15 Tips to Help You Succeed in Email Marketing

Whether your online business is selling your own developed products or marketing affiliate products to earn sales commission, you have to work hard to connect with your potential customers or target prospects. One of the fastest and cheapest ways to communicate with your potential customers on the Internet is through email.

You can gather your potential customers email addresses by offering something free on your website to entice your potential customers to sign up your offer and give you their email addresses.

Once you got their email addresses, you will start connecting with them often to build up a good relationship and make your propects be familiar with you. This will build up trust and credibility within your email subscribers. And when you have done that, you can expect to make some sales every time you send out a sale email to them.

Writting effective and successful email does require skill and knowledge.You need to know exactly how to write that email that will get people to open and read and get your prospects to take the action that you want them to take. Knowing when to send it also matters.

Below are 15 tips to help you out with your sales emails:

1. Many research have been conducted to find out the best day to send email and the result showed that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days.

2. The word 'testing' is important in email marketing. You should always test your email before sending it. First, use a spell checker, then a spam checker, and finally, email it to yourself before you send it to anyone else.

3. Use targeted marketing methods when growing your email list to ensure that those who opt-in to your email list are your target prospect. It is worthless to send email to people who have no interest on what you offer or on your website topic.

4. Research found that people read a message approximately seven times before they will purchase something. So Don’t just recommend your product once – recommend it a few times.

5. Never send out more than one email per day. Depending on what audience you have, you may want to set to send email once or twice per week. At the same time, you don’t want your audience to forget about you. So never let more than a week pass by without connecting your audience.

6. You may send out old offers to your new email subscribers, as long as the messages that you write are not ‘time specific.’ This will allow you to keep profiting from your old emails over and over again, as long as they are still related. Make sure that you keep those old emails clean, and remove sales emails for products that are no longer selling.

7. Your email will look more interesting and professional if you use HTML. However, A lot of email clients either don’t accept HTML email, or the email subscribers have set their client to refuse HTML. So for best result, it is best to stick with plain text.

8. Make thing simple to avoid confusing your audience. In each email, there should only be one of two actions to take. First, they can take the action that you desire, and second, they can close the email and take no action at all. Those should be the only two options.

9. Links will be included in your email body, so make sure the link you added in your email message is clickable. In most cases, the receivers will see a clickable link if you typed in a URL in your plain text email message.

10. Many people use web based email. You should too, for testing purposes. Test your email in different browsers, including Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape, and Opera. All of these browsers are free, and you can test them with any free email account.

11. You email message shouldn't be a direct sales offer as people don't like to be sold to. Make sure that the verbiage you are using is not a hard sales pitch.

12. You will want your propects to like and trust you. So make sure not all of your emails are designed to generate a sale. Try to send them valueable info that help them out solving their problems and refer them to free and useful resources, as opposed to always referring them to products that they must buy.

13. You want your readers to feel like they are your friends. In some of your emails, you should refer to real personal details about your life. This can be anything from referring to something cute your kid did to an interesting, somehow related, conversation you had with your wife. Mention your family members by name.

14. Avoid abbreviations, including ‘cyber terminology.’ While such things are fine in personal email to your friends, it really isn’t appropriate if you hope to build a personal relationship with prospects. Some people have no idea what those abbreviations mean.

15. Pay attention to how other people’s sales emails affect you. Open your email client, download your mail, and record your thoughts regarding what you were thinking or feeling as you read each sales email. This is a really enlightening exercise.

Email marketing is a world of its own, and the concepts that work and do not work are changing continuously as users become more knowledgeable. Be sure that you keep up with the latest email marketing techniques and strategies, and be willing to test new things. But, when you do test new things, only send the ‘test’ email to part of your list – not the whole list – to see how it works out.