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How to Get the Most Out of Your Email Marketing

By Hannah Du Plessis in Featured

One of the main reasons small businesses fail is that they don’t follow up with their leads. Usually it takes up to seven contacts with a prospect before they are ready to buy. Most people give up after one or two contacts. If you are not doing your follow up you, are leaving money on the table. Staying in touch with your prospects builds trust and keeps you fresh in their minds so that when they are ready to buy, they’ll come to you.

Email marketing is a great, inexpensive way to keep in contact with the people on your list and to form and nurture a relationship with them. If you do this correctly, you will get more business than the Average Joe and you will not have to do anything else to get clients to buy. It is therefore important to set this up correctly. Once you have done this, you can pretty much just leave it. Then you can concentrate on building traffic to your website because the system to capture leads and nurture the relationship with them is done for you automatically.

Here are a couple of ways you can improve your email marketing:

First, you have to worry about your prospects opening your emails. If you are not yet tracking your email open rates, you need to start doing so straight away. You need a good email marketing provider like Aweber (or mailchimp if you are in New Zealand). Not using a provider will give you too much work, as well as the possibility of you getting banned by your Internet Service Provider for sending bulk mail. Bulk mail just ends up in the spam folder just because it is bulk mail.

Once you have a provider, you can then set up your emails, set the frequency that they are sent as well as track the click through rates, open rates and bounce rates. You then have something to work from.

Once you have this information you’ll want to improve your messages so that it doesn’t happen again. Here are some reasons why your emails may not get through to your prospects’ inbox:

Spam Words

Some words are triggers for the spam filter. These include: “special offer, free, discount, cheap, home business, %, work-from-home, limited time, click here, coupon”. The chance that your prospects are getting your emails if these words are present are slim. Spam filters are becoming more sophisticated, and your email can be removed before it even hits the inbox. A good email marketing provider like AWeber will be able to pick up if you have any spam words in your messages, and will alert you before you send them.

Subject Lines

The next thing you need to worry about is getting your readers to open your email. This should not be a problem if they signed up because they want to read what you have to say. However, if you have a boring headline they may want to skip reading it because they have many other emails or they are busy. Make sure they know it is from you, and have a proactive title so that they want to open it. If your emails are interesting, and give them more information related to the reason they signed up in the first place, they should look forward to it, and open it. Avoid subject lines that are full of hype or make outrageous claims. If it sounds unbelievable, you will lose credibility with your prospect. Make sure your subject lines are real, convincing and a bit mysterious.

You need to put your name or your company name in the “from” field so that the prospect recognizes you. “Noreply” or “Systems” addresses are less likely to be opened.

Make Sure You Send Relevant, Interesting And Valuable Content

Make sure that the content of your email is valuable. When I sign up for something because I am interested in it and then get an email that says nothing or wastes my time, I unsubscribe on the spot. Most people will do the same. Make sure you deliver on the promise you gave when they signed up.

You should only send your emails to those who asked for it. Don’t use lists from somewhere else that you bought or lists that are out dated. This will just invite complaints.

Make sure your emails are interesting. Don’t copy from somewhere, be yourself. You should know how you are different from your competition. This will ensure that you stand out from the crowd.

Your content should guide your customers toward a sale. Every email you write should help your prospect get answers to their problems, clarify their misconceptions on the subject, climb over stumbling blocks they may encounter, and help them arrive at your product or service, ready to buy. I use again the example of the nutritionist who uses a different illness in every email, usually related to the digestive system. She describes it in graphic detail so that you feel with the sufferer. Then she offers her special diet as a solution. In every email she also has a testimonial from someone who used to suffer this illness, but is now cured thanks to the diet. This is powerful stuff. Think of how you can offer your prospect a solution to their problem. Find all the problems, misconceptions, stumbling blocks and objections they may have and solve them one by one.

Frequency

If you send out emails daily, you will be seen as a severe nuisance before long. This will get your messages deleted or result in unsubscribes. On the other hand, waiting too long between emails will make your prospects forget you. I send one email per week with good content. This ensures a list that looks forward to my emails. The only way to know for sure would be to ask your prospects. Take a survey and find out.

