If you do it well email marketing is is a cost effective and highly trackable marketing tool. I’ve been doing it for myself and my clients for years now. I average about a 60% open rate. My last one had an open rate of 88%. No not all of them are paid subscribers, in fact most of them are not. Your open rates can be that high if you put a little effort into it.
Here are some basic on how to get you emails opened and read.
The first thing is to make sure you are gathering and managing your leads in a way that is compliant with best practices. Use only leads you have collected yourself either in person or through your website.
Define the goal of your emails. It should be to forge a relationship with potential customers, not beat them over the head with a sales pitch in every email. Remember, email marketing is long term.
Subject line:
Avoid spammy words like Free or Your Won. A good email program will give you tools to check this before you send. Test it on your Gmail account. Gmail has a very pretty good spam filter. If your email doesn’t get through, something is wrong.
Personalize. Again, a good email platform gives you the tools to do this. I recommend that you have your lead generator set up to gather first and last names seperately so you can automate them to be personalized by first name only.
Body:
Talk directly to an individual. Rather than talking to a group make it feel as if you are talking directly to the reader. Again, personalization can help here.
Keep you emails short and succinct. Keep them simple in language using a conversational tone.
Keep them beautiful. Avoid a solid block of text. Use sub heads and breaks to increase readability. Avoid over use of exclamation points and ALL CAPS.
Add images if the make sense to the email.
State your desired call to action and make the follow thru easy by using links and buttons.
Send it at the right time.
Avoid late Friday and the weekend. It will get lost in the Monday morning avalanche of email.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are great days to choose. Send morning through mid afternoon.
Frequency
Don’t overdo it. Unless you are writing something that needs daily attention like top news headlines or horoscopes no more than once a week is best. Most businesses can do once every 2 to 4 weeks, but bridal vendors have a much shorter window of opportunity.
Keep your readers.
If you have been reading Think lately than you are working on the reinvention and you may well have hit upon a plan to keep your customers for life. If so, shift them off of the bridal list to a more permanent one after their wedding date. Ask permission in an unsubscribe follow up email.You can alos put a note in your footer that will remind them that they can unsubscribe from your bridal list once their wedding is planned but keep receiving email about your other services.
If you have done a good job of engaginging you leads while brides, they will glady keep subscribing. this gives you more opportunities to convert from leads to customers.
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Full disclosure. I highly recommend A Weber, not just because I am an affilate but because I have been using it for the last 5 years. Their system is great, secure, reasonalbly priced and their tech support is top notch. Yep, there is a link in the sidebar if you want to know more.
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