With the invention and growth of the internet and email marketing, a whole new medium has been opened up to individuals in the field of marketing. Unlike other marketing channels, email allows us the ability to reach thousands of individuals almost instantaneously and at little or no cost. And while it is easy to see the benefits this type of marketing can provide, learning the best way to go about sending out your emails isn’t always quite as simple. Here are 5 of the most common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them:

1. Having no return address.
   This is one of the most common mistakes when marketing by email and can also prove to be one of the most frustrating for your recipients. Often, the individuals you’ll be emailing will have never worked with you, and therefore will not have your contact information readily available. Rather than having noreply@ or bounce@ as the return email address, try to have a real, monitored return address that will make it easy and stress free for any potential clients to directly contact you.
2. Having a weak subject line.
   You may think that the subject line is short, and therefore less important than the rest of your email. This is simply not true however, as the subject line is actually the second largest influencer on the open rate (after the sender). Think of the subject line as your only chance to make a first impression. As a general rule, try to make the subject line catchy, and when you send out email ask yourself, “Would I open this message?”
3. Sending image based emails.
   Although common sense might tell you that an image based email may attract more attention, text-only emails actually have a 40 percent higher click through rate. There are multiple reasons that this may be, the first of which is that emails are often checked through smart phones and webmail, neither of which usually displays images as well as a desktop client. (Blackberries and Gmail are both notoriously bad at displaying images in email) If you do use images with a lot of text in them, be sure that you repeat everything in simple text, so that users that are unable or unwilling to see images don’t miss important content.
4. Not having a clear purpose.
   Emails need to be clear in their intent, and that intent should usually occur near the top of your email, or somewhere where it is at least easy to identify without much work. Most individuals won’t take the time to search an entire email to find why it was sent. Have a direct offer, provide a coupon, or do something that makes the benefits of your email clear immediately. If you have more information, limit it to what is most important and most interesting to the reader.
5. Having no target.
   Don’t just bombard every email with every offer. Instead create multiple lists for individuals with similar interests and send people only information they may be interested in. If you send someone something for which they have no concern, they may not bother to read your email next time.

While this list may not make you a master of email marketing immediately, you’ll find that almost all of the best email marketers are able to utilize these tips successfully and repeatedly each and every time they send an email.

Email marketing has provided one of the fastest means of communication, which is also environmental friendly. Electronic mail has emerged far more successful and useful than its inventors could have imagined. Today email is just not a means of communication but has become a vital marketing tool also. Email marketing is used to define the multiple benefits of emails, and the profits that one can gain from the same.

Statistics prove that email marketing acts as a catalyst for Web users, and is a decisive tool in all their offline purchases. Almost, more than half the users purchased offline products after they got an email promotion as per a recent study. Emails that had coupons or coupon codes boost the open rate and online sales. Some ways in which email marketing can help you include:

Branding your company: You can brand your company’s image through creating graphic-based emails that are catchy and visually appealing. You can also use email ids like yourname@thenameofyourcompany.com as this creates a positive and independent image of your company. You can use these official email addresses on invoices, providing information flyers, and other marketing materials.

Targeting newsletters: The e-mail newsletters are a perfect cost-effective method for reaching out to millions of customers, especially with a tight budget. All you need to do here is seek permission of the customers to e-mail them. Not seeking permission can alienate regular customers or even irritate them. Newsletters can be sent out through sign up options at various locations like your website.

Auto responder benefits: Email marketing allows you to be in touch with your customer 24X7. You can use auto responder services to let them know that their problem or query would be sorted out immediately, and thus let them know that customer satisfaction is vital for you.

Campaigning or marketing: Through emails one can also trigger campaign based interest and the results can be determined by clicks that you get on your website. This is ideal for launch of a new product or promoting a new offer.

Generation of repeat sales: Promote your old offers or get in touch with clients by reaching out to them on their birthdays and anniversaries. This is a great way to enhance customer loyalty.

Viral marketing: Through this process, you can ask your customers to forward their favorite products to other friends or suggest your brand to others. This proves to be one of the most affective and reliable marketing tools.

Catering to different interest groups: You can sort out different groups on the basis of their interest, preference of choice, gender, age, etc. Then you can categorize the emails on the basis of these factors and reach out to customers with products that you think they would love the most.

There are a lot of other ways in which you can use email marketing for promoting your product. This helps you in retaining older customers, even as you gain news ones and enhance revenues.

Selling products or services

If you own a business the purpose of your eNewsletter will probably be to drive more people to your website with the intention of making more sales or getting more orders. Regardless of how well your business might be doing you will always want to get more customers. Using newsletters is a great way to sell your own services, and products as well as partner products and services because what it essentially does is help you build a relationship with your subscribers. This in turn means that your subscribers will begin to trust you and hence will drive your sales figures up.

Before you even start building a list of emails and start writing your first newsletter you need first think about what you are trying to achieve. If you have an online store it’s probably going to be more sales, if you provide services it going to be more orders, and if you are running a blog it’s going to be more visitors to your blog which will help you make money off advertising.

Provide useful information

Your newsletter should provide good and solid information. Good information helps you build credibility. People will begin to trust you once they see that you are giving them good information they can find nowhere else. The information you provide will also help you build readership which will help you sell affiliate products and partner offers as well as advertising.

Your email list should be targeted to the services and products you sell. The people you are sending emails to need to have the desire and ability to purchase your products or sign up to your service. You don’t want to be sending gardening newsletters to people who are interested in cooking and vice versa.

Building an email marketing list is a great way to establish a relationship with potential clients. There are many ways you can go about building an email marketing list, many businesses even go so far as to purchase email lists but those lists are usually not targeted and chances of success using those lists are very narrow.

