Optimizing email marketing can greatly benefit businesses.

Whether your company is involved in selling to consumers or other businesses, email marketing is a powerful tool that offers some unique advantages.

A slight tune-up of marketing strategies or more sweeping changes as part of a plan for how to grow sales will both benefit from paying attention to the latest email marketing advice from Business 2 Community.

Necessary tactics

Some of the updates to messaging have come about because scamming and phishing emails now use strategies that once helped legitimate marketers reach prospective clients. Because the public has adapted to older concepts like personalized greetings, change is required. A study from Temple University’s Fox School of Business found that 95 percent of customers responded poorly when their names appeared as part of an emailed greeting from a business.

The negative reaction to personalized online greetings – one-on-one communication should still involve the use of a client’s name – stems from fears of identity theft and the invasion of privacy. The study specifically suggests not greeting new customers by name for this reason.

Business 2 Community recommends using collected data to point out products that they may be interested in. This strategy shows you know their preferences but avoids the personalized greeting pitfall.

Long subject lines are another area to avoid. While being descriptive is important for email marketing, going above 70 characters is discouraged because it doesn’t produce increased an click-through rate or more responses.

Refresh and refocus

A business growth plan for a company that uses email marketing as a key component should involve a review of these strategies for effectiveness. The Long Island Business News provides a checklist for growing the reach and results of your efforts.

Businesses should be worried about sending too many and too few emails to customers. While complaints and unsubscribe rates should be carefully watched, companies shouldn’t be afraid of sending out more messages, as long as they are engaging and targeted to consumer interests. More messages means an opportunity for more clicks, reads and purchases.

Optimizing email campaigns for mobile viewing should also be of paramount importance. A heavily formatted email can look good on a computer screen but terrible on a smartphone, which more customers are using to view messages. Using a design focused on mobile viewing won’t negatively impact views on standard computers. A large font is also a simple change that will make reading such messages on the smaller screens of smartphones easier.