How To Effectively Make Use Of Email Marketing For Your Website in 16 Simple Steps

1. Getting to know your audience

Your audience have more to them than just their names, getting to know more about them has lot of benefits attached it. You might want to find out their interest [what they want specifically from your website] as this provides you with the information needed when advertising specific contents on your website and also improves your email marketing strategy as you know what particular category of people require a particular content. This can be accomplished by personalizing your communication with them, and not just you sending general contents—this successfully increases your email open rate.

2. Building Relationships should be your first priority

This forms a major aspect of email marketing and is easier when the first step has been achieved [getting to know your audience], this is the factor which promotes trust and loyalty. Before carrying out any action, begin building the relationship with your audience. Don't start by flooding your email lists with advertisements or contents they didn't sign up for or are unrelated to your website, you risk losing your reputation in their eyes which in turn hurts your website—this conquers the purpose of getting involved in email marketing.

Getting involved in email marketing indicates having the ability to access the general needs and concerns of your targeted audience. Your email campaign may be an opportunity to manage and further enhance your relationships with your customers/audience and email marketing loses its value if not properly carried out from the onset.

3. Sending Emails at the appropriate time

The need and importance to adhere to this can't be emphasised enough. Timing is everything with regard to the email that's intended on been sent—you can't send a Christmas based email during Valentine. There are various researches on the internet with respect to the appropriate time emails ought to be sent, taking into consideration the category of audience.

Unfortunately, this isn't all that simple because what works for A might not for B. Let's give an instance, according to studies Saturdays at 9:00am are the perfect time to send email for a certain niche—you obviously don't expect everyone in that niche to await Saturday before sending out their mail.

Each website has a different kind of audience, even while been in the same niche with millions other, and so it's up to you to observe and choose the right time for your targeted audience and not just relying on some generalized research.

Conduct your personalized researches and make use of analysis services to know the period you get an high open rate and period you don't—this helps choose the perfect time in respect to your audience and when consistency is involved it improves open rate in light of the fact that your audience get familiarized with the period mails are been sent.

4. Taking Permission from targeted audience

Also known as Permission Based Email. Email marketing involves sending emails to your potential customers, which can be carried out with or without their permission. However, lack of permission from recipients more often than not results into negative responses and puts you and your product/website in a bad light.

Permission needs to be taken before sending mails or contacting targeted audience. The only people you should be sending any marketing emails to should be those that have agreed to receive them or requested such from you. Sending unsolicited email can be irritating, disturbing and annoying to your intended audience as this pisses them off. You aren't just flooding their mailbox but also creating a nuisance.

Before you start dishing out mails, make certain to have the express permission of the receiver to do so. Unless, you risk creating a bad image for the product/service you intend on advertising and destroying your reputation as a marketer. Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission.

5. Avoid Spamming

SPAM simply means unwanted email and is considered illegal in some countries, even when you have the permission of the recipient to send mails, you are not supposed to send information that lacks valuable use as it's also considered as spamming.

Spam mails hardly ever get opened which indicates a waste of time, probably money and effort—so why even get involved in such? When you piss off potential customers, you lose them as potential customers as they have possibly deleted your email and won’t be visiting your site or making use of your services/products.

Spam messages are hated so avoid them—what people want are informative and valuable mails from trustworthy website owners who have received their permission to provide them with valuable contents and not unsolicited email.

6. Make use of sender address with your domain

According to Zoho, a sender address is always a business email address and reflects the “From” part of an email creation so that the recipient can identify the sender of the email. An example is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.—the sender address here is Daniel. The benefits of using this includes:

• Email Deliverability: it increases the chance of recipient receiving the email in inbox, rather than been tagged as SPAM as some email servers tend to block emails from sender address that looks suspicious or doesn't exist in recipients' address book.

• Trust: the recipient would trust a sender address sent from a domain name than from a common email address, and once your domain name is spotted you gain visibility as compared to if This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. was been used instead of This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

• Brand Recognition: as stated above your website is easily recognized and promoted when spotted with a domain based email address.

7. No attachment to mail

When an attachment is added to a mail, it could be regarded as a virus threat by a minority of email servers and sometimes marked as junk or spam. Attachments puts an extra load on email servers, indicating longer processing time and would in most cases be filtered out—lowering the chance of delivery of mail.

