Email Marketing, eBooks, and When to Stop Pestering Your Customers

We’ve all fallen victim to one or two companies who bombard you with email after email that you have no interest in reading, or maybe you did, but now you’re too annoyed to care and feel like you can’t find the ‘unsubscribe’ button fast enough. Don’t be like them. Follow these email marketing practices to get the best results and stay on your customers’ good side.

Best Email Marketing Practices

Email marketing is an excellent way to reach your customers, stay top of mind, and see higher sales volumes. There is a way to do email marketing the right way, and there is also a wrong way. Here’s how to keep your emails engaging and informative while avoiding making your customers feel like you’re pestering them.

Avoid Purchasing Contact Lists

For a successful email campaign, you need a healthy open rate. So if you’re contacting people whose information you purchased, they will quickly unsubscribe, or you’ll end up in a spam folder. Earning email contacts through genuine interactions will get your better open rates and better results.

Avoid “No-Reply” Sender Email Addresses

An email address like “[email protected]” should absolutely be avoided. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 set some guidelines for staying legal when it comes to email practice, and avoiding “no-reply” is one of their major rules. This prevents recipients from opting out of future emails or sending a response. Using a person’s name in the email address makes it more likely to be read.

Focus On The Subject Line

The subject of your email is more important than you might think. The headline is your way to convince your subscribers to open the email, so do what you can to create a compelling subject line and set yourself up for success. Avoid using all uppercase letters, spammy words (free, win, urgent), or a subject line that doesn’t match the email content. These are all ways to get readers to click unsubscribe. Instead, use action verbs, a clear value proposition, and keep it to 30-50 characters long.

Keep It Simple

The body of the email should grab your reader’s attention but not get overly complicated or in-depth. Don’t forget to use a Call To Action (CTA) that is visible without needing to scroll down. Make the CTA a button if you can and keep it bright and noticeable. You don’t want to force readers to search for it.

Test Your Email Content

It is a terrible feeling to send an email to hundreds of people only to realize it has typos or broken links. So, before you hit send, test your content on yourself. Most platforms used for creating email campaigns give you the ability to send a test email or look at a preview of the email. Some will even check for specific errors for you, like broken links or formatting issues.

How Often Should I Send Marketing Emails?

If you’re new to email marketing, you can start by sending emails one or two times a month. This gives your audience a chance to get to know you, and they begin to expect emails to keep coming. Slowly start to increase your frequency to about once per week to avoid pestering your customers. If your business is the type that produces a lot of content, has regular promotions, or varying offers, then you could consider sending an email two to three times a week. At this frequency, you will want to monitor the campaigns more closely to make sure you aren’t annoying the recipients. If you start to see open rates plummet or a rush of people are unsubscribing, it is probably time to back off and rethink your timing.

Should I Send Out My eBook?

eBooks are an excellent way to deliver lots of in-depth information in a neat package that your customers are willing to read. Your business can pick a specific topic and write an eBook that dives deep into the subject that will get your audience to start seeing you as an expert in your field. Sending an email to your customers with snippets of the eBook and a link to download it is a great way to distribute the content without forcing them to read it all in one email. You can also advertise your eBook on your website and encourage visitors to sign up for your email list to receive the eBook.