The fact is that many people use this kind of marketing just to send unwanted emails, or commonly called as spam. In the last years, the number of spam messages in people’s inboxes have considerably increased. In a year, more than 3 trillions of emails are sent, of which an average of 70% of them are spam. For our luck, email service’s providers are constantly improving their algorithms to filter the good messages of the bad ones .

What should you know to run an email marketing campaign?

Well like everything related with marketing, creating a good campaign can take you more time than you expect. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is create a newsletter. You can do this by using Aweber, a service which you can send scheduled emails, broadcasts and configure autoresponders… And as every service of this nature, it lets you send bulk emails to your mailing lists.

Once you have ordered your email marketing service, you can start creating email lists and promoting your campaigns! On now, , let’s start with reviewing the things you need to have in mind to create and run with success an email campaign:

Respecting the Subject

• Keep it short: Make your subject as short as possible, with a maximum of 50 characters including spaces. This way, the message will be direct and concise.
• Keep it simple, don’t overdo it: Avoid using capital letters in all the words, as well as using punctuation like exclamation marks. In the case of the capital letters, they will be directly filtered by spam protectors, but if you want you could use exclamation marks, is not so bad but sometimes it could be misinterpret.
• Don’t forget your brand: Include your brand, i.e. the name of the company, product or service in the subject line. It helps the subscriber to recognize you.
• Create a sense of urgency: You can include time-depending words in order to encourage your subscribers to read the newsletter as soon as possible. Phrases like now, this week, for limited time, exclusive offer and similar can be use it to create this sensation.
• Motive the subscribers, entice it: You can let the reader know about the benefits it will get by reading the newsletter. Things like get free… or get a discount for… can work.
• Be honest: I think I have been a good broadcaster of that phrase. Being honest with the subscribers will create a sense of loyalty between you and they. You won’t get anything by deceiving them.

Respecting the From

• Don’t forget your brand: Your brand should appear either in the subject or the from fields.
• Use your website tags: This is something relatively optional, you can choose between adding or not the tags of your website, i.e. Mr Javo dot Com – Blogging and Internet Marketing Tips. This can give you good or bad results, it depends of its length. In my case, it’s fairly long to include my tags in the From field. If your tag is too long, I recommend you not to use it.

Respecting the Message

This is may be the most important aspect of email marketing because here will be displayed the information you want to promote. So let’s see the guidelines for this field:

• Provide relevant content: What would you feel if I send you through my newsletter something related with Food, Cars or Deports? Exactly, you could find it surprising and annoying! If you signed up to receive blogging and internet marketing tips why are you getting information related with other niches? So with this I want to tell you that it’s really important to match your content with your audience. You will get better click-through rates if you send relevant content.
• Emphasize your brand: Including logos and URLs related to your business will boost your click-throught rates and at the same time, you will be imposing your authority.
• Send copies in both HTML and Plain Text: It is very recommendable to send the newsletter in both HTML and Plain Text formats. The reason of this is because there are people who don’t allow HTML code in their email inbox. If the subscriber don’t allow HTML code the text plain version will be shown instead.
• Include a link to unsubscribe: Is a really important thing to include a link which the subscribers could use to unsubscribe for your newsletter whenever they want. By doing this, they won’t be moored to you if they don’t want to!.
• Provide a RSS link: If you constantly update the content of your website, as the case of blogs, you could include a link of your RSS feed encouraging the people to subscribe. Remember to tell them the benefits, i.e. a little message explaining them that they will get (quicker) updates of your site…
• Include your contact information: Is a must to include your personal information, like your company’s street address, phone number and contact email. Some services ask for this in their policy.

Ok these were the recommended things that you need to do in order to run an email marketing campaign successfully. Another great tip is to set a Follow-up message in order to give them a welcome when they sign up for your newsletter. This create a good relationship between you and them, and helps you to estimulate the sense of loyalty. For this message, you can include a kind of coupon or offer of your product/service to estimulate a sell.

To conclude this post, remember to tell to your visitors the advantages of subscribing to your newsletter or how do you expect to attract subscribers if you don’t tell them what will they win? Keep in mind NOT to send spam, and send emails only to people who are willing to receive them.

By the way, if you are not in my newsletter yet, I invite you to take part in to receive my very best tips, exclusive offers and mailings, in addition of a free copy of my ebook The Affiliate’s Start Guide .