Make your 2005 Email Marketing Plan Successful - Six useful tips

Email Marketing is growing more and more every year. Many small E-business owners have already made marketing plans for 2005. Email marketing is a very popular tool these days but often not utilized correctly to reach out to prospective customers. E-mail is very effective and inexpensive tool than regular mail to attract prospective customers, grow relationships with current customers, gain mindshare among affiliate partners and resellers and increase brand awareness. Below are six useful tips to make your 2005 email marketing successful:

Improve your Email Marketing tactics

When used correctly, and ethically, email marketing is one of the most effective forms of online advertising. But if misused, abused or underutilized, e-mail marketing may have an adverse effect on your business. Here are some keys to successful email marketing.

Select the right Audience

Selecting right audience is the first step to any marketing strategy. Make sure to buy the right targeted audience segmented in right demographic groups. If gathering audience list on your website, make sure you collect as much information as you can to segment your list in to interests. If you are using an audience list that you currently have, make sure to divide it in to groups to make your message more effective.

Personalize your message

Segment your audience in to groups depending on geographical areas or interests or age and personalize your message for each group of audience. Expert statistics and results show that the more you personalize your message or newsletter, the higher your open rates and clickthrough rate will be.

Send HTML and Text versions

Send both HTML and Text version of you message so that everyone of your audience receive either HTML or plain text message depending upon their server settings. HTML messages tend to get much more response in terms of open rate than regular plain text.

Proper use of From, To and Subject line fields

Proper use of these fields is one of the most important keys to a successful email marketing message. Effective subject line will make your prospective customers to read your message.

Use your company name or an individual within the company.

Personalize each message with the recipients first name or last name.

Use an effective and message related non-deceptive subject line. Creative, interesting and to the point straight subject line tends to give good results. Dont use "newsletter" word in your subject line if possible. Dont use the same subject line every time. Ad words like free, cheap, free money does not work.

Balanced use of Text and Graphics

Balanced use of text and graphics are also important for getting your message read and responded to. Not everybody have fast internet connection to download your graphics loaded message.

Keep your message as clean as possible. Use soft colors with appropriate use of white spaces.

Write a brief and to the point message rather than making them read the whole story. Make them to visit your website to read the full story.

Too much graphics results in low open rates as nobody wants to wait till they download it.

Always write your physical address at the bottom of your message to be CAN-SPAM compliant. Read the CAN-SPAM act on our website www.mailmailer.com

In many cases, search engine optimization and link popularity can be more effective to drive more traffic to your website but with low "visitor to customer" conversion rate. Traffic from your email marketing efforts will have high "visitor to customer" conversion rate. But Again If used wisely. There are many more useful tactics and tips for successful email marketing, but I cannot write them all in one article. MailMailer will be back with some more ideas on Email marketing for you in 2005.