Email marketing can be a great way of reaching clients and prospects. Done successfully, it can be an effective lead generating tool and a great way to educate and nurture existing clients. However, done ineffectively, and all of your efforts can end up in someone’s trash, spam folder – or worse, you could end up on the “Do Not Email” or “Unsubscribe” list. Don’t let this discourage you from sending emails to your clients and prospects, though. Email marketing is also a really powerful tool for keeping you and your business top of mind with prospects and current customers.
What exactly is email marketing?
If you have an email address that you use on a pretty consistent basis, then I’m sure you’ve seen marketing emails. Martketingterms.com defines email marketing as simply “the promotion of products or services via email.” Marketing emails are usually sent with the intent of educating consumers and prospects through newsletters, announcements and press releases about new or current products, sales promotions or other exclusive time-sensitive information. Most of us are probably guilty of deleting some of these emails before opening them or even allowing them to add to the number of unread messages that sit in our inbox for eternity. However, this isn’t favorable for effective email marketing or lead generating. So here are a few tips for successfully sending these emails and getting them read.
Where should I begin?
Build your subscriber list. Building a continuous list of subscribers is key. This can simply be done through an information capturing form located on your website. Just make sure you are upfront and honest about what you are providing the subscriber or what you are doing with the information they provide, prior to submission. Here is an information request form on our sister brand, Displet’s website.
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Talk with your audience, not at them. Engaging conversation is always more appealing to clients than just throwing information at them. Your clients probably already understand that you are the expert in your field, this is why they have provided their information to you or requested more information from you. Therefore, spitting hardcore facts at them instead of engaging text will likely get your emails unread time and time again. 
More tips for engaging email content:
Your email should be interesting from the moment it lands in the recipient’s inbox. Think about this like a newspaper heading. It should grab the reader’s attention immediately.
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Make your email personal. Making your email personal can be as simple as sending it from your email address instead of an automated email server.
Keep your emails from landing in spam folders. You can’t control what happens to emails after you send them however, you can control to whom, when, and how often they are sent. If recipients have not opted-in or signed up to receive emails from you or if you are over-loading their inbox, your emails are likely to be sent to spam. Keep your emails from accidentally being flagged by spam filters by avoiding subject text in all caps, using too many exclamation marks, or using poorly formatted HTML templates.
Keep your email content clean and crisp. Nothing else to explain here.
Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe. You want to keep your email marketing campaign friendly and honest. Allowing subscribers to unsubscribe at their will and providing the option to opt-out and keep your emails from landing in spam folders.
Provide valuable content. You don’t want to waste your reader’s time. Providing them content of value, where they actually feel like they are getting something in return of providing their email address, will help them take pride in being on your subscriber’s list. Educational industry information or insider information from experts in the field will encourage readers to open and read your emails.
Ultimately, effective email marketing is all about testing; and then testing again. Changing the email subject line or even switching out a simple word or two can potentially make a huge difference with your audience. Companies like Mailchimp or Hubspot are great for sending and testing marketing emails, because it provides metrics on how many people opened your email, who opted-out of it, and who didn’t open it at all, etc. This information is what you will need to know for successful email marketing. So, here’s to getting those emails opened. Happy email marketing!
