Author: Laura

Imagine the feeling you had the last time you received a handwritten note in the mail. It means something to you, and it’s personalized. The power of a handwritten note can go a long way. I encourage you to treat your email marketing efforts the same way. Just as a handwritten note in the mail has the power to move a person, so does the next email you send. Email can drive change, and ultimately help you achieve your mission.

Email marketing can build brand awareness. You can drive action from your subscribers to complete a task on your website. You can even encourage them to become an advocate of your organization by sharing your content with their networks.

Email marketing is one of the only channels that consumers ask to receive. The majority of businesses using the platform only send messages to those who have signed up to receive them. This can allow for much higher conversion rates as a business is only targeting those who already have an interest in their brand.

If you aren’t currently including email marketing in your digital outreach efforts, you’re missing out. Think about email marketing in the same way you think about tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and your website. It’s another digital platform that allows you to reach your customers and achieve your goals. There are three areas to keep in mind when executing a successful email marketing strategy.

Measuring Success

In any digital effort, it’s important to define what success looks like. Email metrics analyze various aspects relative to the tracking of the email marketing strategy performance. Identify key metrics by aligning them with your organizational and email marketing goals.

-What do you want your email subscribers to do?

-How would you measure those ideal actions?

Set a baseline for your own email marketing efforts. How many people are opening your emails now? How many people are clicking through to your content? How is email impacting your Web presence and social media presence? Let your goals drive your success metrics.

A/B testing

Optimizing your email marketing efforts for your particular audience is important, and testing is a key part of email marketing optimization. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a way of working out which campaign options is the most effective in terms of encouraging opens or clicks. In an A/B test you set variations of the one campaign and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. The best approach to testing is to develop a hypothesis based on insights you’ve gathered from your email marketing metrics and create a test that would prove whether that hypothesis was right or not.

Let’s use email titles as an example. Do long titles work? Do questions work better than statements? Does putting all words or specific words in CAPS work? Testing these theories will help you learn what works best to engage your email subscribers. Here are some elements to consider testing:

-Email title

-Email by line

-Date/time of email

Customer Feedback

It’s important on any platform to listen to your customers’ feedback and use it to improve your strategy and tactics. That means using metrics to dictate how you change. Whether you’re using A/B testing, reviewing metrics, or collecting feedback in a survey, it’s important to listen to your customers’ insights to improve your email efforts.

Email marketing is an ideal way of promoting products, services, and events to customers, business prospects or members. Email marketing is much more cost-effective than traditional direct mail marketing and banner ads. Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.

Because email takes less time to create and send than other marketing and advertising channels do, you can communicate with your customers more frequently. Instead of only being able to send them a flyer or catalog once a month or once a quarter, you can easily send them offers once a week. Email is an important part of your Internet Business, you will use it for everyday communication and it is an absolutely essential tool for marketing when done right! If you aren’t currently including email marketing in your digital outreach efforts, you’re missing out.

Think about email marketing in the same way you think about tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and your website. It’s another digital platform that allows you to reach your customers and achieve your goals. Email marketing can be used in different ways, depending on your communications goals.

-You can build brand awareness.

-You can drive action from your subscribers to complete a task on your website.

-You can even encourage them to become an advocate of your organization by sharing your content with their networks.

How Does Email Work?

Email is messages distributed by electronic means from one computer user to one or more recipients via a network. A major difference between email and conventional mail is that while postal letters are not entirely secure, email is even less secure. Unless the message has been encoded, it could be intercepted without your knowledge. For this reason, ordinary email should never be used for sensitive communication.

How Do I Get An Email Address?

If you have a website normally your web hosting company will provide you with at least one free email account depending on your plan you may have access to numerous email accounts. The following is a list of free and popular email services you can use to set up a web-based email account.

-Gmail: http://www.gmail.com/

-Outlook: https://outlook.live.com/owa/

-Yahoo Mail: http://mail.yahoo.com

-AIM Mail: http://mail.aim.com/

Email Marketing Services

Normally you can not use ordinary email services to send out a large number of bulk emails because they limitations. when it comes to sending out bulk emails. There are also various restrictions on using an ordinary email account for bulk emailing. Some free email providers do offer limited tools for bulk emailing. Email marketing service providers are set up to handle bulk emailing. Many hosting companies offer this type of service at an additional fee. There are also some free bulk email marketing service providers such as Mailchimp.

Free Mailchimp Email Marketing Service (mailchimp.com)

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers online primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan. Mailchimp comes with an easy email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on the user’s time zones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation. But you are required to display their branding in your email. The program can be used with many different popular applications including WordPress.

Targeted Email List

A good email marketing campaign begins with an email list full of qualified leads Subscribers that are interested in what you have to offer. Commercial unsolicited e-mail messages are considered spam and against The CAN-SPAM law. Email spam also referred to as junk email, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).  The best way to build a targeted email list is to convert your website visitors into subscribers.

How Do I Get Subscribers?

When someone comes across your website, blog or social media channel, you’ll want to present them with a signup form where they can subscribe to your emails. Email service providers have pre-designed sign-up forms and email templates.

-You can Customize them for your brand.

-Type in your messages.

-Drag in pictures.

-Add links to your site.

What Is An Email Marketing Campaign?

Once you have your email Subscribers it time to create an Email campaign, an email marketing campaign is a series of emails a business uses to communicate with current and potentials customers. They are used to persuade customers to engage with the company, such as download a sample product, sign up for an offer, or make a purchase which may include a coupon that is known to produce higher conversion rates. A successful email marketing campaign will get the recipients to take action and help you to get more leads and sales.

Email Marketing Strategy

In any digital effort, it’s important to define what success looks like.

-What do you want your email subscribers to do?

-How would you measure those ideal actions?

Set a baseline for your own email marketing efforts. Check with your email marketing service provider to see if they offer any features which will enable you to see:

-How many people are opening your emails?

-How many people are clicking through to your content?

Opt-out Option

First and foremost, your email marketing campaign or lists should have the option to opt-out of emails.

Using email marketing is a standard practice, knowledge of the do and don’t of The CAN-SPAM Act can save you thousands of dollars.

Opt-out Option

First and foremost, your email marketing campaign or lists should have the option to opt-out of emails. Subscribers may have their reason for removal from your list and to capture their explanation, add a comment section before they officially remove themselves. The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Each separate email in violation of the law updated as of January 2020 is subject to penalties of up to $43,280, and more than one person may be held responsible for violations.

For example, both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that originated the message may be legally responsible. Email that makes misleading claims about products or services also may be subject to laws outlawing deceptive advertising, like Section 5 of the FTC Act. The CAN-SPAM Act has certain aggravated violations that may give rise to additional fines. The law provides for criminal penalties – including imprisonment – for:

-accessing someone else’s computer to send spam without permission,

-using false information to register for multiple email accounts or domain names,

-relaying or retransmitting multiple spam messages through a computer to mislead others about the origin of the message,

-harvesting email addresses or generating them through a dictionary attack (the practice of sending email to addresses made up of random letters and numbers in the hope of reaching valid ones), and taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without permission.

What Is The CAN-SPAM Act

The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages and your guide for using electronic mail message systems: put by the FTC (federal trade commission): The CAN-SPAM Act establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

The CAN-SPAM’s The CAN-SPAM Act specifies how to prepare your Email Marketing Campaign message in order to comply when current no spam laws.

Main requirements:

–Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.

–Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.

–Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.

–Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.

–Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.

–Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

–Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

For more information see FTC Fact Sheet below:

bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business