1. Create the Perfect Title

Readers aren’t even going to click on your emails unless they’re compelled by an exciting title. Experiment with different techniques, including calls to action (“Save Big!” or “Switch Now!”), questions, jokes and more.

2. Emphasize the Benefits

Don’t just deliver information to your readers — explain how it can help them succeed. For example: “Investing in credit card solutions can reduce your long term expenses.”

3. Deliver Exclusive Perks

Readers love to feel privy to inside information, so offer them a little something for their time. Whether it’s free shipping, 5% off their next purchase, or a free business evaluation, every little perk counts.

4. Include Relevant Images

They say a picture is a worth a thousand words — why not throw in one or two? If you have products or graphics to showcase, that’s great. If not, pick up some stock photography of happy people online and add those to your copy.

5. Be Seasonal

Some businesses have an easier time of being seasonal than others, but it’s important to keep your email marketing messages as relevant as possible. Whether you’re selling home goods or self storage, a Valentine’s Day sale is never going to go out of style.

With social media buttons for Facebook, Twitter and other services built-in to your email marketing newsletters, your readers can share your content through their preexisting social profiles. Best of all, you can track these shares the same way you monitor the amount of reads, clicks and forwards each outgoing message receives.

And Facebook and Twitter buttons aren’t just nifty — they’re lucrative as well. Studies have shown that email newsletters with social networking badges garner significantly higher CTRs (click through rates). Can’t argue with that, can you?

EmailSpark offers social media integration and more — we can help you add an email signup form to your blog or Facebook page for added exposure, and to share links to your latest messages on Facebook, Twitter and other networks. To find out more about our email marketing company, give us a call at 800.594.0444.

1. Targeted Email Marketing Goes to the Right People

At EmailSpark, we create and constantly optimize your contact list based on a variety of factors: your former customers, the people your email subscribers forward messages to, the users that signed up for your email list directly. We use this information to deliver your messages to the most relevant audience, so your newsletters are helpful, not annoying.

2. Targeted Email Marketing Avoids the Wrong People

Delivering emails to the right audience isn’t just courteous, it’s mandatory. Email marketing services that fall outside of certain regulations (like the CAN-SPAM act of 2003) can wind up in spam folders — where no one will ever see them. Our targeted email marketing service operates with CAN-SPAM in mind, so your messages stay visible.

3. Targeted Email Marketing Delivers the Right Message

Got Christmas items on the way? Offering some leftover promotions from Black Friday? Then by all means, spread the news! At EmailSpark, we target our email marketing messages and the content within them, so your customers will see your offers, products and services in a timely, logical manner.

Thinking about small business email marketing? If so, you’re probably wondering about the different ways this advertising method could work to your advantage. Read on for some ideas.

Newsletters

Business email marketing newsletters are extremely versatile. Convey news about your business or industry, announce an upcoming promotion or event, or showcase select products for sale — or do a little bit of everything. It’s up to you!

Promotions & Coupons

Got free shipping? 10% off select items? Bargains are a great way to turn emails into clicks. Be sure to include all the relevant information in your ad, such as any necessary check out codes.

Invitations

People like to be invited to things. Whether you’re hosting a gala or simply holding a two-week sale, an invitation adds a personal touch that customers love. You can even “invite” customers to your online store, whether or not said invite corresponds to a physical location.

Cards

Like invitations, sending cards is a more personal targeted email marketing technique. You can send customers cards to correspond to certain holidays, or set up cards for customer-specific dates, like birthdays.

Not my inbox

Probably not, but some think this new development may provide a challenge for e-mail marketers. According to the overview provided on the Priority Inbox (I’ll call it PI) support pages, “Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages you’ve deleted.”

So how exactly does it work? There’s a PI tab on the left side of your inbox, and when you click it, messages will be grouped into three sections: Important/Unread, Starred and Everything Else. As you move messages around, over time you train Gmail to figure out which incoming messages you’ll deem important, using the following criteria:

• Who sent the email (For example, if you email Bob a lot, it’s likely that messages from Bob are important.)
• What terms it includes (If you always read messages about soccer, a new message that contains those same soccer words is more likely to be important.)
• The actions that help us determine which people/terms are important to you include: replying, using stars, archiving, deleting (Messages you star are probably more important than messages you archive without opening.)

