Email marketing can be a great way to reach customers, but it can be very difficult to capture your reader's genuine attention without looking like spam or a sales pitch. Who wants to put a ton of time and effort into email marketing when their emails are just going to get ignored, deleted or caught in a spam filter? There's a few tricks to successful email marketing for small businesses, which if done right can increase not only your conversions but also your website traffic, search engine rankings, etc. Plus, it's one of the most effective free-of-cost marketing tactics out there. Read on to discover the top 5 tips for email marketing geared specifically toward small business owners.

If you want your email newsletter to be opened and read, follow these simple tips…

1. Frequency of Emails. Current trends show that emailing between 1 and 3 times per month is the optimal number. Less than that, and you may lose opportunities. If you email more frequently, you run the risk of annoying your customers and having high unsubscribe rates. Having said this, different businesses will have different optimal emailing frequencies. To discover your optimal frequency, track metrics like click-through rates, bounce rates and unsubscribe and spam complaint rates. Of course you should also look at the results of your campaign in terms of conversion rates for website forms and sales (if you sell online).
2. Email Subject. The subject of your email can make or break your open rates. A good subject can get as much as 80% of your readers to open it whereas a poor subject can lead to a less than 1% open rate. How do you construct a good subject? Don’t try to sell. Subject lines like “Shop Early and Save 10%” or “Holiday Sales Event” are among the worst performing. On the other hand, subject lines that simply describe the contents of the email, like “<Company> Sales & Marketing Newsletter April 2011”, do the best. This may be counterintuitive, but it’s backed by statistics from some of the largest emailing companies. Read the research on the 20 best and worst performing subject lines. Read More »

Once you have a good converting site live – one that utilizes all the strategies that we’ve discussed so far – it’s time to start driving traffic to it. The primary ways of driving traffic are:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Social Media Marketing
• Press Relations (PR)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Strategic Partnerships
• Email Marketing
• Viral/Referral

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Every business wants to build their email list. Unfortunately, almost every website visitor wants to have less email spam and are therefore wary of giving their email address away. In order to build your email list of prospects, you need to give visitors a good reason to sign-up for your list. You have to offer them something of value. One of the best things to offer is your expertise. Create a white-paper or article that gives them good advice. For example, we have the down-loadable article Proven Strategies for Driving More Traffic to Your Web Site. This article covers a subject which we are experts in and which we think are customers would be interested in reading.

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