Adhering to these guidelines will ensure successful email marketing. Once this system is in place, you can concentrate on building traffic to your website.

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Article by Hannah Du Plessis. For more information on setting up a Lead Generation System for your Business visit Attraction Marketing today. http://masterattractionmarketing.net

HTML Email Marketing – Two Mistakes You Are Making Right Now

By Jonathan McCulloch in Featured

HTML email marketing is almost irresistibly tempting for anyone seeking to do email advertising because, let’s face it, it looks so cool sending all that wonderfully formatted and professional-looking email doesn’t it? I mean even the ‘little guy’ can look like a ‘player’ with a bit of work.

Um, no. The fundamental difficulty with HTML email marketing is… what looks fantastic at your end… often looks absolutely atrocious at the other.

Here’s why:

First, HTML is a standard… but not every email client interprets it the same way. Like it or not every creator, manufacturer and developer of HTML rendering software has his own slant on things. And, rightly or wrongly, despite the standards, the same HTML is shown differently by different browsers and email clients.

For example, Google’s Gmail shows HTML differently from Hotmail and Yahoo (I know, because I’ve tested it). And then you have the standalone email clients like Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, Outlook, and Lord knows how many others, each with its own idea on how things should look.

The upshot of all this is what YOU can see at your end as the email writer is NOT what everyone else is going to see — of that you can be sure. Your only real question is exactly how MUCH difference is there between what you can see and what they can see.

And unless you’re prepared to test every email before you send it with, say, the top 20% of email clients that will represent the choices of about 80% of your readers, you’ll never know. In other words, you could be sending out emails that look like a dog’s dinner to your prospects, clients and customers… and you’ll never even know it.

And secondly… your pictures are NOT shown. There’s a second reason why what you see at your end isn’t the same as what your readers see, and it’s to do with security.

When you include an image in an email, often it’s hosted remotely — say, on your website or somewhere else. And the idea is, when the recipient opens it, the email client downloads the picture and displays it.

Only… this is a huge security and privacy issue, so most decent email clients do NOT display images by default and instead show a message saying, in effect, “click here to see images in this message”. And people rarely bother.

Why would they? It pays to remember an important rule of marketing here: no one cares about you; all they care about is what’s in it for them.. So while you might try to offer some inducement for them click and show images, they almost never will and all you’ve done is put yet another obstacle in the way of your marketing efforts.

And meanwhile, the images not being shown means your email looks absolutely terrible (I had one recently which clearly had everything of interest as a remotely hosted image, because all I got was the ‘missing image’ icon).

Plain works best

In general plain-text or very simple HTML works best (by simple I mean use bold, italic, underline and link-anchors and that’s all you need). You get better readership and your click-through-rate tends to be higher.

Does this really work?

Yes. If you doubt me on this, just sign up to emails from the big-name Internet marketing gurus who test this kind of thing to death, and you’ll see probably without exception plain and simple is the way to go.

Give it a try and let me know how it works out.

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Lead generation and email marketing expert Jon McCulloch is the author of “BIG Marketing Muscle for Small Business”. This book reveals the strategies he has used with his clients to realize response rates over 300% better than traditional methods (and over 1,000,000 pieces sent, so this is not just ‘theory’).

Your free book is waiting for you here: => http://www.jonmcculloch.com/big-marketing-muscle

Monetizing Social Media Is About Targeting First, Everything Else Second

By Ryan Deutsch in Featured

About 60 days ago, my team was working on an email program with an online retailer focused on expanding participation in their loyalty program. Unlike previous programs, the call to action of this email was not to “click a link” and join the loyalty program; rather; it was to share the experience of the loyalty program with their friends and encourage them to join as well.

This was no simple share-to-social initiative. The retailer created several incentives to motivate sharing behavior. Next, they tracked the number of invitations each customer sent to their friends and attributed those that actually “subscribed” to the loyalty program back to the initial inviter.

