With the holiday season upon us, you may be thinking about email as a way to get the word out about your products or services. Email is still a great way to capture and engage customers—if you know how to plan a campaign that maximizes marketing dollars and maintains your company’s brand and reputation. This week we released a course by online marketing guru John Arnold that explains how to do it right. John has some serious cred in the email marketing world as the pioneer of Constant Contact’s small business education program, a sought-out conference speaker, and the author of For Dummies books on online marketing.
In Effective Email Marketing Strategies, John gives practical tips for how to build a top-quality subscriber list, comply with spam laws, increase sign-ups, choose design elements that grab customers, create compelling content, write subject lines, analyze the effectiveness of your email campaigns, and much more. Here’s a peek:
John’s number one email marketing tip? Think long-term.
“Avoid planning one email at a time or judging your success on one or two emails,” he explains. “Instead, plan to invest in email marketing over the course of six months to a year with multiple emails over the course of several campaigns. That way, you give a chance for the power of repeat messaging to work and you give yourself a chance to fine-tune your email content, frequency, and targeting.”
Suggested courses to watch next:
• Google Analytics Essential Training
• Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter
• All courses on business in the Online Training Library®
Tags: email marketing, online marketing
Do you think more emails should be sent out during the holiday?
If your business depends on holiday sales, then the answer is probably yes. However, don’t increase your frequency without increasing the value of your email content. If you’re only increasing the number of emails because you’re afraid people are too busy to notice unless you bombard them, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Instead, come up with a strategy for making each email valuable to your holiday shoppers. That way, people will feel good about taking action on only one – or every one – of your emails.
Great timing on this one! Thanks for having more business courses lately too – The SEO courses were great and e-mail marketing is a great addition as there is no real one-step solution, but a compilation of needed marketing practices.
Hi Jeremy! Great to hear the Effective email marketing course worked for you! We also really appreciate your feedback about the SEO courses; did you watch Analyzing your web site to improve SEO or SEO: Search engine optimization getting started (or both!)? If you’re interested in SEO and email marketing, you might also be interested in checking out our Social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter course (if you haven’t ventured there yet).
Keep your eyes peeled for much more to come from the business category in 2012!
Waiting for your Next Post ! – Admin of “White Crow IM”
Hi White Crow! So glad to hear you connected with the Practical and effective email marketing course. If you’re hungry for more content right away, you might check out chapter 10 of Online Marketing Fundamentals, or chapter two of Effective HTML Email and Newsletters for more on email marketing basics. There’s also some good information on social media marketing in chapter six of Online Marketing Fundamentals.
Is there anything specific you’re looking to learn?