Email marketing is a tricky thing, though a powerful medium for communicating with your customers and prospective customers. Despite having lost a lot of sheen due to spammers, email marketing is a great tool for sending information and advertising about your products and services. Though some may find it annoying, many businesses, big or small, as well as home businesses find it a very cost effective marketing strategy. Recipients of emails find them more convenient than the conventional printed direct mail, as they can simply click over to the senders website.

Tips To Make Email Marketing Work For You

Email marketing, as a strategy, can be easily used and abused. There are ways in which you can make this strategy work for you and it does not matter whether yours is a big, small, or a home business.

- Address The Recipients By Their Names - This is very important. How would you feel if you receive an email as part of a bulk mail service? All marketing emails are bulk mails, but they would make you feel much better if they address you by name. It will sound more personal. Similarly, recipients are more likely to read your emails and venture a click if they are addressed by name.

Personalize your marketing emails, using first names. For certain campaigns, you may need to address the recipients by their last names.

- Avoid Email Marketing During Holidays - Especially during the holiday months, avoid sending your marketing emails. The recipients are most likely to be away, without easy access to their computers. They will not be checking their emails frequently and regularly. On return, their inboxes will be full of unattended mails, and are likely to dump all, but the important personal and business ones. Chances are that your marketing email will also be deleted en masse with the other bulk mails.

Exceptions may be there, but as far as possible suspend your email marketing during December, January, July and August.

- Ensure Your Email Marketing Campaigns Do Not Look Like Spam. Obviously, no one likes spam. Spam mails contain signs of spam, such as $$$ in the subject line or in the body of the matter. Email users, today, have many anti-spam filters and tools installed, either at their ISP, or in their email programs. To make your email marketing campaign successful, avoid using anything that will seem as a sign of spam in your message.

- Check For Mistyped Addresses - People genuinely make mistakes such as typing their email addresses wrongly while signing up to get on your mailing list. Common mistakes, such as htomail in place of hotmail, and oal in place of aol, do occur inadvertently. Just for this, your newsletters and other information messages do not arrive.

You need to fix things up at your end to ensure such errors are removed. Your sign up form should require typing in the email addresses twice to check whether both entries are the same. It may look cumbersome to certain people, but this practice has become a norm.

Your email marketing strategy must include a clear link telling the prospective customer what to do next or where to go to order. Many email marketing campaigns are beautifully designed, and are more than half way into convincing prospective buyers to go for the kill. What gets lost in the static is the link to follow to place the order. Your carefully laid out campaign loses its meaning.

When designing your email marketing campaign, ensure it is very clear what the recipient of your mail needs to do. Make the link to order your product or service clear, and easy to follow.