What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the act of using people’s email to keep in touch with them. It is considered as a direct mean to communicate with costumers, “to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business” or “to purchase something immediately”…etc. In few words, it is a simple and an easy way of advertising and communicating with costumers. Even though it is a simple and cheap way to keep in touch with costumers, it needs to be done properly.

Opt in and opt out email

• Opt-in email or permission marketing: companies who own such data base are lucky enough because it means that recipients agreed to receive and respond to emails. And, it is a good solution used by email marketing specialists to decrease email marketing disadvantages.
• Opt-out email marketing: is the opposite of opt-in email; it is the use of emails without any permission of the recipients. Most of the time, spammers work on them, they subscribe any email they own to an infinite chain of mailing list where recipients receive different kind of spamming emails of all kinds, and most of them are useless emails, aiming to promote illegal products.

To avoid falling into such dilemma, being a spammer who uses opt-out database, we will talk about the best practice to develop an opt-in email list:

Email database creation

Create a database that contains important fields that should be filled by users. For example: name, email, birth date, genre…etc. These fields should help you to collect the most important information that you need to accomplish your emailing marketing strategy. If your email marketing strategy offers more than one type of email, think about adding email preference. Please, remember to think about a way to designate the subscriber status.

How to collect email?

• Create a form on your website that permits to subscribers to log in using their emails.
• Each page should contain a field that permit to each user to subscribe to your database. The handed emails are personalized; they aim to receive a specific kind of emails. That is to say, they want to be alerted only when there is an updating or a news on that subject specifically.
• If you got a fan page on Facebook, you can personalize your FMBL app to collect emails from your fans who want to keep in touch and be informed.
• Attend conferences, workshops, seminars…etc. all events that are rounded your niche. If you can participate or sponsor them, it would be more interesting. Present yourself and your business then exchange business cards and ask them if they will be interested to be added to your emailing database.
• Ask your colleagues and friends to help you get emails with basic information or to exchange your business cards with people who may be interested in what you do.

Let’s presume that you have collected emails and that your opt-in database is big enough to start exploiting it to promote, encourage, loyalize, send newsletters and collect other potential emails.

How to create good emails?

The form of your emails plays a great role into your marketing campaign success. The more you adapt your email to the need of your recipients, the more collected emails you will have. Whenever you create a new email, try to apply the following basic practices:

• The content of your email should be base more on content than images, animations and html code. This content should be simple, coherent and short.
• Add a form search that permits to the recipients to search within your website without being forced to leave to the website.
• Give your user the opportunity to forward emails to friends by providing a forward link. This is an important step because it is a smart way to reach new people and collect new opt-in emails without effort. More than that, emails will be sent from your server which means that you will be able to track those who forward emails and all the following actions.
• Offer a subscribed link to facilitate subscription for the forwarded emails receiver. This way you are sure that those who received the forwarded email and want to subscribe are guided directly to the pursued page.
• Since email clients may block images and do not support html, provide a link to a website version.

These are the basic and the important practices that every email should contain. Then, experience will impose new things to be added like telephone number, a message to call for action when you propose other services that may interest you recipients, and an email address for feedback…etc.

We hope that these basic steps to follow will be a good help for those who want to start collecting, developing or exploiting an opt-in email database.

Related posts:

1. What is Google alerts and how to use for ?
2. SEO and Website design
3. The importance of Social Media
4. Database Design & Modeling Tool – MySQL Workbench
5. Online/on-page optimization basic steps to follow

Tags:clients, collect email, conferences, email, email database, facebook, following, opt in, opt out, seminars, spam, subscribers, twitter, Webmarketing, workshops