Implementing email marketing for your business

Email marketing is a tool that can, and really should be utilized by businesses of all sizes, regardless of the industry. For new or small businesses with little resources, email marketing is a powerful way to consistently reach your prospects in an inexpensive manner. For established businesses and businesses with larger marketing budgets, email marketing is a great way to provide more traction to your other marketing channels. If you are already developing content on a regular basis for your print newsletters or blog, then much of the work for your email campaign is already done.

The first step in launching an email marketing campaign is to determine if you’ll handle it in-house our outsource it. If you’ll be handling it in-house, you’ll need to choose your platform for delivery. If you’re not the technical type, then you may want to look at one of the web based services such as Constant Contact or Bronto. Aside from being relatively simple to use, these types of services also offer varying levels of statistics analysis to help you fine tune your campaigns for a higher ROI. If you know your way around a server and are comfortable installing software on a web server then you may want to consider running your own email marketing software such as phplist. This is more complex to set up but gives you complete control over all aspects of it’s operation.

The next step is to build your mailing list. You’ll want to add a link on your web site enabling visitors to join, and then contact your current customers/clients and ask them if you can add them. In moving forward, be sure to ask all of your prospects if you can add them to your mailing list. It will take some time to build a large list but the focus should be quality over quantity.

Now you’ll need to create your first email newsletter. HTML newsletters produce far better results than text newsletters but you’ll need to carefully test yours to ensure that it displays properly. Roughly 75% of business users use Outlook, so start there, but you will also need to ensure that your newsletter displays properly in web based email including free accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo. Be sure to check that all links in your newsletter work properly and that all images load properly.

When it comes to sending your newsletter, keep in mind that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday generally generate higher open rates but email sent on the weekends generally generates higher click-through rates.