This all theoretical, for me, anyway, because Gmail still “rolling out PI slowly” and I am not one of privileged few yet. This might not be the worst thing, though.

What Elliot Ross, senior creative designer at e-Dialog London, points out is that e-mail marketers now not only have to worry about getting their messages into recipients’ inboxes, but into this inbox within an inbox. (Hmm, it’s kind of like Inception) He also wonders, though, if the PI is worth trying to infiltrate.

“Bear in mind that whilst the user will check the priority email first,” he says, “in this folder they will be scanning things quickly and looking for things to act upon. The users mind state once they come to read the regular inbox afterwards may be easier to engage with for some marketers.”

At any rate, people don’t have to use PI, and a lot probably won’t for fear that an important e-mail will slip through the cracks.

1. Check for typos: Do NOT send out an e-mail unless you’re positive there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Spell-check is old news, and everyone knows about it — there’s no excuse for a misspelled word. I recommend having someone else (a self-professed Grammar Nazi is your best bet) take a look at any longer messages, even if you’re confident in your proofreading skills.
2. Don’t use “smileys”: Nothing screams unprofessionalism more than an emoticon or two freckled in a business e-mail.
3. Don’t use Internet slang: As with #2, throwing a LOL or IDK into a business e-mail is the quickest way to look unprofessional (and like a teenage girl).
4. Don’t use inappropriate language: Again, this is piggybacking off #2 and #3. Swear up a storm in your personal e-mails all you want, but these are prospective clients — the first experience they have with your foul mouth should be in person.
5. Try not to use too much text formatting: Italicizing or bolding a word here and there for emphasis is fine, but as not everyone’s e-mail server may even recognize this formatting, it’s generally best to skip it. The same goes for colored text.

1. Contact with your internet service provider and see what spam-prevention options they have— providers typically have an option that automatically detects all your incoming emails for known spammers
2. Make an entirely separate email account for e-commerce purposes only: mailing list subscriptions, making accounts for online retailers, etc. Save your personal email for strictly personal emails.
3. Create a Suspected Spam folder. Then using the filtering feature within your email program, create rules to redirect spam into.

• These rules are usually something like this: “If my name appears in the To: or cc:, then move message to inbox.” Consult your program’s Help feature for exact instructions as many email programs vary
• Create individual rules for emails you receive that for example, do not include your name in the To: or cc: This will allow you to redirect emails from specific senders whose emails you do want to receive
• Finally, after you’ve defined rules for the majority of your emails, create a final rule that redirects all other emails into your Suspected Spam folder.

Periodically check your Suspected Spam folder from time to time to see if any wanted emails end up in there. Good luck and happy emailing!

Full service email marketing — what’s that mean? Like most things, the definition of email marketing depends on who you ask, but this guide should give you a general idea of the advertising technique and its potential.

Email marketing management includes:

• Email newsletters — Kind of like the direct mail marketing from the days of yore, email newsletters feature your upcoming specials, promotions, etc., and can even be personalized to suit their specific recipients.
• Client lists — No addresses labels, no stamps, no paper cuts. With email marketing management, you can keep track of current, past, and potential clients with comprehensive lists, then distribute in a snap!
• Stats — Are recipients opening your emails? Forwarding them? Clicking on the links? With email marketing stats, you don’t have to wonder — it’s easy to keep track of the efficiency of your campaign.

You might be wondering: Can’t I send out email newsletters myself?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer? Yes — assuming you experience in graphic design, knowledge of trackback  links and other stat monitoring techniques, a system to manage client lists, and lots and lots of time.

With all of its components, email marketing management is pretty much a full time job. In fact, it’s ours.

• A business signature can include name, company name, title, address, telephone number, email address (a fast and easy way for your contacts to start a new email thread) or company website.
• Aim for clarity by avoiding messy font styles, sizes, and symbols—be as clear and concise as possible.

Email Signature Samples

• Sometimes less is more, figure out what best suits your needs.

• For many people, a personal email account is their business account.  Avoid including too much personal information in your signature—leave your cell phone number and home address for the body of your emails to friends and family.

Although your email signature is attached with all your outgoing emails, don’t forget that it’s also not set in stone.  Edit and modify as you see fit for all, some, or individual emails, you have complete ownership over it!