A blog post by Tyler Gams – Email Marketing 2.0 – brings up some great points for small businesses that are using email as part of their marketing strategy.

Tyler offers five best practices for email outreach.  Here’s a brief rundown of his suggestions followed by things we would add to the list.

  • Track your customers’ activity. Know who filled out forms, opened your emails, clicked links and eventually bought your product.
  • Use reporting information to help you create messages targeted specifically to your customer.
  • Create valuable content that offers plenty of helpful information about your products or services.
  • Invest in a system that automates follow-up.
  • Segment your email list based on customer type or customer activity.

Our additions:

  • Personalize your messages whenever possible – not just with content, but by name. You can do this in the subject line and also in the body of the email.
  •  Enable social sharing – A recent Marketing Sherpa study revealed that email marketing messages that included social sharing options increased the reach of that content by 24.3% on average.
  • Research the best time of day to send your emails based on recipients likelihood to take action on them. There’s plenty of generic information out there about the best day/time to send email – however, nothing can beat analyzing your own email performance metrics. You may find that different types of emails get different response rates depending on weekday and time of day they’re sent.