FlL8VWcKzxiL1TWqlZWLMKys7ALRHu9Dx: December 2012

Sunday, December 2, 2012

How To Make Your Email Marketing Campaign Stand Out From The Crowd

Email has become such a pivotal aspect of most of our lives that we often take it for granted; various industry experts have been predicted it's 'death' at the hands of social media for years now, yet most people are still using it on a daily basis to communicate quickly and efficiently.

Most people online will have an email address, whether they use it on a daily basis or just have one set up for signing up to social networks and websites. This makes it an extremely attractive avenue of marketing for most businesses as it's a direct form of marketing - your email inbox is your private space on the web and businesses are prepared to pay a lot to get in there.

Email marketing campaigns are abundant, with literally thousands of emails being sent out every day in an attempt to build brand, get more hits or gain conversions. This means that your marketing emails will be fighting for attention against plenty of others, so you need to give people a reason to sign up initially as well as a reason to open and read your emails regularly - and stay away from the unsubscribe button!

There's quite a few guides on generic ways to create a good email marketing campaign and that's good, but when you consider the fact that most email marketers will have referred to exactly the same guides when starting out, it becomes clear that there's a danger of your email joining the wave of good - but generic - emails already circulating in their thousands. With that in mind, here are some ideas for making your email marketing a bit more interesting.

User generated content has lost its novelty somewhat in the past few years, but in terms of building community from a brand perspective it's still invaluable. Invite your readers to contribute to the content of your email by opening up competitions, such as a 'best video showing the use of your products' contest or inviting people to contribute articles, photos or videos. Even something as simple as compiling a 'tweets of the month' list can show a reader that you care about their contribution to your organisation.

Another way to make your content unique is to send your emails under the guise of a 'brand character'. Creating characters to represent brands is an idea as old as marketing itself, but the internet has allowed for characters to take on a life of their own, existing beyond branding purposes. People have a natural affinity towards characters, and creating a character that inspires emotions and dedication in your audience is a great way to keep them reading your emails.

People love a good contest and holding a competition has always been a great way of getting people to engage with your brand. Competitions can also be community-building if done right, so they can make a potent tool in your email marketing arsenal. Don't settle for simple 'question and answer' competitions however - make your contests stand out. One example could be an online 'egg hunt' on your site, with the first person finding all the hidden content and emailing you receiving a discount or a free item.

Of course, the best way to really make your email stand out is to dig into your own creative reserves and use your imagination. Developing your own voice and style is a surefire way to get your email subscribers engaged with your content and help you stand out from the deluge of other emails landing in their inbox!

Learn About Email Marketing and Three Ways To Build Trust With Subscribers

Do you ever think about how you can get individuals to trust you and purchase from you? Many marketers do not think about this, but they should because this method helps to earn great sales online, it also helps to distinguish the good businesses from the ineffective ones.

What you should do is consider your clients and how you can gain their trust. If you are capable of doing so then you can get some good subscribers for yourself. You can do so by establishing great email marketing techniques that will get you gain the trust of buyers and allow you to benefit from them.

There are three email marketing techniques that will help get the trust of potential buyers

1. Converse in a nice manner: This means to create your emails as though you are writing to individuals that you know. Try to be friendly and professional at the same time. You must truly know email marketing and must be able to be open up to your buyers in order to build trust with them.

2. Give them recent information: What is email marketing? Well if you do not know then it is informing the clients about topics related to the information that they need. If something important happens, try to keep the subscribers up to date on it before they get it from another source. This way the subscribers will rely on you instead of the TV and other resources for up to date news.

3. Try to make up for your mistakes: A great way to build a reputation in email marketing is to admit that you have made a mistake. If you do then you will have the ability to fix it and make it right. We must know that we are human and mistakes are made. The subscribers know that they are dealing with humans and not robots, this is why if you do something wrong then the best thing to do is apologize and by making it right by regaining their trust.

So if you did not know what is email marketing then now you know exactly what it is. When you learn to do it, then you must put your best effort into it and try to improve your email marketing list. This is all about technique and does not require much time. If you become great at it then you will be able to get customers that trust you and will be willing to purchase from you.

5 Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing Don't Ask Too Much From Strangers Six Simple Ways to Engage Your Email Subscribers and Strengthen Relationships How To Ensure Every Website Visitor Becomes A Subscriber Mass Mailing: Success Oriented Advertising Solution Direct Email Marketing Software - A Step Ahead In Online Marketing

Money Grabbing Sales Funnels - (Learn the Tricks of the Trade) and Catapult Your Online Business Now

I want to share the power of automating a sales funnel and making more sales on auto pilot than grinding it out continuously. Using leverage is much better than grunting it through.

Once you're leveraged correctly every action you take and every task you complete is actually multiplied 5 to 10 times.

Statistics show the multiplication factor that comes into play when one bar that helps to hold up a structure is accompanied by another bar to hold up the same structure, it exponentially multiplies the effort. This is how leveraging and using automation can be for your business.