The results far surpassed previous email campaigns; in fact, the social program described above generated three times the number of subscribers than the previously launched un-socialized programs. Major results included:

• 1 new member for every 1.8 peer-to-peer invitations
• 10% of new members went on to purchase
• 4.3 emails sent, on average, by each influencer

While the program clearly extended reach and subscriptions to the loyalty program, the team believed there was an opportunity for optimization — and implemented two minor yet critical tweaks, both focused on enhanced targeting of the socialized campaign.

The company looked at their loyalty program members and created a segment based on engagement metrics: for example, how long a subscriber was part of the loyalty program. Targeting based on engagement is not a new concept to email marketers. Transactional email programs garner a higher response rate than broadcast campaigns do, because they target the customer at the point of maximum engagement: during a purchase cycle or some other lifecycle activity.

In addition to developing targets based on engagement, the company did more analysis to identify “Super Influencers” within their recipient lists. Super Influencers in this case are customers who already have a defined Web presence within a specific vertical.

In the retail space, there are a number of “Discount Bloggers.” These bloggers aggregate special offers on blogs or personal Websites. These customers can have a huge impact on campaign performance, since they already have a following relevant to a specific space with people looking for new content or the next great deal. The identified “Super Influencers” were added to the segment and the optimized campaign was ready to go.

The email program was launched to the new, targeted segment with the same offer and creative. The result? The targeting impact was off the charts.

• 420% Increase in loyalty member subscriptions from the initial campaign
• 326% Increase in purchase conversions from the initial campaign
• Thousands of additional subscribers and hundreds of new purchases

The lesson is a simple one: Do not abandon the best practices you have grown to rely on when developing programs in the social space. The same email strategies you have been applying for years need to be relied upon as you activate new channels.

At the same time, it is critical to understand that not all customers are created equal on the social Web. There is a big difference in extended reach between me posting an offer on my Facebook page and a serious blogger embedding the offer for their followers to take action on.

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Ryan Deutsch is vice president, strategic services & market development, for StrongMail Systems, a leading provider of online marketing solutions for email and social media. Contact him here.

12 Strategies for Effective Email Marketing Campaigns

By Chuck Matthews in Featured

Most people do not send effective email messages. I know. I spend a lot of time analyzing email messages for our clients, and measuring and tracking their effectiveness.

Whether you send large email newsletters or just use email to communicate with friends, colleagues and customers, following these twelve strategies will make your email more effective. So, here’s my list, compiled and crafted from years of experience and quantitative analysis of tens of millions of messages we’ve sent out for our clients:

1. One Main Message Per Email:

The most effective email messages have one main idea or concept. I spent a summer as an intern at the White House, helping to read and answer the mail. The writing staff taught that the strongest messages were ones that didn’t distract people with extraneous information. Before you start writing a message, write down what you’re trying to communicate. Or at least think about your message before you start writing.

The most effective messages are ones that are crisp, clear and concise.

2. Keep it Short:

If you’re like me, the phone rings off the hook, people walk over to your desk to ask you a question, and other people are instant messaging you. And then your cell phone starts ringing. It’s enough to make anyone a bit crazy and give you Attention Deficit Disorder. Our collective attention spans are very short. People simply have too many distractions to wade through a really long email.

You might think they need all of the information. But when people are faced with dense blocks of text, many people’s eyes glaze over. And then they ignore the entire message. And thus, the most effective email messages are short. Two or three short sentences in length. Perhaps a couple of bullet points. And perhaps the short message is followed by supporting material, an attachment or a link to more information on a website. Enough said. I’ll try to keep this section short.

3. Keep it Relevant:

I believe that attention is the most important asset of any business or organization. What do I mean by this? If your messages are relevant, your recipients will pay attention to what you are trying to say. If you send email that isn’t relevant — they will quickly stop paying attention to your messages.

It’s easy to get into a mentality where you want to send everything to everyone. And with email newsletters or mass broadcasts, it’s not that expensive to do. However, once someone feels your messages aren’t that important, they will simply stop reading them.

4. Reply Early & Reply Often:

With the huge volume of spam, it’s tough to know if your message got through. Right now, four out of every five emails sent over the Internet today is spam. With so much junk, it’s easy for your message to get lost, trapped in a junk mail filter, or simply piled up in someone’s ever-expanding inbox. So you start to worry when you haven’t heard back from someone that you emailed a couple of days ago. Hmmmm, you say. Did that person get my message? Should I send it again? If I do, will that bug them? Am I being too pushy?

