Make it easy to subscribe. Post a signup form on your homepage, blog, Facebook page, and wherever else your customers and fans are already active. You might want to collect names and birthdays (for a special offer or gift) or invite readers to join groups, but don’t go crazy with the required fields. A too-long subscribe form might scare people off.
Keep it simple and strong (K.I.S.S.). Once subscribers open your email or click through to your landing page, you have mere seconds to capture their attention. So don’t use difficult words, “market-speak,” or technical jargon. Instead, write as if you were talking to a friend. But at the same time, keep your content powerful and to the point to grab and keep readers’ interest.
Tell a Story In All Marketers Are Liars, Godin emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a successful marketing strategy. Email offers the opportunity to tell the story in continuous installments. "Email marketers don't have a prayer to tell a story," Godin says, "unless they tell it in advance, in another medium, before they get permission. Otherwise, it quickly becomes spam. The best email marketing starts with a foundation, like Amazon, and uses the email to drip the story, to have it gradually unfold." Too much email marketing, Burke opines, is one-off offers written as if recipients "like to run home at the end of the day and turn on Home Shopping Network so they can be targeted 24x7 by commercials.
Send a welcome email. It’s always smart to remind people why they’re on your list and reassure them that good things are in store. You might even send new subscribers a special offer or exclusive content, as your way of thanking them for their loyalty.
Talk about the benefits versus the features. Let your customers and prospects know “what’s in it for them” by talking about the benefits of your products and/or services, instead of simply listing the features.
Use less “we” and more “you.” Keep the focus of your email-marketing copy on your recipients, rather than providing too much unnecessary information about yourself and your company.
Send people content they want. Email newsletter services offer features like groups and segmentation to help you make your content relevant to the people reading it. If you’re sending different emails for different groups (for example, a nonprofit might send separate emails to volunteers, donors, and the board of directors), then you can ask people to check a box to join a particular group on your signup form. Segmentation allows you to target certain subscribers on your list without assigning them to group. If your store is having a sale, then you could send a campaign only to people near a particular zip code, because subscribers who live in other parts of the world don’t need to know about it
Think about mobile. If a campaign doesn’t show up on mobile devices, it’s not going to perform very well. Everything you send should be mobile-friendly. Check out ReturnPath’s “Email in Motion” infographic for some data that might affect the way you design your emails.
Build Your Email Reputation "Understanding developments in the enterprise/corporate environment can be enormously helpful in pursuit of best-in-class email delivery rates," says Al DiGuido, president and CEO of Epsilon Interactive, a provider of strategic email communications and marketing automation solutions.
Punctuate prudently. Be careful not to distract subscribers — or dilute your marketing message — by overusing such punctuation as exclamation points, UPPERCASE LETTERS (that shout at the reader), and emoticons.
Proofread, and proofread again. Although this may seem obvious, proofreading is often overlooked. And typos and inaccuracies in your email-marketing copy can hurt your credibility with subscribers.
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