Have you ever been to a site online and then just leave and never visit it again?

I have and we all have. Do you have a site that gets visitors that do the same thing?

I'm guessing we all have. It is so painful to see a site that has all the bells and whistles, extremely well looking and optimized, it gets a good traffic stream but the person who created the site has no way of communicating with the target market?

This is not good, even if the intention is to use it as a hobby it's still paramount to have a way of communicate with your readers.

The nuts and bolts on capturing a lead and automating the selling

Aweber is the top auto responder service provider I know of today online. They are not the only ones but they are the biggest. To get started with them it's 1 dollar for a month and 19 dollars thereafter.

Many of you might be with them already and that is good. Once you have a form setup and ready to go, copy the code and head-on over to your websites back office. This example will be for word press users.

Once your there, click on the widgets tab on the left panel, once it opens drag the text widget and drop it over somewhere on the right and paste the code inside the box... There you go and instant lead capture box.

The second part to this is actually filling in the follow up sequence. Make sure that you have a healthy amount of automatic messages that are sent out in one day intervals. Meaning every day one or 2 messages is sent to the subscribers on your list.

You can make it as long as you would like but I personally make mine for a year long. You can just start with a handful of messages and add more as you go along, that's totally fine!

5 Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing Don't Ask Too Much From Strangers Six Simple Ways to Engage Your Email Subscribers and Strengthen Relationships Mass Mailing: Success Oriented Advertising Solution How To Ensure Every Website Visitor Becomes A Subscriber Direct Email Marketing Software - A Step Ahead In Online Marketing

The Power Of Email Marketing Unleashed!

I decided to do some research of my own into the effectiveness of email marketing and stumbled upon (rather appropriately) an article that was posted on StumbleUpon, highlighting some research that was conducted just last year by Sosemarketing.com.

Here's what they reported:

Email marketing returns 42 times your investment Internet Search SEO returns 22 times Social Media returns 12 times Newspaper Ads return 12 times Mobile Marketing returns 10 times Magazine Ads return 10 times Direct Mail returns 7 times Broadcast TV returns 7 times Trade Shows return 1.5 times

I fully admit that I was surprised at the results. The findings suggests that email marketing offers a better return on investment (ROI) than any other media channel.

Additional Benefits Of Email Marketing

As if bigger returns on your investment aren't enough to fuel your interest in email marketing, I also came across a host of additional benefits in support of this often underrated method of reaching your target audience.

Less time. Just consider the amount of time and effort needed to produce a paper-based direct marketing campaign, organise a telesales operation, or coordinate the many facets required for SEO and/or social media. With an email campaign it's possible to put together and send out a campaign that reaches thousands of people in just a few hours. Less cost. No print costs, no mailing costs, no telephone call costs, little or no outsourcing, the list goes on. Email marketing is without doubt one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching your customers. More personalisation. Not only can you personalise your messages with the recipients' name and job title, you can also customise messages to ensure that they reach different sectors or client bases. Segment your database. This basically means that you can divide your customers by geographical location, product or service offerings, size of business, annual spend or a host of areas relevant to your business. The result? By segmenting customers into smaller lists you can communicate with your customers in a very personalized and intimate way that just isn't possible with other channels. More dynamic messages. Got something to sell or say? With email marketing, once the groundwork has been done it's possible to put out a message the very same day. Test messages. Unsure about what message has the greatest impact? With email marketing you can easily test different messages by splitting them up into groups and creating a test matrix for fast feedback about your most powerful communication. Communicate more regularly. The speed and ease of sending out emails means that you can plan, create and send out messages far more frequently. This also enables you to gauge the success of your campaign and gather that all-important feedback. Better customer engagement. There is no better way to track and respond to messages. As a result it's much easier to work out what works, what doesn't and be able to respond accordingly.

Planning, Creating And Converting A Successful Email Campaign

Now that you know the benefits of using email marketing to reach your customers, it's time to turn your attention to how best to plan a email campaign that works!

Mailing Lists

To start with you need to ask yourself: who I am I going to mail? I would advise you to start as you mean to go on by dividing recipients into easily identifiable groups such as:

Existing Clients - How to stop clients from being ex-clients? Treat them like new clients! These are your most important targets and should be the first to receive offers, discounts and introduced to new products and services Hot Leads - Personal referrals, leads gathered through networks and trade fairs Warm Leads - Casual enquiries, competitors' clients and ex-clients that you wish to entice back into the fold Cold Leads - Bought lists, contacts gathered through online research, telephone directories etc

You can also segment recipients according to geographical area, products or services of interest, in order to be able to easily identify which people to send your email to both now and in the future.

If you are going to buy into mailing lists, remember quality is far more important than quantity! Invest in a reputable company that offers verified mailing lists that are focused and, most importantly, regularly updated. Below is a list of some of popular and recognized mailing list companies:

datahq.co.uk marketscan.co.uk businessmailing.co.uk marketingguru.co.uk

Mailing Software

In an ideal world, you would send every email individually personalized and one email at a time, thus avoiding most spam filters and greatly improving the chance of your emails being opened.

