The popularity of email marketing has steadily grown over the years. It’s easy to understand why so many people are using email marketing with all its potential advantages. Compared to other forms of marketing, emails are cost efficient and time efficient while allowing you to maximize your audience size. With everyone turning to email marketing, how do you make sure your emails aren’t lost in the crowd. It’s hard to find an email in your inbox without first sorting through a canvas of newsletters sent from the numerous services you use, websites you’ve visited, or that time you agreed to go on a timeshare sponsored vacation. Sure, many people use emails to promote their business because it is seemingly cheap and easy. However, many of them are doing it very ineffectively. If you want your emails to be opened, read, and reacted to, here are some of the practices you should be integrating into your email marketing:

1. Make It Personal

How many emails in your inbox go unopened or unread? It is common for people to completely ignore emails that give the impression of spam. “Spammy” emails are those that seem like they are mass produced and have nothing of value to personally offer you. People want emails to make them feel exclusive or at least like they are part of a special group. They want to feel that they were chosen to receive this email, not blindly sent it as part of an indiscriminate list. Try to make different emails for more specialized groups in your marketing campaigns rather than one email that gets sent to everyone. Try using the recipient’s name in the greeting and using the word “you” throughout your message. Make the sender of the email show up as someone or something recognizable to the recipient.

2. Keep It Short and Direct

In part, this goes back to people’s distrust of “spammy” emails. People don’t like to have their time wasted. For this reason, many people simply ignore emails that seem irrelevant at first glance. If people DO decide to look at your email, they often do so tentatively with a tempered attention span. You must convey your message quickly to the reader. Overloading an email with large quantities of text, mixed messages, or excess images can cause your readers to quickly lose interest and abandon the email. It is best to send an email with a singular focused message. From the subject line to the design to the text, all pieces of the email should revolve around one goal that is clearly stated to the customer and followed with direct action they can take to complete that goal.

3. Send Emails That Have Value

Plan your emails purposefully. Do not send emails for the sake of sending emails. “More is better” is generally not the case in email marketing. Flooding your subscribers with emails typically makes them assign less importance to each of the messages they are receiving from you. Much better is for each email you send to have meaning, meaning to both the recipient and to yourself. This is the first step to increasing the perceived value of reading and reacting to emails sent by you. Making sure that your emails have value does not necessarily mean you must be offering a deal or financial benefit. While offering an exclusive deal to subscribers is one of the most direct ways of effectively adding value, there are other means of value. Value can be found in information, letting subscribers know of new products, sales, or news. For instance, there is value is informing restaurant frequenters that your restaurant will now have different hours or be closed over the holidays. Value can also be found in gratitude, offering a sincere thank you to subscribers or customers. However you are defining the value of your email, be sure to make sure that it has a clear purpose.

4. Track Your Results and Adjust

Specialized tools and practices can help provide you insight to what is happening after you click send. It is important to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing. By seeing how what percentage of people are opening an email and who those people are, you can understand what changes you need to make to your campaign. For instance, if your email has an unusually low amount of people opening it, perhaps the subject line appears “spammy” or dull to recipients. Maybe you notice that all the people who did open or respond to your email share a common trait or demographic. A very common use of tracking information is to take notice of what people opened your email or clicked on links within it. If you decide to send an email at a later date with the same goal in mind, then you want to make sure you are sending it only to the people who did not complete the goal the first time around. Also you can compare the results of multiple emails with the same goal to see which version works best or what type of subscribers it works best with.

5. Be Aware of Modern Email Marketing Standards

Did you know that there are spam laws that regulate the legality of email marketing practices. The CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act outlines certain practices when sending emails that are illegal. Some of the rules included in the CAN-SPAM Act include not sending emails from a misleading sender name of “From” line, having an unsubscribe button that allows recipients to stop receiving emails from you, and making sure your subject line is relevant. You can check out the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide for business if you would like to know more about the various spam laws. There are non-legal concerns with keeping up with the modern email world too. A common mistake is not making your emails compatible with mobile use. Emails being read on phones may not be seen in the intended format if they were created on another device. Images may not appear correctly or email layout might get jumbled when viewed on mobile. In general, it is important what technology/software is out there affecting emails and how you can utilize it.

Have we covered everything there is to know about email marketing? Not even close, but now that you know the most practical and useful guidelines, you are more than ahead of the curve and ready to make your emails stand out in the crowd. The experts at Vision Local Media can help you master the world of email marketing. Among our many digital services, we offer software designed to help you optimize your email marketing efforts. We can help you create templates, analytics for tracking emails, and customized intelligent automatic email marketing systems.