Content marketing is fine, and so is social media marketing, but at the root of every online entrepreneurial success lies a successful execution of an email marketing campaign. Are you building your own mailing list? If you are not, stop doing whatever you are doing right now and sign up for a service like Mailchimp, AWeber or Constant Contact, create a mailing list, generate a subscription form, and then put it somewhere prominently on your website or blog. I’m not recommending any particular email marketing company because more or less they provide the same sort of services and almost every service allows you to create a mailing list for free for the first 1000-2000-3000 subscribers. The basic idea is, start publishing a newsletter as soon as possible.

Why your business needs email marketing?

Despite social media, despite blogging, email marketing still reigns supreme. Billions of emails are sent everyday and despite the fact that more than 70% of them are spam, people still prefer to receive emails rather than go through social media updates when it comes to doing serious business. Another good thing about email marketing is that people subscribe to your updates on their own. Most of the email marketing companies allow you to manage your mailing lists with double-opt-in facility which means when a person submits his or her email ID to your subscription form, a confirmation email is sent to the same email ID and unless that person clicks the confirmation link contained within the email message, he or she does not get your email updates. So only if someone really wants to hear from you, hears from you. It means the person is eager to hear what you have to say. He or she is eager to receive updates from you.

But not every email marketing campaign is successful, this is why there are certain things you need to know before you start your email marketing campaign. Here is the concise listing:

1. Define a clear, lucid way of convincing people to subscribe to your updates.
2. Find out which are the best days of the week to broadcast your email marketing campaign.
3. Find out the frequency with which you should send messages to your subscribers.
4. Figure out how the spam filter works because otherwise even when people subscribe to your updates they may end up not receiving them – explain it to them how to white-list the email address from which they receive your updates.
5. Track the right metrics – how many people actually open your messages, how many click through them and once they come to your website through your emails how many of them do business with you?
6. Figure out A/B testing – this is also known as split testing in which you send two versions of your email to see which one performs better. Most of the email marketing services (this is normally a premium feature) allow you to send multiple versions of your emails.
7. Take every aspect of your email messages seriously – the subject line as well as the main content. Without a strong subject line people want open your email messages and without equality, convincing and strong body content people won’t click the links in your message.
8. Find out what is the ideal length of your subject line – not all email clients will be able to handle the length of your subject line.
9. Try to make your emails look good in every platform. Whether people are checking your mails on their computers, laptops, tablets or mobile phones, make sure they look the same, or almost the same, without losing the central meaning.
10. Don’t be afraid to break rules of email marketing. It doesn’t mean you spam the hell out of your subscribers but keep on trying various formats and various writing styles to attain the optimal results.