This could be in the form of "image only" email and this shouldn't be considered, as text mail should be kept into use instead. Making use of attachments isn't effective to marketing as users are now being more cautious as to what files they access in their inbox or the internet and are most likely not going to take the risk of opening an attachment whose content is unknown.

8. Choose the rate/frequency at which emails will be sent

You have to decide on the rate at which you intend sending emails, you don't want a situation were the emails sent are too much or too less—either way, it's preferable to have less emails than to have much more than is required because, you might just be pushing your audience to a spot were they have to click the unsubscribe button.

The number of emails sent, and the time frame between them is a decision you have to make, most times quality is worth more than quantity and there are no exceptions in this case. This is however dependent on what you have to offer—if you're only able to provide informative and relatable emails on a monthly basis, then so be it. What we are after here is the value been created, the impact it has on your audience, alongside the promotion and good reputation of your website.

9. Keep your subject lines simple, catchy and real

Sure, using click-baits subject lines would result into an higher open rate, but when the content doesn't correlate with what is been provided in the subject of the mail, your audience slowly and gradually begin to lose trust in you and may stop opening your mails or even end up unsubscribing to them. Your email may get lost along with several emails that inbox owners are faced with regularly, but improving your subject line by beginning each word with a capital letter or asking compelling questions should help your email stand out.

When your subject lines are kept real, personalized, creative and catchy and your audience are getting exactly what was promised at the beginning, you provide value to them and this encourages opening of future mails more often and could be enhanced with the application of calls-to-action, as it creates a sense of urgency and contains strong action words that compel readers to click and get directed to your website. Avoid statements that are too good to be true and don't make unbelievable claims.

10. Integrate Recipient's name into mail

This increases the interest of the recipient in such mail, as they feel it's urgent and directed towards them and by so doing they wouldn't want to miss it. You don't have to write down the recipient's name and then input it when need be into the mail been sent, there are email marketing services/tools that offer this as it's been carried out automatically—just make sure this is been offered by the email marketing tool/service you choose.

11. Avoid fancy/complicated HTML email

HTML email provides a feature rich feature. However, not all email servers support the HTML email well and could result to having blank areas in the body of the email, which is mostly as a result of images not been loaded automatically. So when preparing an email with the help of HTML, don't forget to make it simple.

12. Accept reply/feedback

Give your audience the opportunity to send feedback or reply to your content after reading. Don't make use of “no reply” email addresses when sending contents to subscribers. You may get a whole lot of mails, but it's totally worth it at the end as it helps promote trust.

13. Provide e-books/videos in the form of incentives

This can be very effective if you plan on increasing your website traffic through email marketing, but this isn't entirely compulsory. This indicates offering a content in exchange for their signup and most email marketers have testified to the benefits this technique possesses. Providing free e-books/videos lures people to your website and if they take interest in what you're offering, then they have no choice than to subscribe before gaining access to the e-book/video been offered. It's even more effective when the e-books/videos are of major interest and potential value to the target audience.

Your goal should be to create a product that's easy to pass on and download friendly. It ought to motivate people to pass it on and this can only be achieved when you provide value—don't limit your e-books/videos because if your new email list doesn't find its content useful or worth their while, it gets disregarded—this then defeats its purpose.

The more e-books/videos you create on diverse topics, the larger the scope of your reach and more traffic on your website. As people sign up you are building your email list which you can market to as often as you like and should be able to build a base of audience/customers who are ready to pritronize and advertise for you.

14. Keep in touch with your customers/audience on a regular basis.

Taking this into action will keep your brand/website in your audience/consumers mind—even if carried out via daily, weekly, or monthly emails.

15. Educate your customers and provide useful information

Email is at its best when used to spread useful information to target audience—an example is sending informative newsletters. The body of the email should contain pertinent and updated information about your website, products/services and the information should be kept short, simple and direct for this feat to be effective.

16. Make use of the follow-up mechanism

Sales based website's may want to adopt this approach. Your potential client is as of now a current client of your competitor, you actually have a great possibility of turning such client into your real customer on the off chance that you utilize the right email marketing techniques.

The use of follow-ups involves determination and persistence and an effective email marketer will continue to pursue the potential customer without let-up—there's a chance that sooner or later, the individual would become your own customer.