10 Essential Marketing Tips To Boost Your Businesses Success

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1 10 Essential Marketing Tips To Boost Your Businesses Success You may have tried marketing or would like to find out how an campaign can drive more leads and sales to your business. The following tips will really help you get off to a successful start. You may have already found that simply writing an and sending it hasn t quite given you the response level that you may have hoped for. You can enjoy improved response rates today. This is your opportunity to build new customer relationships, trust and incremental business. marketing can be a complicated process, but if you start with these essential tips then you will be off to a flying start! Tip #1 Ensure Your Subject Line Grabs Attention Your needs to be read in amongst others in a receiver s inbox and stand out in a positive way. s that are from people you know are more likely to grab initial attention than those from an unknown sender. You can test out different words, length of subject line and mixing up upper or lower cases to see which work the best. You will find that words such as FREE will have a very different effect to DISCOUNT and their effect depends on your customers.

2 2 Tip #2 Write Your In A Personal & Friendly Manner Even if your is intended for a business, you are still writing to a person. So keeping your message personal, friendly and engaging will be better received than officious or corporate sounding language. After all the purpose of your is to encourage an individual to respond to you, starting a form of conversation. Tip #3 Ensure Your Call To Action Is Clear Including Links Your overall reason for sending an will be to encourage a response, be it to download information, respond directly to your message or click through to your website. The action you would like the recipient to take must be clear and this includes the links. Try to avoid shortening links e.g. xyzbitly.com as this can be seen as untrustworthy, to both your customer and to service providers (your may get blocked!). If your web link is long or looks untidy then it is better to hyper link such as Contact Sparks4Growth Today. Links are useful for customers so don't be shy to use them in your messages.

3 3 Tip #4 Make A Text Only Version Of Your Available The more messages that you manage to deliver to an inbox, the more potential you have from your s. Many people and businesses use service providers that have complex rules to blocked undesirable some indicators they use are the inclusion of images, HTML (designed images). These may get blocked and reduce your delivery rate. Ensuring you either write mainly text-based s or provide the service provider with an alternate text based will increase your campaigns potential. Tip #5 Minimise Your Of Risk Getting Blacklisted Your s are being monitored in three or more ways. By your sending method such as Outlook, MailChimp, Gmail; by your recipients service provider and of course by the person you are writing to. If you send to addresses that you have gleaned from web pages and not gained permission (known as Opt In) then you risk having your account temporarily or permanently blacklisted. You could find that you are unable to send s or get reported for improper data use.

4 4 Tip #6 Include Unsubscribe Option To Increase Your Potential You may be tempted to avoid adding an unsubscribe option in your s. But this is a positive thing to do, as it builds trust and is in increasing numbers of countries, a legal requirement. If a customer unsubscribes they are telling you something valuable, why not contact them in a polite and positive way to find out why? You will at least learn how to improve your next campaign and may even find that your personal attention results in a re-subscribe or even a sale! Tip #7 Keep Text Short Overall And Easy To Read Whether you are sending HTML or plain text messages the purpose of your is to be easy to read. People have limited time so help them by being succinct. Include bold facing for your headings or use * in plain text as bullet points. Keep your paragraphs short and with consistent line spacing also helps.

5 5 Tip #8 Avoid Over Use Of Images Or Even Images At All s unlike print publications are designed to create a one to one dialogue. Although an look better with images when you send them, they may be removed by the receivers server impacting the layout when they open it. Unless an image is going to give real extra value then try to avoid using them. If you do need to include them ensure you create a high quality HTML message, with a plain text version. Tip #9 Build Up Your List Organically And Cherish If you encourage people to provide their addresses they are more likely to become valuable customers. addresses are like currency, incredibly protected by each of us and potentially business gold for you! Your customers will value your messages more if they ve agreed to receive messages from you. Once you have been trusted with someone s address ensure you treat their information well and respectfully e.g. ensure messages are relevant.

6 6 Tip #10 Start Small, Test, Adjust, Test Repeat You may be running a large campaign with lots of existing lists available to you or a small campaign to a niche group of customers. Whichever you are aiming for it is a good idea if you run a small test initially, make adjustments and then run a second test. Repeat until you are satisfied with the results. This means that when you increase the scale of people you to, you have the confidence that your message will work in terms of being received, viewed, opened and responded to. You will have more data left to customers and you won t be overwhelmed trying to analyse why your message failed or worked. These are fundamental marketing best practices and even the most professional marketer won t get it right first time. However you will have a far greater chance of success than most others if you try out these essentials for your next campaign. If you would like to find out more about marketing then you may wish to contact me or my team we would be delighted to help you to even greater success! Mark Elliott Director, Sparks4Growth Ltd. [email protected]