Email marketing can be a profitable activity and an effective tool for growing your business and building your brand. The problem is that email marketing can only work its wonders if you are prepared to put in the work, do the research and give everything you do the professional touch.
If done incorrectly, email marketing will not be effective, will not build your brand, and will not drive customers through your doors. If any of the following apply to you, email marketing is probably not the right choice for you.
You should keep away from email marketing if:
- You are planning to send your mailings to a list of addresses that you purchased – buying a list of emails is a good way to get banned as a spammer but a lousy way to make money.
- You think you can make big money from day one – there is no such thing as overnight success, and that holds true for email marketing as well.
- You refuse to take the time to test your email templates across a wide range of email clients – sending emails that your recipients cannot read will do nothing to boost your business, but it could boost your unsubscribe rate.
- You plan to hide your true identity or hide behind tricks in the from field and subject line – if you are a professional, you should be proud to let recipients know who you are.
- You think that techniques that worked 10 years ago are still the best strategy – the world has moved on, and if you are stuck in the past you will quickly be left behind.
- You use free SMTP servers to send emails to large lists of recipients – professional SMTP servers – e.g. turboSMTP – are worth every penny you pay for them, and that is not much.
- You think segmenting your list is not worth the trouble – sending the same message to everyone on your list is fast track to failure.
- You see your subscribers as numbers on a list, not as real human beings with real needs and feelings – the best email marketers treat their customers with respect and want to meet their needs.
If you really want to succeed as an email marketing, you need to avoid making the mistakes listed above. It is not enough to avoid one or two of those blunders; you need to make sure your strategy does not include any outdated or ineffective email marketing techniques.
There are no shortcuts to success; taking a professional approach is always the best way to go. You have probably seen plenty of unprofessional and dishonest email marketers, but any success they generate is sure to be short-lived. The world has changed, and email marketing has changed with it. Email marketers can no longer rely on tricks to gain the trust of their customers. In today’s online world, trust must be earned, and only professional techniques will get the job done.
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