**When your business has something to say or a product to sell, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to reach out to your customers wherever they are?**
With the help of (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/digital/email-marketing/ text: email marketing popup: true title: Email Marketing), grabbing the attention of your customers on the go is easier than ever before. This hugely powerful marketing method gives you a great ROI, but so few businesses really make the most of eshots.
Here we answer some of the most common questions asked about email marketing, and share with you our top tips to craft a winning campaign every time:
**1. When is the best time to send an eshot?**
If you’re signed up to any mailing lists, you’ll notice that you get sent eshots at different times of the day.
Sometimes they’re waiting in your inbox as soon as you wake up, others land mid morning or early afternoon. So when is the best time to schedule your email marketing campaigns for? Is there a time of day that encourages the largest open rate?
Research – and lots of testing – has shown that the optimum time to send your eshots is either 11am or 3pm.
At 11am, your recipients have already opened and acted on all emails from overnight and are much more likely to open and read your message. The same goes for 3pm. Recipients have cleared the lunchtime backlog, boosting your chances of success.
**2. Should we be segmenting our target list?**
The brief answer to this is: YES!
Why send a blanket message to hundreds of recipients, when you can just as easily send targeted messages to segmented contact lists? By carefully crafting your message to specific recipients, you will boost your open – and all important conversion rate.
**3. How can we avoid spam filters?**
Everyone sets their spam filters differently, so it’s difficult to give this question one simple answer. However some top tips for avoiding spam include…
– Don’t include too many exclamation marks – this looks like spam to humans and computers
– Avoid words like ‘free’ and ‘urgent’ in the subject – intelligent filters might mark this as spam
– Send your emails sparingly – sending one everyday will quickly flag you up as spam
**4. What can we do to boost our open rate?**
The first step to improving your open rate is crafting a winning subject line. Create intrigue with something engaging and exciting. Tell readers what they can expect from opening your email, but hold enough back that they are encouraged to open up.
You should also connect with your recipients with your first eshot.
Let them know what to expect from you, and they are much more likely to open emails from you in the future. Get it wrong with your first email, and your suppression list (list of unsubscribers) will only grow.
Check out our (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/email-marketing-secrets/ text: 7 Secrets to Successful Email Marketing) post for some more tips on boosting your open rate.
**5. What is the best email marketing software to use?**
There are a whole host of third party email marketing software options your business can use to maximise your email marketing.
dotMailer, Campaign Monitor, and Mail Chimp are just three of the most popular, and user-friendly systems out there. Each has its own benefits, so it is worth doing your research to find out which will work best for your business.
**6. My open rate is only 20%. Does this mean my campaigns aren’t working?**
These systems will produce reports showing you your open rate, any links that have been clicked on, and whether someone opened an email more than once. Many people though, see an open rate of 20% and think that this means their campaigns aren’t working.
In reality though, this is a great open rate to be met with. When you factor in bounce rates, in-active email accounts, and people simply deleting emails from unknown senders; you can see how effective email marketing really is.
As long as you have a strong message and play by the rules, including eshots in your businesses marketing mix is hugely beneficial. Looks like that age-old marketing myth of speaking to your customers wherever they are is a lot more realistic than we first thought thanks to today’s technology.
*Thinking about email marketing for your business? (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/contact/ text: Contact us popup: true title: Contact) today and put our dedicated online marketing team to the test, and see just how powerful this marketing method can be.*