Feb 10
10
Businesses Use Email Marketing To Boost Results
Email marketing is one tool that an increasing number of businesses have latched onto within the past couple years as it is an amazing opportunity to double or even triple profits. If you have decided that this method of marketing to your customers is a strategy you’d like to tackle, plenty of resources are out there to help you get started. However, it can be difficult distinguishing among the many different email marketing companies. Here are several characteristics of a reputable email marketing service.
Building Permission-Based Opt-In Mailing Lists
A vital part of email marketing is having easy-to-use mailing list management features. First and foremost, an email marketing service should allow you to be able to upload your existing mailing addresses from a file (usually Excel or CSV) on your computer. This is often the preferred method when adding a lot of contacts because manually entering your existing contacts email address one at a time is more time consuming and leaves lots of room for mistakes to occur.
Second, one of the characteristics of contact list management that an email marketing solution should contain is a feature that allows your list to be segmented into multiple groups. As you build your email contact list, you’ll see why the segmentation is important. Remember, not each contact is the same and having different segments lets you treat them differently.
A third feature that your provider should have is the easy-integration of a sign-up box on your website. Being able to use a sign-up box from your email marketing service is perhaps the most important feature you should be looking for. A sign-up box that’s strategically placed on your site acts as an automatic marketing tool that works on autopilot adding subscribers as soon as they enter their email address.
Blasting Out Your Emails
An email marketing service should offer a variety of options when it comes to sending out your emails to your mailing list. There should be pre-designed HTML templates, image galleries that you can use if you want to include images, and there should also be the option to customize your own design. In addition, there should be guidance along the way and systematic instructions to help if you get lost. An intuitive, user-friendly, and easy-to-use interface is what you ultimately need in an ideal email marketing service.
Reporting Tools
An important part of the marketing process is tracking your efforts. In order to know the success of your efforts, you need to know what your subscribers do with the information contained within those emails. A reputable email marketing provider should contain such data like how many emails were opened, which links your prospects clicked on the most, and how many emails bounced because of invalid or full email addresses. In addition, important subscriber statistics that you should have access to include what your email-list growth rate it as well as how many subscribers have been added and removed. Ideally these reports will be updated in real-time so that you don’t have to wait to gauge your success.
All of these elements are important to look for when selecting the right email marketing service provider. The ability to create visually appealing emails, easily manage your mailing list, and have reporting data readily available at your fingertips are all features that will help you excel at the highest level with your email marketing.
Rudy Barell is an Account Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing program used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing software. Try it free!