Offer free downloads with sign up

Everyone loves free stuff and especially stuff they can’t find anywhere else. By offering free stuff you can get a person to sign up to your newsletter. For instance if you are a designer you can offer free web design template downloads to people who sign up using their name, and email address. This is a great way to target and find people who will be interested in your web design services. You can then send them a weekly or monthly newsletter informing them about your latest promotions and offers.

Ask people you meet if you can add them

If you are networking to promote your business, ask the people you meet if you can keep in touch with them through email. The internet is a big part of our lives and we meet people online on almost a regular basis either via social networking websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook or on various chat rooms online. Many people you meet might actually be interested in hearing from you about your business and about your latest offers. They can great leads which you can add to your email list however make sure that you ask them for permission before you add them to your list.

Add current clients

There is nothing like getting lots of repeat business. The best way to get repeat business is to add your current clients to your list. Give them a call and ask them if they would be interested in receiving emails from you informing them of your latest offers and news. Many of them would since they are already familiar with your services. This will make selling to them easier and hence increase the flow of repeat business.

Having a targeted email marketing list is a great way to get the word out about your products and services. However once you have a list you also need to be able to use it effectively. You need to deliver on what you had promised when you asked people to sign up for it.

Using an auto responder

In order to build an email list of subscribers who respond you need to develop a relationship with them. The people on your list need to get to know you better and that’s the only way they are going to trust you. This is where the auto responder comes in. The auto responder is built into our email marketing service and gives you the ability to send out mails at preset intervals. This saves you a lot of work in terms of sending out emails. It also helps develop a relationship with your subscribers.

An excellent way to build a good healthy relationship with your subscribers is to send out a weekly or a biweekly newsletter. Write good articles and provide them with helpful tips, and advice. This will help you the most and more than anything in creating a good responsive list.

Categorizing your list

In order to market the right products to the right people you need to categorize your list. You need to break the list down into fields of interests that your subscribers have. You can also build on most clicked subjects. So for instance if you are offering just a weekly SEO newsletter to your subscribers, many of those subscribers are either business owners, or people looking to learn about SEO. While on the other hand if you are offering a general newsletter about the latest news and events, you can narrow them down to the links they clicked within your newsletter. This will help you create accurate email lists which you can use for target marketing purposes, as opposed to just sending one email to everyone on your list.

Email blast is actually the act of sending out one email to a large mailing list. This used to be something that most marketers used when the internet was new, however people soon grew tired of it and it became known as spam. An email blast can come from stores and businesses that send out one email to everyone on their list informing them of either a sale or a special announcement.

The biggest problem with an email blast is that it does not give you an opportunity to build a relationship with your customer. You are primarily just throwing something at what is mostly a bunch of email addresses hoping that someone will take notice of it. This sort of email marketing is almost dead as even free email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail will most surely throw your email into the spam folder.

The major difference between a newsletter and an email blast is with a newsletter your subscribers have willingly subscribed to hear from you. A newsletter helps you build a relationship with your subscribers who eventually and hopefully become paying customers.

Email blast might be good for one day sales offers or partner offers but even then for it to work you will need to have a really large database of email addresses. Out of probably a thousand email addresses there might be a few people who might visit your website and out of those there probably might be one or two people who buy from you.

Today’s internet marketing is all about building long lasting relationships. It’s about reaching out and attracting people to your business. If anything email blasting is just going to give you a bad name, so if you are really serious about promoting your services and products build a targeted email newsletter subscriber list.

Email marketing campaigns are given a spam score rating of 0-9. 0 is not spam, 9 will be blocked by any spam filter. Average setting for a spam blocker is 3 or 4. It’s always best to set up an email marketing campaign with a score of zero.  Sometimes re-writing phrases is a necessity to keep it from being blocked.

Here are just a few phrases that increase the spam score:

• Subject that starts with a dollar sign
• Subjects that contain a question mark and exclamation point
• All caps
• Multiple exclamation points
• Money back guarantee
• Cash back or money back
• No cost
• Free

Why would your email marketing be blocked?

When you are sending email marketing through our service and use your own email address as the “from” address, emails sent to yourself may be blocked by your server. When this happens, the email will either bounce or go to your junk mail. This is because your mail server is smart enough to know that the email that claims to be internal (your email address) is actually coming from an outside source. Don’t worry. This isn’t happening to your list unless they have the same email domain (@domain.com) as you.

In order to successfully get the word out about your products you need a good email list. A good email list of potential clients is an invaluable asset. There are a number of ways you can go about creating a good email list.

Offer Something Free

Offering something free is one of the best ways to get people to enter in their email address and name. However you need to make sure that you offer something interesting to the people you are trying to target. For instance if you are trying to target people who are interested in SEO software you should probably offer a free search engine report, since people interested in SEO software will certainly be interested in a free search engine report. All you need to do is to put a box that asks for their email address and name and email the download link to them, that way you can be sure that the email address belongs to them.

Start a forum

When people sign up for forums they usually enter in their name and email address along with a bunch of other things. The good thing about forums is many people tend to visit forms on almost a daily basis. So a forum will serve two purposes the first being that it will make it easy for you to compile an email list and the second it will make it easy for you to pin point exactly who needs what. For instance if you see a graphic designer on your form asking questions about InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator software this person is probably the right candidate for your Graphic Design Tutorials. You can send him an email letting him know that you are offering design tutorials.

Offer Premium Content

There are many blogs, and websites out there that offer content only to their members. Usually what they offer is a membership and all you have to do is to enter in your email address and name and you can now access this member’s section. This is an excellent way to build a good email list since each time you recommend something they will know that it’s coming from a credible source.