Top 5 eMail Marketing Best Practices in 2009

eMail Marketing is the most primitive form of direct marketing which uses electronic mails as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages.

From the macro level point of view, we may say that e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing.

Following are some of the Top 5 eMail Marketing Practices, which i found useful and can be used for your future projects :

1. Use Text Links to Maximize Click-Thru Rates
   While graphics can often add flare to an email, a great deal of research shows that readers respond best to bold, blue, underlined text links. So if want to get your email newsletter readers to click and visit your site (and I’m sure you do!), include links in text form without relying too heavily on graphics for the maximum possible click-thru rate.
2. Personalize for Best Results
   Your email newsletter should contain the subscribers name in a greeting, right at the top. The reason? A much higher response rate. People love being addressed personally, and as proven by countless email studies, a simple “Hey John,” will go a very long way in increasing the response rate (if that subscriber’s name is John, that is).
3. Always Include an Unsubscribe Link
   An unsubscribe link in every email, more than being a courtesy, it’s actually law in some countries. Not only that, but the providing an easy to use, clickable unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email helps keep your subscriber list clean, your deliverability high and gives the subscribers that stay with you confidence in knowing they can unsubscribe if they ever want
   to… And believe it or not, it’s that type of confidence in your company that will keep actually keep them subscribed — go figure.
4. Keep it Consistent
   If you’re sending out an email newsletter to your clients and prospects, you have to keep the design consistent, the from field consistent, and the timing of your mailings consistent — if you want to get a high response rate that is! It’s okay to
   make a change every once in a long while, but generally you want to keep things as consistent as possible so that your subscribers learn to expect your great email newsletters, and the informative content that comes with it, in their email boxes.
5. List Benefits in the Subject Line
   “ABC Co. Newsletter – September Issue” isn’t going to cut it as a subject line. Why should your client’s or subscribers bother to open that email?
   Good question. In fact, it’s a question you should answer for them by listing the benefits of reading the email right in the subject line. So, go for a subject like “ABC Newsletter: 10 Tips on How to Do XYZ”. Now, that’ll catch some eye-balls and get ‘em to open up.

If you have any other tips for email marketing success that I haven’t mentioned, I’d love to hear about them (and maybe pass them on to the others), so feel free to drop, me a message.