Email marketing has been labelled as the best performing marketing strategy of the century. It is also the most accessible marketing medium and has easily the best ROI because of its very low unit cost. Follow these 6 steps and your business will benefit from a great email marketing strategy:

1. Choose an email marketing provider

First thing a business needs to do when it gets serious about email marketing is to choose a suitable email marketing provider to manage and send the emails. There are plenty of excellent reputable email marketing services that will send the email campaigns, remove bouncing emails that don’t get sent because of invalid addresses and even build up reports of the email campaigns.

2. Build your list of email addresses

Next thing to do is to start growing the email list. First you have to build an opt-in form that collects the emails of customers and prospects. Email marketing providers usually have easy to use form builders where you just add your own details and messages and the service builds the code for you to embed to your website.

There are two important things to remember with using the opt-in form:

a) Give subscribers a valuable gift as a reward for giving their email address and name. It can be in a form of a coupon, store discount, free report, ebook or anything else that your customers find value in.

b) Add the opt-in form on every single page on your website preferably on top of the page. Business Facebook Page is another important place for the form. Add the form also into business leaflets and ads – prospects can then bring the form to the store and collect their reward. You have to manually add these email addresses to the email list. Have the form on the counter of your business as well.

3. Design a Newsletter

When you design your email campaign it is good to do in a form of a newsletter. People tend to stay subscribers to a newsletter longer than to random emails. Email marketing providers help you with this as well. Most of them have newsletter templates that you can adjust to suit your business. You can add your business logos and headers. Good design gives a big advantage to your newsletter – recipients recognize the business and the newsletter easily and this adds trust to your message.

The newsletter needs to have valuable information in it to keep subscribers interested. Reports and articles are a great way to add useful information to newsletters. Then you can add your offers, discounts and links you’d like the subscribers to click. Best email marketing providers let you also add videos to the emails.

4. Send and get you emails opened

There are a couple of crucial points in sending emails and actually get them opened:

From line – The sender of an email is the first thing a recipient sees when he gets an email. It is definitely best if the recipient recognizes the sender. People get so many emails nowadays that they have no time to open them all. The first ones to go to the bin are the ones that the recipient doesn’t know. For this reason try to come up with a sender name that is memorable and keep the same name in every email.

Subject line – Subject is the second and probably most important feature that you have to choose carefully. Why is it most important? Because if your subject line is not interesting enough the recipient will not open it. Instead your newsletter with all the important links goes to rubbish bin or stays unopened for ever. It helps immensely if the recipient is used to getting great information and valuable offers from you so that they actually wait to get your newsletter.

One strategy is to number your emails 1, 2, … and have a certain number of emails that you’re going to send. This works well if you have a course or something similar that you’re giving out. Subscribers want to have all of them and they can easily find one in their inbox if they have missed it.

5. Evaluate and Test

Open rate – Rate of emails opened in an email campaign vary according to the size of a list, nature of the recipients, area of industry, time of sending the campaign (for example holidays are not a good time to send important campaigns). Therefore you have to understand your audience to evaluate the rate of your opened emails. And remember that not every newsletter subscriber will open your messages what ever you do. It’s just the fact of life in email marketing. The open rate usually is less than half of the recipients, and that is a good result in most cases. Even a lot smaller open rate may be good in another industry. You can really compare only your own email campaign open rates and try and improve it.

It is good to evaluate the campaigns, opens, clicks to links, conversions, unsubscribers and new subscribers. Email marketing services provide these details after campaigns have been sent. Testing different subject lines and links, sending times and days is part of a good email marketing strategy.

6. Add social sharing

Twenty-first century is the time for social sharing. Every business should really take part of this excellent marketing strategy. Building up Facebook and Twitter pages for your business gives you the advantage of reaching far more prospects than you could otherwise imagine. Have links or buttons to Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing sites on your newsletter and ask your happy customers to join you on those forums, like your page and also forward the newsletter to friends and colleagues.