Email marketing is the best tool to keep in contact with your prospects and increase sales. It is the cheapest way to talk to a list of prospects and takes you no longer than 5 minutes to reach out to them. In this article, let me share with you 10 tips to increase sales with email marketing:

1. Talk to your subscribers frequently. Your subscribers will expect to hear from you frequently. The frequency to send an email depends on the nature of the list. If you are offering a daily forex course, make sure that your subscribers receive your email every day. For a general list, you should contact your subscribers at least 2 - 3 times a month.

2. Establish yourself as an expert. You need to position yourself as an expert in your field by offering information and opinions to your subscribers. When your subscribers trust you, they will listen to your recommendation and buy from you.

3. Establish reliability. Provide them with information consistently to establish reliability. Reliability builds trust which in turn helps increase sales.

4. Send special promotions to your subscribers, but don’t do it too frequently. You can let your subscribers know about any special offer or events you may be attending. But don’t do it frequently and only use a small portion of the email to talk about yourself.

5. Provide value. Remember this: “What is in it for me? (WIIIFM)”. The reason why people opt into your list is because they feel that you can provide something valuable to them: advice, free report, coupons, etc. So make sure that your email always talk about your readers and provide something of value to them.

6. Build your own list. Anyone can email to a million subscribers as long as he or she is willing to pay for the list rental. But this will not effective. You need to establish permission marketing by building your own list.

7. Decide who you want to reach. Then send content that they are interested in.

8. Be personal. Always address the reader by his or her first name. Your email should not talk to a general audience. Be personal and talk to a single person.

9. Be consistent. Consistency breeds readership. So pick a schedule and stick to it.

10. Design your own template and build brand. You can start off by sending plain text or using default template. Once your business grows, you need to design your own template and build your brand.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency that provides email marketing services.

Find out more about email marketing at OOm Singapore.

[tags]email marketing, edm, email blast, email broadcast, mailing list, build list[/tags]