The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

Ten Keys to Your Overall Email Marketing Success

If you learn nothing else from this book, I recommend you master the following ten principles. Most of the statistics that suggest high returns on email marketing investment depend on how closely you adhere to these basics.

1. Only send email to people who know you. People open email from people they know, and they delete email from people they don’t recognize or mark it as spam. It doesn’t even matter what’s legal or ethical. If your business makes a habit of emailing total strangers, then your reputation, your budget, and your growth will suffer for it. You can read about building a good email list in Chapter 5.

2. Don’t treat email addresses like email addresses; treat them like relationships. An email address is one of the most personal things someone can share with your business because it’s an invitation to send your messages to a place where he or she sends and receives personal communications as well as business ones. Email doesn’t work if it feels like a computer-generated HTML document. It has to come across as being part of a meaningful relationship. You can read about building relationships in Chapter 2.

3. Send relevant content that has value to your recipient. You probably weren’t going to send irrelevant, valueless content on purpose, but content with good intentions isn’t the same thing as value and relevance. In order to ensure that your emails are valuable and relevant, you have to know exactly what your audience ...