Email Marketing Blog

Anna Billstrom over at Adventures in Email Marketing has an interesting article on the “5 Common Newbie Mistakes”, based on the first email messages she received when joining the lists of many small businesses.

Rather than point out the mistakes (I find people remember mistakes rather than the proper way to do it!), I’ll list the five things you should remember to do!

• Label your top header graphic. I’ve gone over this a number of times due to many email clients not automatically showing images.
• Remind your reader who you are. If you don’t want to have your reader hit spam, take a moment to remind them where they signed up, who you are, and what this is all about.

“You signed up for 101 Quilting Tips at http://quiltingtips.com on 5/2/08. This is part of a series of 101 tips for new and experienced quilters.”

• Use a professional email marketing company like GetResponse. Ms. Billstrom says “nothing screams amateur hour more than trying to send it from Outlook/Yahoo/Gmail”.
• Personalize your emails. That doesn’t mean inserting FIRSTNAME, but occasionally changing what you send to them. If you normally send a newsletter, send a personalized email or a link to a contest. If you know their sign-up date, send them an anniversary card with a discount code.
• Build interactivity. People get tired of one way communicaation. Provide opportunities for them to comment on your email marketing in blogs, social networking sites,, forums, or a Feedback section of your newsletter.

Tags

email marketing, marketing, autoresponders

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under email marketing, marketing, autoresponders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.