As part of customer relationship management (CRM), Email Marketing is a notable yet delicate tool that should be used with great care. As a general rule, there are a few well-known email marketing mistakes to avoid including:

- Sending marketing emails and newsletters to individuals that have not opted to receive marketing communications from you
- Selling your subscribers’ details to third parties
- Making it difficult for your readers to unsubscribe or update their contact details
- Using long or irrelevant subject lines for your newsletters

With Email Marketing there is a fine line between building and strengthening relationships with your customers and annoying them with irrelevant, arbitrary and too-frequent emails or newsletters. What follows are four tips to ensure that your Email Marketing messages are on-point and don’t rub your subscribers the wrong way.

Mistake #1: Ambiguous sign-up process
Make it easy for individuals to subscribe to your newsletter. Have a sign-up form prominently available on your website and keep the amount of information they need to provide during the sign-up process to a minimum. Send them a confirmation email once they have signed up with a link to where they can manage their subscriber profile.

Mistake #2: Inadequate content
The aim of your newsletter is to build and maintain relationships with your customers, hence the copy of your newsletter is very important. Sending personalised emails based on your subscribers’ interests and preferences will not only increase ROI but also build customer loyalty. If writing is not your forte, consider outsourcing the creation of your newsletter content – it is worth the investment. If you are writing the content yourself, look it over a few times to check for mistakes and ask someone else to read through it too before you send it to your subscribers.

Mistake #3: Not linking properly
As part of a marketing strategy, your newsletter should show some sort of return on investment, whether that is growing your subscriber database and increasing brand awareness or increasing leads and sales through newsletter promotions. If you are talking about a specific product or service, link to that specific landing page on your website and not your home page. It is important to include calls to action in your newsletter, persuade your readers to perform a certain action.

Mistake #4: Not sending test emails
It is embarrassing to receive emails from subscribers telling you that the format of your newsletter content has been distorted. Check the appearance of the newsletter in various email clients and make sure all the links in the newsletter are working and linking to the correct pages before you send it. It is recommended that you use professional email marketing software to send newsletters as your newsletter’s appearance is a big part of your customers’ perception of your brand.

Lastly, it is important to track and measure the performance of your newsletter. Most Email Marketing platforms include reporting interfaces which will give you data such as the number of newsletters that were opened, links that were clicked and the number of times the email was forwarded. Another way to track email responses using your Analytics platform is to uniquely tag the URLs in your newsletter so that you can accurately measure the activity from this source.

After your newsletter has been sent, check how many subscribers have opened it, which links they clicked on, how many readers unsubscribed and which email addresses bounced or are inactive. By keeping an updated database and paying attention to the statistics you are sure to see ROI from your Email Marketing efforts.

About AlterSage
AlterSage offers tailored online marketing solutions that achieve targeted exposure for your website. Goal focussed and driven by return on investment, services include search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, web design and development, persuasive web copywriting, brand building, conversion analysis, email marketing and many more.AlterSage
18 Roeland Street
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Cape Town
8001

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[Website] www.altersage.com