Email marketing still remains the most effective tool to reach out to a wide range of audiences. Effective email marketing can play a major role in influencing your target audience. Email marketing is cheap and fast. Unfortunately, because of these key benefits, businesses end up abusing this medium. Too many emails, too soon; unsolicited email blasts, and badly written marketing or sales messages that get classified as spam. This blog post tells you how you can avoid the pitfalls of email marketing and use it as the effective medium; it really is to reach out to your prospects.

To create effective email marketing campaign, follow these simple steps:

Identify your target audience:
First things first. Zero in on your ideal audience. You cannot engage in a powerful email marketing or sales campaign until you know to whom you are talking. Answer questions like…Who is your target audience? Are they your current clients, prospects, employees or the combination of all these?

What are their pain points?
Understand the needs of your target audience. Analyze their pain points and learn what they really want. Once that is clear, you can easily relate with their challenges. Put yourself in their shoes. Try to craft a message with that feel as though you are the purchaser.

Permission based:
The ideal way to start a conversation is to seek permission to email your subscriber. Permission based in simple terms refers to marketing that revolves around obtaining consent to receive information. Ensure that the mailing list you have created is permission based. Unsolicited emails can affect your server rankings, impacting your email delivery to even genuine leads. Also, purchased email lists are not very reliable and accurate. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a great source of valid email addresses. You may also check out relevant tradeshow websites and try to work with the list of attendees, as they are more targeted to your offering. Email marketing can become successful only if you reach out to prospects who have interests and needs relevant to what you offer.

Create an relevant email subject line:
To attract the reader, you need to have a catchy subject line that encourages the reader to open the mail.

Avoid Spam filters:
Avoid using words that could lead to your email being classified as spam. Here’s a list of words that are commonly classified as junk.
–  Ad
– Click
– Click below
– Sale
– Click here
– Month trial offer
– Visit our website
– Free

Test all your links:
Check all the links in your emails before sending it out. If the email consists of broken links in the content, chances of client unsubscribing it increase.

Personalization of email content:
Customers receive thousands of emails on a daily basis. To stand out in the crowd and grab prospect’s attention, it is important to personalize your email content. Personalizing your email content goes way beyond just addressing the prospect by their name, it entails customizing your messaging to address the prospect’s pain-points clearly.

Measuring email effectiveness:
It is important to measure the performance of your email campaigns on daily basis. Understand which emails were opened, how many times were the attached assets downloaded, which links got most clicks, and so on. The nicest email in the world is useless if no one opens it. Finds out what works and doesn’t.

A/B testing:
A/B testing is testing the performance of various versions of your e-mail messages to see which one is more effective. Create multiple versions of your messaging and test it to see which one is better received by your audience.

Always add value (give an asset, interesting video, link):
While sending an email, you need to ensure that your target audience remains interested in reading your message. Providing an interesting video or a link to an informative page on your website creates awareness about the products and services offered and can make your email more interesting.

Keep it short:
At times too much information becomes boring, plus no one has the time to read through a long email. Ensure the message that your drafting is short and specific. What really matters to them is short and to the point details.

Space out your emails:
Sending too many emails too soon can irritate the recipient. Space out your emails so they don’t feel like you are invading their inbox too often. Also, pick the right time and day for sending your emails out. For example sending emails on Monday mornings or Friday evenings is a bad idea. Prospects are either busy getting started with the work week or not interested in reading your mail a day ahead of the weekends.

Be consistent:
While it is essential that you space out your conversation, also make sure you are consistently communicating with your recipient. If there’s too much of a gap between your emails, chances are, you may fail to make an impact at the right time, probably when your prospect is ready to buy. Also, if you are using e-newsletters or blogs to support your email marketing efforts, make sure you email that blog link to them every week and the newsletter, every month or quarter, just as it is supposed to be.

More tips for effective email marketing:

You always need to ensure all the mails that are sent out are sent from a “person” and not from a department or company.
Always proofread your emails and fix any typos or grammatical errors.
Try complementing your images with text so that it does not look dull.
Use smaller sentences and bulleted lists so it’s easier for your target audience to comprehend what you are saying.

In a nutshell, successful email marketing is the combination of crafting right message, sharing it at the right time, with the right audience, measuring the performance and being consistent..