morning inbox flood are high, so you might want to choose an early afternoon delivery instead.

Open rates are also gauged by the way email applications block or allow images, in turn effecting tracking software. You may find that you have a disproportionate number of clicks compared to your open rates. If the email address for your email marketing newsletter is not part of your subscriber’s safe sender list then images are usually blocked. To avoid this situation, include a message on your opt-in permission sign-up form for your new subscribers to add your email address to their safe sender list. It is also a good idea to add this message above the header in each of your email marketing newsletters as well.

Make sure you keep your subscriber lists up to date. Most email marketing companies offer subscriber maintenance features that help you weed out the email addresses that are no longer valid. If that feature isn’t offered with the email marketing company you are currently using – you may want to look for another one that does.

And last but not least, make sure you aren’t inducing email fatigue on your subscribers by sending your email marketing newsletters too often. If you are sending more than once a week, you may want to scale that back to weekly or bi-weekly.