Tips for getting your emails opened

Initially e-mail marketing was perceived as the absolute marketing tool which was economical, quick and assessable. Click-through rates (CTRs) were the only numbers that were relevant, and people were excited to receive e-mails and read any kind of e-mail in their inbox.

But now-a-days the explosion of spam and the huge amount of e-mails that people receive has impaired the usefulness of e-mail small business internet marketing promotion tool. Even perfectly genuine e-mails are rapt by the spam filters or are deleted by the recipients unopened.

Nevertheless, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, e-mail marketing remains the number one online activity of Americans, and now as the technology has progressed and more and more people are able to receive e-mails on their cell phones and PDAs, the opportunities for creative e-mail marketing continually expanding.

E-mail small business internet marketing promotion has the potential to deliver a higher return on investment (ROI) than the traditional promotional methods such as direct mail advertising, newspaper and radio advertising etc. One should remember that spam and volume do not destroy e-mail marketing, but they are just some problems and you have to hop through them to get your e-mails delivered and opened.

Here are some techniques for getting your e-mails distributed, read and acted on. By using these techniques you will be able to earn revenue from all of the opportunities that e-mail marketing provides.

1. Manage Your "Subscribe" and "Unsubscribe" Requests Quickly:

One of the most important things you can do to

minimize your nuisances and maximize your revenue is to take care of your "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests. If you have an automated system for managing subscriptions then it will be done automatically but if you do not have an automated system for managing subscriptions you will have to periodically renew your opt-in list.

You should always contemplate requests to unsubscribe from your list very critically. People who are not swiftly removed from the subscribers list after making an unsubscribe request can blame you of spamming them, and you can find yourself in trouble with your ISP.

You should quickly add the people on your subscribers list who had asked to be added to your list. It is very important that people who ask to be added to your list are subscribed right away, as these subscription requests are going to increase your sales and bring small business internet marketing promotion to you and maybe any one of them becomes your best customer.

If the subscribe and unsubscribe requests are not handled automatically then in such a case you make sufficient adjustments for them right before you send the mails. This will ensure that your list is as up to date as possible.

2. Remove Duplicate Addresses:

Before you send any e-mails, you should make sure that you do not have any duplicate e-mail addresses in your list. There can be a situation that some people who had opted in to your subscribers list may come back later and sign up again, not remembering that they have already joined the list.

People are happy to get one copy of your e-mail, but getting multiple copies of the e-mails will make them unsubscribe from your list or they may even report you as a spammer.

This kind of spam complaint is comparatively easy to resolve, but it is still an annoyance, and instead of having a prospective customer who was so thrilled about your offer that they signed up twice in your subscribers list, you will be left with nothing.

3. Clean the List:

Cleaning your list means sieving through the messages that bounce back to you after sending an e-mail. You will have to decide which e-mail addresses should be removed from your list completely and which should be kept for further mailing.

"Bounced" messages, are those messages which were not successfully delivered to the projected recipient. The bounced messages could be categorized as either "soft" bounces or "hard" bounces.

Soft bounces are those messages that were not delivered at the time they were sent, but may be deliverable at some time in the future. The soft bounces are usually caused because of the recipients ISP being busy or their inboxes being full. Hard bounces are those messages that can never be delivered. Hard bounces are usually caused due to the user typing in an incorrect e-mail address at the time of subscribing to the list.

You should delete those e-mail addresses immediately that turn to hard bounces. If these e-mail addresses are left in your list you will have to go through unnecessary bounce messages every time you send a mail, which wastes lots of your precious time. If you continue to send e-mails to an address that is invalid, you can get into real trouble as dead addresses are used as spam traps, and if you send messages to these addresses constantly you can get into a problem with the ISP receiving them.

4. Divide Your List to Conquer More Subscribers:

People want to get only those e-mails that are relevant to them and if they get anything irrelevant they may consider it as spam, and can report is as spam.

Using the e-mail method to target the different segments of your market is one of the most effectual ways to promote the products and services on the internet. A 2006 report by MarketingSherpa found that those e-mail marketers who use segmentation have click-through rates (CTRs) that are 72% higher than those e-mail marketers who do not segment their subscribers lists.

You can segment the subscribers on the basis of whether or not they had bought from you, where they live, their age group, etc. There are numerous ways to segment your audience depending on the information that you have collected and e-mail automation makes it possible to segment your market easily. By segmenting your market you can improve the results spectacularly.

5. Catch Your Recipients' Attention by Using Their Names:

The secret of attracting your recipients attention is by personalizing the subject line of the e-mail. This is the technique which will enhance the response rate of your e-mails. It is a way of creating trust and developing affinity. The simple reason behind it is that nothing attracts an individuals attention more rapidly than hearing or seeing their own name.

By personalizing your e-mails, your e-mails emerge as genuine and secure to open, because the recipients will thought that the e-mail as coming from a reliant source. There are great e-mail marketing software available that will help you to completely personalize your campaigns and that too automatically, and save a lot of your time and effort.

Thus by using these techniques you can get your e-mails opened and read. E-mail marketing remains a highly effective promotional tool for any business, and the success depends on the number of messages delivered to and opened by the prospective audience.