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Category: Digital Marketing

Email Marketing Best Practices

Back-to-Basics: E-mail Marketing Best Practices

email marketing

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is an essential tool for business and comes in many shapes and forms. It occurs when a company sends a message to a group of people through electronic email. Most commonly through advertisements, requests for business, or sales or donation solicitation, any email communication is considered email marketing if it helps to build customer loyalty, trust in a product or company, or brand recognition. Basically, it’s every email you send to (potential) customers with the hope of gaining or continuing their business. Email marketing is an efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting your business.

Why is Email Marketing Effective?

There are two reasons why email marketing is effective. First, email is permission-based. The people on your email list have given you the go-ahead to send them messages. Second, it’s easy, effective, and inexpensive. Email marketing allows business owners to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of pennies per message. For small-business owners on a budget, this makes it a better choice than traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, or direct mail.

Best Practices Guide

Sometimes we forget the basics—the most important things of all. But don’t worry, this handy guide is designed to act as your email marketing checklist.

Write Compelling Subject Lines
A good subject line should contain no more than 30-50 characters. It should also create a sense of urgency and give the readers some indication of what to expect once they open the email.

Keep the Main Message and Call-to-Action Above the Fold
If your main call-to-action falls below the fold, then a large percent of your recipients won’t see your message.

Fonts
Use basic cross platform fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and Times New Roman.

Keep it Short and Sweet
Emails need to be short and sweet. However, you will want to invest in quality content. How long will users read your email before leaving? The answer to this question is—not very long. You will have less than one minute to capture your reader’s attention.

Tone of Voice
The tone of voice should be friendly and enthusiastic and not too aggressive or sales focused. Your email should make your audience fond of your products. You’re telling them something other people won’t hear.

Make it Visual
If your email contains all text, it could become boring. Illustrations and pictures can make your email look aesthetically pleasing to read and will enhance your storytelling.

Flash or JavaScript
Elements that require Flash or JavaScript should be avoided in emails as these technologies are not supported by email clients. If motion is needed in an email, a .gif is probably best.

Mobile Matters
A large percentage of marketing emails are opened on mobile devices. The best way to drive email engagement on mobile devices is to use responsive email templates. A responsive template will respond to the device that it’s read on. For example, if you read an email on your cell phone, a responsive theme will automatically resize the font, images, and layout to fit the smaller screen.

Test, Test, Test
Most importantly, before you send your email, test, test, test. And, be sure to test on different devices. Create an account to send an email to yourself so you can preview your test before you hit the send button. You will want to do this in conjunction with services such as Litmus. Litmus is a powerful email testing tool that allows marketers to see exactly how clients will view their emails prior to sending their email.

Conclusion

In conclusion, email marketing is an excellent way to reach your audience. You can communicate with those clients that really want to be informed about your products or your company. And, it’s an inexpensive but effective marketing tactic that keeps your audience coming back to your site.

 

 

 

 

Industry Specific Digital Marketing Acronyms

Industry Specific Digital Marketing Acronyms

We all tend to speak in industry-specific jargon as a means of impressing clients or customers. Jargon is a specialized vocabulary that functions as a kind of shorthand by people with common backgrounds and experience. It can be valuable for those who understand it. However, jargon often leads to misunderstanding and confusion because clients or customers may be unfamiliar with the language. As digital marketing continues to advance, I am going to detangle some of the industry-specific acronyms and their meanings.

CRM: Every business has a list of existing and potential customers. Customer Relationship Management is an effective strategy that allows your business to manage and track the history of your customers, collaborate effectively, increase productivity, and grow your business. Salesforce and Marketo are just two examples of CRM software application tools for organizations.

CSS: Used in web design, Cascading Style Sheets is a “style sheet language” used to define HTML interface design elements such as typography and page layout (color, font size, line spacing, letter spacing, indents, margins, element positioning, text alignment, borders).

CTA:  A Call to Action is a word or phrase that’s used to prompt the reader to take immediate action. Some examples include “Click Here”, “Subscribe Today”, or “Act Now.”

HTML: HyperText Markup Language is the language used to create webpages that can be viewed on the web.

Digital Marketing Acronyms

PPC: The easiest way to make money from a blog or website is to run pay-per-click ads and banners. Pay-per-click, or PPC, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites where advertisers pay the publisher, which is typically the website owner, each time a user clicks on your ad.

Google’s AdWords is the most popular PPC program. Advertisers bid on keywords, and the highest bidders get top listings, next to the organic (non-paid) search results. They’re charged only when a visitor clicks their ad.

PV: Page Views are the total number of different pages on your site that visitors have opened during a specific period.

RSS: Real simple syndication, or RSS, allows users to subscribe to content and read at their own convenience, using an application called a feed reader. Every time new content is developed or updated, the user will get a notification. Feedly, NewzCrawler, and Feed Demon are among the most popular feed readers.

SEO: You’ve spent lots of time building and optimizing your website, but what if you launch your site and nobody visits? And if you do get visitors, how do you know if you’re giving them the information they came for? Search engine optimization, or SEO, are methods used to gain visibility on a search engine’s list of search results with the end goal to gain more relevant site traffic. The most commonly used search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These methods include optimizing and creating keywords, URL structures, page titles, content, meta titles and descriptions, page load times, inbound links, internal links, and more.

SEM: SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO and SEM are not interchangeable terms but, when practiced together, they can help can boost your website’s rankings on search engines. SEO is the practice of boosting your rankings through organic methods such as publishing effective content and using good keywords, links, and easy navigation for users. SEM typically refers to pay-per-click advertising that would appear on sites like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. It’s the ads that appear on the top and side of those pages and include search engine optimization (SEO) to have their business show up naturally or organically within the results page.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, is the web or specific address of information found on the Internet.

The digital marketing industry is rife with acronyms, so this list is not exhaustive and only includes some of the more commonly used terms.

 

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