So you've been gathering visitor information and email addresses from people you meet at networking events, visit your website or wherever ... now you need to contact them with your all important message.

Before you begin, decide on one clear objective for your email beyond just contacting people and getting more customers.  

• Do you want more website traffic?
• Are you trying to improve traction on your social media channels?
• Do you have a promotion that you want to publicise? 

As with most things, keeping it simple is usually the best policy and below are a few guidelines to help your email achieve it's objective.

1. Keep focused

Decide on one clear message. If you need to convey more than one message consider sending separate emails.

2. Target your email

You may need to divide your email address list up into sections so that you can really target that message for maximum impact. Whilst you may want to say the same thing to your entire list, there may be a section of the list for whom it is more relevant or requires a slightly different angle. There's no point sending the message to a 1,000 addresses if it's irrelevant to 99% of them.

3. Less is more

Be concise and reduce the length of your email ... I'm not very good at this and often ramble on. You don't want your main message to be lost within too much text, however beautifully written it is.

4. Prioritise and highlight

Have the most important piece of information first and use headings and bullet points for bite size chunks of information. A lot of people will be speed reading your email on a mobile device. Make sure the most important message is available at a glance.

5. Have a clear call to action

If the aim of your email is to encourage website traffic, have one clear link. Don't overwhelm with too many. If you want to encourage a phone call make this prominent.

6. Link back to your website

If you've followed some or all of these points, you may well be lacking some detail and need to reference more information. Create links to encourage a visit to your website ... unless that of course was the main objective of your email.

In which case that call to action should already be prominent as mentioned previously.

While you're implementing all of the above, of course don't forget that you really need to include your logo and branding at the top of your email so that everyone knows where it's coming from.  More on using graphics within your emails another time.

Did you know that you can have a free Mailchimp account for up to 2,000 email addresses? Would you like a bit of help getting yourself set up with an email marketing campaign? 

Why not give me a call on 01494 537612 or drop me an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..