So when you’re on the other side of the email message, it’s really important to reply early and reply often. What you’re doing is letting them know you (a) received the message and (b) that you care.

5. From Line:

The single most important part of an email message is the From line. If the person you’re sending to doesn’t recognize your name, your message will be at best skipped over. At worst, it will be simply deleted without opening. Most email programs show a friendly display name instead of the plain email address.

The From line of your email (friendly display name) should have your full name and organization in it. The culprit is that many people have only their first names listed in the friendly From display line. Most of the time the messages aren’t too racy, but with email programs that automatically fill in an email address when you start to type a first name, it’s easy to email the wrong person something that could be seriously career limiting.

6. Subject Line:

After the From line, the subject line is the second most important part of an effective email. If you forget to include a subject line, your message is much more likely to go into a junk mail folder, or just not be opened.

Email marketing professionals live and die by subject lines. A good subject line will sum up what the message is all about, but still entice someone to open the message, read it, and take action. Including the company name in the subject line can increase open rates by up to 32 percent to 60 percent over a subject line without branding. (Jupiter Research)

7. Personalize Each Message:

Except when being called into the principal’s office, everyone likes being called by their name. In this impersonal world of email messages, people like to know that you know who they are, and that you care about them as a person.

Nothing is worse than a highly demanding email that is sent without being addressed to someone by name and is out of context. I’m much more willing to help someone who personalizes the message to me, and gives me a non-threatening reason why this needs to really be done by tomorrow.

8. Always include your contact information:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve not returned a call promptly because I didn’t have someone’s contact information readily available. In this age of iPhones, Blackberries and cellphones, it’s rare that I have a phone number memorized. So many people rush through their phone number, making it virtually impossible to write down the number without having to go back and listen to their message a couple of extra times.

Ideally, you should always give your phone number, say it slowly, and repeat it twice so that someone can write it down and then make sure it’s correct. Effective emails always include a signature line with contact information. You should include your contact information in every new message or every message you reply to.

9. Strong Call to Action:

In direct marketing or email correspondence, most of the time you want someone to take a specific action when they receive your message. The most effective email messages always have a strong call to action, telling the recipient what you want them to do.

Email is a low context medium. It doesn’t transmit behavioral clues like voice inflection that might otherwise indicate what you want a person to do. So it’s important to be direct and ask what you want the other person to do. It sounds basic, but it’s a key to effective email.

10. Paste Links & Get on the Same Page:

How many times have you felt that the person receiving your email just isn’t on the same page as you? A lot of times it’s literally true. You might be thinking that they are looking at one page on a website, when in fact they are looking at something completely different.

I know I’ve been frustrated by this in the past. Simple pasting a link into an email is the best strategy. Again, it seems simple, but it can mean the difference between confusion and clarity. Sending someone the exact link to the website page you are discussing gets everyone on the same page.

11. Use Folders & Filters:

If you’re like me and you receive a lot of email, you can use folders to store messages from different people or clients. In most email programs, you can set up automatic rules (often called filters) that will place all messages from Joe into a specific folder. That way you can review all of the messages Joe sends over to you, reply to the ones that need attention, and not have to spend the time moving the messages from the inbox to another folder when you’re finished.

This one strategy has made me amazingly more efficient at dealing with the large volume of email I receive each day (usually about 950 messages per day).

12. Know when email doesn’t work:

Pick up the phone instead… Email remains one of the primary ways that businesses communicate internally among their staff, and externally with their customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. However, make sure you recognize when email is losing its effectiveness.

It’s easy to hide behind email when we don’t want to speak to a scary client or team member. I’ve been guilty of that as well when I have a million things going on. But sometimes a three minute conversation can clear up the confusion inherent in five days of back-and-forth email messages.

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Chuck Matthews – Most people do not send effective email messages. I know. I spend a lot of time analyzing email messages for clients, and measuring and tracking their effectiveness. Whether you send large email newsletters or just use email to communicate with friends, colleagues and customers, following these strategies will make your email more effective. So, here’s my list, compiled and crafted from years of experience and analysis of millions of messages.

