Email Marketing: Is Anybody Out There? Part 1

Should you ever bring up the topic of email marketing, you will certainly hear people complain about the hundreds of emails they receive on a daily basis. They will tell you stories about the endless “junk” they receive and how they try to opt-out from all that spam to no avail. They might even give you a strange look and wonder you if you are one of “those people” who sends out huge volumes of email.

The worst part about spam email may be that your own marketing message gets lost in the heap. With so many businesses sending multiple messages, how can you stand out from the crowd and ensure that your message actually gets noticed? To cut through the spam filters and be sure that your message is one that someone truly wants to read, consider the following:

1. The success of your email starts with your offer. When business owners want to improve their success with email marketing, they immediately look at what they are sending. Look deeply into your offerings to ensure that they provide enough value to qualify as “real” (as opposed to spam) email. The better you make your offers, the more responsive your prospects will be.

Whether your database holds 200 email clients or a million, find out how people initially learned about company. Did recipients originally sign up for a newsletter? Did they sign up for a white paper to learn more about a particular offering or service? Far too often the same email messages are sent to every prospect in a database. The person who signed up for the newsletter is looking for something entirely different than the person who signed up for a white paper.

2. An interest-piquing subject line. Most business owners take the time to carefully review their marketing pieces before they go out. They might work with a designer on color details for their website or change the layout of a brochure multiple times before it lands in the hands of a prospect. But what about the time they spend looking at the subject line of an email?