When it comes to marketing your business, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to connect and build trust with your target audience. Regardless of industry or niche market, it’s imperative that you have a solid strategy in place before you start sending out emails.

With that in mind, here are some tips on how to get started with email marketing:

1. Have a Branding Strategy in Place

Your branding strategy should include the colors, fonts, tone of voice, and overall aesthetic that will make your emails cohesive and professional. The best way to do this is to create a style guide for your company that includes all of these details.

2. Make Every Character Count in Your Subject Line

On average less than 35% of marketing emails are opened, and even then, only an estimated 1.38% are clicked on.

Your subject line has one job—to get people to open your email. Once they do, you have a whole screen’s worth of content to convince them to click through to a landing page of your choice. Best practices suggest that you have 60 characters or less (approximately 9 words) to pique a person’s interest enough to open the email. Without that open, your awesome email content will never see the light of day.

However, there are some words (and even symbols) that could trigger a spam filter and send your email to a dreaded “junk” folder—ensuring that it will never be read. In order to avoid this utilize one of the many web-based subject line checkers that will help identify spam words, tab words, and other things to stay away from.

3. Use a Clear Call-to-Action

Your CTA (call-to-action) is the most important part of every email. It should be something that’s clear and easy for your customers to understand. The best way to do this is by making sure you include a clear CTA in the beginning of your email so that people know what they are clicking on. This will help increase your conversions, as well as allow you to track the effectiveness of your campaign.

In addition to being clear, your CTAs should also be concise. Make sure they give your customers all the information they need without unnecessary bloat or clutter.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Split Test

Split testing your email marketing campaigns is a great way to find out which elements are likely to drive the most engagement. Depending on your email marketing platform’s capabilities, you may be able to test different combinations of content, design, offers, and CTAs to ensure that they are all performing well. Then you can use the test results to tweak your approach and increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

5. Avoid Buying Lists

Building your subscriber list takes time. But while you’re waiting, avoid buying lists and sending to people who haven’t opted in to receive your emails. This can result in a massive uptick in abuse reports, which can get you in trouble with your email service provider, and land future campaigns in spam folders. Buying lists can also be a scam if it turns out the lists are full of outdated email addresses that no longer exist. If you try to upload an outdated list, this could also send a red flag to your email service provider and prompt them to freeze your account.

6. Give Users an Out

As hard as you try to provide relevant and engaging content to your audience, not everyone will want to stay subscribed to your emails, and that’s okay. In order to make things easy on everyone (and avoid getting reported as spam), be sure to include an easy unsubscribe option in your email. Most email template builders come with this feature already equipped, but if yours doesn’t, it’s important that you add one.

7. Timing is Everything

Before you start sending out email campaigns, you’ll want to think about which days and times work best for your list. Most industry experts tend to agree that marketing emails perform best when sent on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Using these parameters can give you a good place to start testing to your list.

Final Words

Email marketing is an excellent way to connect with your audience and build trust, but it won’t work without the right strategy. With these best practices in mind, you can ensure that your email marketing campaign is successful.

Search engine optimization is one of the most viable and cost-effective ways to market to your audience. It makes your website more accessible, which results in more visitors and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. It can be an effective tool for increasing brand awareness, developing relationships with prospects, and establishing oneself as a trustworthy authority in your field of expertise.

While it would take more than a single blog post to fully explore SEO, let’s look at some of the primary components that you can familiarize yourself with before undertaking an SEO effort.

Content Creation: Content SEO refers to the process of developing content that can help your web pages rank higher in search engine results. Search engines read the text on your website, and so the words you use there will help decide where your site will appear in their results pages.

Keywords Research: This is the process by which you investigate common search terms that people input into search engines and strategically integrate them in your content so that your material ranks higher on search engine results pages.

Local SEO: Local SEO is a method that helps your business appear more prominently in local search results when people search for it in their area. Local SEO can be beneficial to any company that has a physical location or that serves a specific geographic area.

On-Page SEO: On-page SEO involves optimizing both the text and the HTML source code of a particular page, as opposed to an off-page SEO strategy that involves links and other external signals.

User Experience: Creating good content is not only important to SEO – it can also help improve the usability of your site and foster a seamless user experience. For instance, make sure your website is responsive so that users can access it from mobile devices. And work on increasing page load speed, which will lower your bounce rate and encourage users to stay on your site longer. (The average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%. That rate jumps to 38% if it takes more than 3 seconds.)

Website Authority: Although the concept of authority is relatively new in SEO, it is becoming increasingly significant to search engines as online users become more aware of its significance. For the most part, authority indicates that your website is trustworthy, of high quality and relevance, and that it has something to offer visitors. When your website has greater authority, it will rank higher in search results and more prospects will come to trust your brand.

Website Traffic: Increased web traffic is one of the primary objectives of SEO. Approximately 33% of all clicks are sent to the first ranking page, and the top five listings receive more than 75% of all hits. If you want more prospects to see your website using a search engine, you need SEO strategies that will help you rank at the top of the search results page.

The use of SEO can assist you in developing stronger relationships with your audience, improving the customer experience, increasing your authority, driving more traffic to your site, giving you a competitive advantage, and increasing conversions – all of which can lead to increased sales, more customers, and greater growth for your company.