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

Permalink: http://www.submityourarticle.com/a.php?a=59693

5 Secrets to Moving the Free Line With Your Client-Capturing Device

By Donna Gunter in Featured

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of Internet marketing (only about 10 years ago in Internet years), all an online business owner had to do was stick an email opt-in form on her site and request visitors to join her list. Simple, wasn’t it?

Then, the legion of spammers began to grow and started to make marketing by email more difficult. So, then to encourage someone to opt into your list, you had to give something away, typically a very short assessment, checklist or special report.

As more and more online business owners implemented this strategy, website visitors started to become more skeptical. The giveaway then had to be more substantial, like a free ebook or transcript or recording, to get a visitor to part with his contact information.

And, today, the free bar is raised yet again. Ongoing difficulties with spammers and email marketing has caused online business owners to almost give away the store, it seems at times, to interest visitors in parting with their name and email address. If you’ve been in business awhile, you probably have some valuable content that you can easily add to enhance your giveaway. If you’re newer in business, the first pieces of content you create should be used as your free giveway rather than creating them in hopes of selling them. Remember, your primary call to action on your website or blog should always be to grow your list and a great giveaway does just that.

How can you be more competitive in a landscape full of marketers with free client-capturing devices? Here are 5 secrets to moving the free line with your website giveaway:

1. Content Rich. If your giveaway isn’t chock full of useful content that helps solve some immediate problems of your target market, you shouldn’t waste your time. Sure, your client-capturing device needs to have info in it about you and your products/services and an upsell to purchase from you. However, if your giveaway is nothing but an extended infomercial about how wonderful you are and why the reader should buy from you, you won’t create a trustworthy relationship with your reader. Visitors conduct Internet searches because they’re seeking free info to help them solve their problems. If they get valuable and credible content from you that they can immediately begin to use, they are much more likely to pay attention to what else you have to say and begin to like and trust you, which, of course, leads to their eventual purchase from you.
2. Multiple Offerings. A lone ebook, recording, or checklist is no longer enough. Now, multiple offerings in your free giveaway are necessary to lure the visitors onto your list. Creating some type of kit or package that includes three or so items, like a free ebook or report, an audio file, a video, etc. all focused on a similar topic is now what is required as an effective client-capturing device. Your graphical representation of this giveaway needs to reflect that you are offering multiple items in the giveaway, as well.
3. Monetary Value. Because you’re including valuable content in your giveaway, you need to determine the monetary value of this content. Determine a reasonable price in line with your other offerings, and don’t do what so many other marketers do by creating ridiculously inflated prices for their free information. Place a value on each piece of info that you provide in your client-capturing device, and then a total price on the entire giveaway.
4. Sales Page Required. Just like a fee-based product, the free giveaway also now needs its on sales page to let the visitor know why the giveaway is useful and wonderful and how their lives will change (or problems will be solved) by requesting the giveaway. I don’t think it has to follow the long sales letter format (the one that seems to go on forever and ever) but follows a shorter, more succinct sales page that clearly outlines the benefits and features of your offering to the visitor.
5. Audio and Video Help. Almost everyone to whom I’ve spoken agrees that their opt-in rates have increased when they add audio to the giveaway sales page, and have skyrocketed when video is added. Typically all the audio or video does is welcome the visitor to the page, run through why the visitor would want to get the giveaway, and then walk the visitor through the process of requesting the information. The audio and video component is simply a smart marketing strategy because it lets the visitor know that they’re dealing with a real, live, human being and if they can now see you in video, it hastens their feeling of connection to you.

Email marketing continues to be a viable marketing strategy. However, in order to convince savvy Internet searchers that they should do business with you, you need to up the ante and create more offerings and greater content in your website giveaway. Follow these 5 secrets to enhance your offerings and watch your list grow!

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Internet Marketing Strategist & Boomer Biz Coach Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online retirement businesses that they love by demystifying the tools & strategies needed to market and grow their businesses online. To claim your FR*EE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at OnlineBizU.com. Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at AskDonnaGunter.com

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