General Email Marketing Guidelines

As with anything else in life and most especially with the on line world of the Internet there are some rules and regulations to adhere to when organizing your Email Marketing. We'll call them guidelines so as not to offend anyone and to remain politically correct in our dissertation.

The first guideline to make an effective marketing email is that you need to keep it as personal as you can. This is going to be hard since you will be actually mass mailing them and only the email address will be different on them. The trick to doing this in a manner that makes them believe that you are talking to them is to make sure that the email addresses have been gotten from some place that actually relates to what you are pitching. That way there is common ground and they may think that they have actually requested information and that is the purpose of the email. Remember it is all about getting them to read it. After that we hope that the informational content will nail the deal.

By the same token you need to be as specific on the product or service as you can and still leave enough mystery to get them to contact you via the web, email or phone. The trick is you need to excite them but not give away all the cards. We all know that it is very easy to dismiss an email and close it out. However, if you get them to contact you there is an above average chance that you are going to seal the deal and end up with an account, which is after all the reason for the email marketing we are talking about.

So if we have them opening the marketing email and they are interested enough not to trash it and then the call or contact you, what else is left to do in this Email marketing campaign? Well in a word lots. You could simply sell the item and call it a job well done and you would be about half right and you are also about half wrong.

You see if all that you do is make the sale and move on you are losing valuable marketing information. Ask them what there was about the email that attracted them. Glean as much data from them as they will give. It will help you the next time you are marketing another email. People love to talk so let them. Give the customer the chance to let you know what worked and what didn't. Large companies pay a lot of money for these "focus group" answers and you can get them just by asking the questions in the normal course of filling the order.

Another mistake that people always manage to do after the sale is to start focusing on the next sale. You need to remember the customer that you just sold to. Send them an electronic thank you note. You have no idea how far that will go towards solidifying your brand in their minds.