Tips for better e-mail marketing campaigns (part 1)

With Internet, today it is easier to communicate with our clients and possible customers. Since more than a decade ago, companies have understood this and they have taken advantage of tools such as e-mail to approach clients with information about their stores, products and much more. Even though today we have other tools such as social media to approach clients, e-mail is still very important in our marketing strategy.

However creating a successful e-mail marketing campaign is not an easy task. Clients are aiming to receive information according to some specific conditions our company must respect. This is the reason why it is very important that our campaigns meet certain items in order to increase the opening rate and the reading rate of the e-mails we send. In this post and the next ones I will present some elements we should have into account in order to have a more effective e-mail marketing campaign.

The first item we should take into account is the database. Some years ago it was a common practice to buy and sell databases for e-mail marketing. Even though this still occurs it is a practice that companies have understood is not efficient and I definitely do not recommend it for many reasons. In first place we must remember that our idea is not to make uncomfortable the people who receives our mail but to capture his attention and eventually achieve sales. With this type of databases we are going to be sending mails to people that have not asked for it making them uncomfortable. Secondly many of these databases have been created years ago and been used many times making it easy to find mails that no longer exist. Finally it is important to mention that today many countries have strong laws that protect users information making it possible to have legal consequences if we use people’s information without their authorization.

With what has been stated above it must be clear that we must start our database from scratch. With this we are going to have some advantages. Our e-mail marketing campaigns are going to be send only to people that are expecting the information we are sending, so they will be happy to receive it. However we must remember that in the same way we made it easy for them to sign in into our database, it must also be easy for them to unsubscribe. In every mail we send we must tell them how they can unsubscribe from our list in case they are willing to do it.

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