What You Need To Know About Email Advertising

According to a recent article on the site Copyblogger, the author of the piece spoke about attending a social media conference and she also said how surprised she was that the subject brought up the most was email advertising, and that it wasn’t something like Google+, Instagram or Pinterest.

It seems silly to remind everyone of this fact but people still use email more than any social media app out there and email advertising is an important way to get the word out about your business, especially when things like mobile banner ads get a bad reaction. So if you are thinking of using email advertising to spread the word about your business, product and/or services there are few things you need to know.

The first thing is that you need to set one marketing goal. Sometimes companies will set multiple goals but if you try to do too much, it ruins what you’re attempting to accomplish and it could end up confusing your potential customers. You need to know a couple of things from the onset: What kind of message do you want to send out to the masses? And what do you want them to do once you do send them that message?

Email advertising is a great way to reach a large audience/potential customers without having to spend a lot of money, unlike mobile banner ads, but you also have to be responsible. You know from personal experience that you won’t give your email address out to just anyone so in order to get people to do that, you need to make it easy for them to subscribe to your emails.

In the same Copyblogger article referenced above, it mentions that having a dedicated subscription page is extremely important. If you can just send someone one link and they don’t have to click through to multiple pages to sign up for your newsletter, they’ll be more likely to want to sign up. People don’t want to go through hoops so make it simple.

When customers sign up, let them know what to expect from your company. You should tell them how often they should expect emails from you. Be sure that you don’t spam their inboxes but you also can’t be too cautious. If you only send emails out once a month, people may forget that they signed up for your information and may mark it as spam. On the other hand, you also don’t want to send too many emails. People may unsubscribe if you bombard them with too many emails and they will definitely unsubscribe if the emails aren’t interesting. So make sure what you’re sending out via email is interesting and to send people the content they want to read.

Another big tip is to remember that people check emails on their phones and tablets on the way to and from work so they’re not always at a desktop computer so you have to make sure that your email advertising is mobile-friendly.

In a 2012 study by ExactTarget, 91% of respondents said they checked their email everyday so why wouldn’t you want to try email advertising instead of mobile banner ads and the like? To learn more, visit LiveIntent.

Stacey Gotsulias writes for a variety of websites.