To enjoy a high ROI from your email marketing campaign, you need to plan it well. Fail in this aspect, and all your efforts will go to waste. On the other hand, an effective email marketing campaign can increase your bottom-line quickly.

This brings to the most important question – how to plan an email marketing campaign? The answer is actually not that at all complex. When creating your email marketing campaign, just keep the following pointers in mind:

• Connect with your customers first – If you have just started your email marketing campaign, you should avoid making sales pitch in your first few correspondences. The strategy of going for the kill straightaway can be counterproductive and you may lose names in your email list faster than Ben Johnson on steroids.Instead, first focus on developing rapport with your clients. Once you have their attention, you can then ask for their business.
• Test market your value offering – Test market your campaign offering before sending it to everyone on the list. First, send the email to a test target audience to evaluate the reaction, and then, if required, modify your email marketing campaign according to the response you get.
• Follow the Pareto principle – One rule that holds true to nearly every business is the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. Pareto principle in relation to your business states that 20% of your customers will account for nearly 80% of your sales. This is why, it is necessary that you have different email marketing strategies for different customers – customers who account for the major portion of your sales and customers who buy only sporadically from you.
• Segment your email list – For an email marketing campaign to be effective, just having a long email list is not enough. You need to categorize it. When you send an email newsletter to 100 people, not all of them will read your email. Some will read them, some will even forward your message to others, while others will send your email to trash bin straightaway.

Mailhatch allow you to see the action that recipients take upon receiving an email from you. Based on this knowledge you can formulate different email marketing strategies for people who read your email, people who regularly forward your email and people who do not read your email. For instance, you can offer special discounts to evangelists of your business to further strengthen their loyalty to you.

Make use of the above-discussed tips and avoid common email marketing pitfalls to drive maximum ROI from your email marketing campaign.  Next, we will learn about different email marketing pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

Email marketing continues to outperform all other direct marketing tools and experts believe the trend is here to stay for long.

So, the question now is not whether you should use email as a marketing tool or not, instead how effective is your email marketing campaign.

Here are the top 7 email marketing tips.

1. Know the objective – Before you send an email, you should be clear about your objective. You need to decide whether you want to persuade, request action, inform, or motivate the recipients. A clearer objective, in turn, helps you in formulating an effective email.
2. Know the audience – Do you want the whole world to listen to what you have to say, or you want your words to reach out to only a limited few?Sending the right message to the right people is the key of an effective email marketing campaign.
3. Keep it short and simple – The problem with long emails—even when the matter is relevant—is that no one has time to read them.So, do yourself and your recipients a favor and say what you have to say in fewer words. When it comes to length of email content vis-à-vis effectiveness of email marketing, always remember one rule – less is more.
4. A clear subject line – The subject line is the most important component of an email. Sometimes, even more important than the content itself!Keep the description in the subject line clear, relevant to the subject, and catchy. Often, what you say in the subject line decides whether your recipients will read the email or send it to the trash bin.
5. State important things first – Always state the most important things at the top of your email. Use rest of the email to support the theme of your email. For instance, if you are informing your customer about a sale then declare the sale in the first line itself. Use the rest of the email to describe more facts about the sale.
6. One email one subject – Don’t include more than one theme in your email. It will only confuse the recipients and they are unlikely to absorb even one subject.
7. Say your expectations loud and clear – Be loud and clear on what you want your recipients to do next. And provide them with all the information they need to do it.

Now that you the know how to use email marketing effectively, the focus needs to shift on how to plan your email marketing campaign.

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