Email Marketing Tips


Email marketing is one of the best ways of advertising your business online. As the number of email users is growing rapidly, more and more businesses are choosing email marketing as their primary advertising campaign, because it's a great method of reaching global audience for their target market.

Email marketing is cheap, easy, fast and most important - effective. Even the biggest skeptics, saying that email marketing is dead, should be convinced. It still works and brings good ROI (Return on Investment) for internet marketers.

Opt-In Email Marketing vs. SPAM
Before starting your email marketing campaign, you should clearly understand the difference between opt-in email marketing and spam. If you fail to do that, you may hurt your business and reputation for a long time.

Spam is very unethical way of internet marketing. Simply stated, it means sending promotional email messages to people who didn't ask that. If you try to spam, you may be banned by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and never be able to send messages from your email account again. That's strong reason why you shouldn't spam.

A much better method is opt-in email marketing. Contrary to spam it is permission based, which means that people have agreed to receive emails from you. This way of marketing is preferred by many businesses and it brings very good results. Some top marketers have achieved as much as 40% response rates using opt-in email marketing.

Another advantage of opt-in against unsolicited email marketing is that last-mentioned brings very low response rates. It's not targeted, which means that email message goes to anybody, those who are interested in your offer and those who are not. But majority of people will not even look at your email, so it's impossible to reach good response rates using unsolicited advertising.

1) Always use an opt-in form

"Email is one of the most powerful and yet one of the most dangerous mediums of communications
we have,". "Virtually everyone uses it and in business-to-business marketing everyone you want to reach has access to email. It's also very inexpensive and it can easily be built into existing marketing systems. But of all media, it is the one where it's most critical that you have explicit permission."

Getting an email address can be easy. Make sure you do have permission to start sending information before you put them on your email list. There are a few reasons to do this. For one, it tends to upset many people when they start getting email they didn’t request.

Without permission you not only risk losing customer goodwill and inviting CAN-SPAM penalties, you could end up blacklisted by ISPs that refuse all mail coming from your domain if spamming complaints have been lodged against you.

2. Build a Targeted Mailing List

"The very best way to get permission is to have your best customers and your biggest fans ask their friends to sign up," . It results in a self-screened database of prospects who are probably interested in your offering.
Write your message to those people who are interested in your product or service. Decide who's the person that will buy from you and where to look for him or her.Write your message not to the crowd, but to one person and put his or her name in the message. Like "How are you Lucky?". This will be better and more personal than just "Dear Subscriber".

To help you maintain an efficient operation, you can automate the acknowledgement process by setting up an auto responder to your subscription email. An auto responder feature allows you to create a customized message that will automatically be generated and sent to your list member to let him/her know that you have received a message. You can start out your acknowledgement email as “Thank you for subscribing to our weekly newsletter.”Keep a record of all requests for subscription to your newsletter or product offerings, even years afterward.

3) Do more than just sell

Write interesting headlines (subject lines). These are seen first. If your headline isn't interesting, your message will be deleted. Make sure that your headline is attractive and eye catching if you want your message to be opened.
Give your list and readers valuable information that they can actually use so they have reasons to open and read the emails you send.
If you’re sending non-newsletter email blasts, stick to one primary message for each email sent out. The more information you pack into an email, the higher the chance the recipient’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll reach for delete. Keep it to one focus point and put it right in the subject and first lines of the message to make it easier for those just skimming to absorb your message.
Highlighting how you have helped past clients is an effective way to show what you can do.

4) Build both text and HTML emails

Not everyone has HTML capability in their emails. For these users, sending out only HTML versions of your emails can result in a very messy email. It’s always a good idea to make a text version of your email as well as an HTML version. This way users who read only the text versions can still get your full message without losing your style in unreadable code. Most ways that email messages are sent to lists have the option to build both a text and an HTML version of your emails.
When you have a link that you want your readers to see, don’t just put it once. Put it down two or more times, depending on the length of your message. At least near the beginning and end. By doing this your readers will see the link and have more motivation to visit it.
You’ll also want to provide a plain text version that contains the same message but is stripped of all special formatting for recipients using email clients that cannot view messages in HTML. And don’t forget to test out your final template in multiple email clients to make sure it looks how you want it to across the board.
The hallmark of good customer service on the Internet is the quick response time to email inquiries. Make sure that you respond to emails from your subscribers quickly to assure the person that you are taking care of his/her concerns

5) Unsubscribe
People who gave you their email address did so because they wanted to hear from you. But that can change and often does.
"If they stop responding," "chances are it's for one of two reasons: either they're not interested in your content anymore or they're no longer getting your emails.
"In either case we recommend that you define a set number of non-response messages [after which you] stop sending them emails. It sends a negative brand message and it doesn't do anything to help reestablish your relationship with them,"
Give your prospects the opportunity to unsubscribe from your list. If you keep them against their will, you may be accused of spam. You really don't want that. So put the removal instructions at the end of your message all the time.

Testing is very important. If you don't track all your campaigns, you'll never know what pulls the profit and what's not. Every successful internet marketer tests results in order to avoid bad tactics and implement the good ones.

Email marketing is a great way of developing a long term relationship with your target market. It allows you to communicate with your potential clients and customers to promote your products or services. If you serve their needs and treat them respectfully, in return they'll become your loyal customers and friends for life.

Putting together a solid email marketing campaign will keep repeated communication with your customers so they’re more aware of you and don’t forget about you. Making it something they want to read will help build the relationship and help increase the rate of sales for things you may offer to your list. Do all this, follow these tips, and a good, solid email list has a great chance for multiple sales from several members on your list, for years to come.

Few Email marketing software provdier are:
By subscribing the services of a good email marketing company, your business will soon reap the benefit of growing customer base and increased sales.
Some of the basic features to checkout before signing up with a service provider are tracking statistics, high email delivery rate, scheduled email queue, auto responders, professional template designs, less maintenance, etc.
 
Aweber
Getresponse.com
MailChimp
Mad Mimi
GraphicMail
iContact
Constant Contact
Benchmark Email
Sendblaster.com
Emailbrain.com


~HVBARI~



10/22/2010 03:52:00 PM | Contents |

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