If you are talking about small numbers of recipients (say below 50) it's still possible to use your existing email software and simply create a number of different groups in order to identify and segment your target audience.

Obviously this would be unfeasible when you are talking about large numbers of recipients, in which case you might want to use one of the many email software packages available, many of which are open source and therefore won't cost you anything.

Below are just some of the most popular email marketing software packages available to you:

mailchimp.com email-unlimited.com emailmarketinggold.com sendblaster.com mailpro.com resultsmail.com getresponse.com

I've personally used Mailchimp and Getresponse. Mailchimp has a great free package to get started.

Next week I'm going to share some tips on creating email messages that hit the mark.

Opt-In Email Marketing And How It Can Benefit You

If you ask anybody online, they will tell you that the best way to make money with your website is with an opt-in email newsletter. This is the foundation for some people, and I must agree... it works like crazy. It's devastatingly effective, and it's something that you should be looking to implement in your online business.

I also employ opt-in email newsletters in my business also. It keeps me in touch with my customers, and I use it to sell more of my products to my members. You should be looking to do the same thing with your website. It can also produce a lot of traffic to your site (targeted traffic that is), so that's another perk.

If you're primary income model is a blog, then gaining new blog subscribers is essential. Make sure that your blog subscription form is obviously seen on your site, and offer a freebie if you can to entice people to sign up for it. Every time you make a new blog post, your subscribers will be notified, and they will get a message saying that you have new content on your blog.

It doesn't matter what niche you're in. You can become incredibly profitable through opt-in email marketing. This has become the "standard" for marketing online and earning income from your website. Just take a look at 98% of all of the successful websites out there. They all offer a "sign up" form to get you to sign up for your email newsletter. And they are smart for doing so.

Without a lot of leads, it's going to be tough to earn a nice living online. Now don't get me wrong. In some niches, you don't have to have an opt-in form on your site. You can drive that traffic straight to your sales letter page and get sales like clockwork from it. But for the vast majority of niches, driving people to your squeeze page or directing them to your email newsletter is a must.

Now don't think that you need just a few leads to make money online. If you currently have 100 leads in your autoresponder, and you haven't seen a sale yet, then it's time to put your marketing into high gear. Personally, 100 leads isn't nearly enough leads that you need to start seeing great results from your email newsletter.

Instead, shoot for around 4,000 leads. Once you acquire 4,000 leads that are active and engaging with you, there's a very high chance that you will be making money everyday like clockwork. It's not hard to do... you just have to put up a great marketing strategy and you can have all the success in the world that you want.

Make sure you work on getting your emails opened also. It's first tough to write up a good email, and then the next step that you have to do is to convince people to open up your email. This will require a bit of copywriting skills. Luckily, it's just a simple little email subject line that you have to write... nothing major.

Email marketing success can be yours if you follow the tips and advice in today's lesson. The more opt-in leads you get, the more successful your business will become. So keep this in mind.

Good luck with your opt-in email marketing efforts.

E-Mail Marketing And Brand Integrity

Every morning I arrive to an avalanche of emails. Instead of the good, the bad, and the ugly, it's open now, open later, or open never (spam). When your email hits your recipient's mailbox, you want it to say "open now", right?

Yesterday I got a forwarded email from my dear friend and client about the "Obama Real Estate Tax"; we all know this message type: passionate, rhetorical, and spewing half-truths. These soapbox statements tell us how we should think about whatever the red people or blue people are doing to America. It's only August and I am already more than slightly nauseous about the negative campaigning, with all the hype and innuendos running amok.

The facts of the matter reveal a different story entirely. A quick trip over to Snopes.com reveals their factual interpretation of the "Obama Real Estate Tax." Turns out that it's not a "real estate tax", and that it is not an assessment to be levied on all real estate transactions, as this article portrays. I am not sharing this to demonstrate my support of either the red or the blue teams; I am sharing this because I support reporting the truth and facts, not the media spin doctors fashioning the news to support their not-so-hidden agendas.

What has any of this to do with your brand and marketing to generate and convert leads to sales and make money?

Lead with the facts for lead generation. Don't bury the lead with hype.

If you remain authentic, truthful, honest, and considerate of your customers, you portray a brand with integrity. You are truly out there to help your clients get more of what they want. When you communicate with knowledge and clarity, your clients will come to consider you an authority upon whose message they can trust. This directly translates into more opened emails!

For example, my client will take this hot button issue and report the facts in a way to educate her audience about how the Affordable Health Care Act affects real estate transactions. Getting important and valuable content to her market on a consistent and regular basis will establish her has an expert in her field. She is a wildly successful realtor because she markets following best practices. Now she can elevate her branding message to be the new standard of responsible journalism, reporting factual useful content that we can all benefit by knowing.

3 Secrets to Building a Loyal List of Returning Clients

Cultivating a list of loyal and returning clients and customers with high life-time value can be one of the most cost-effective thing you can do to grow your business (I do a lot of that, and my spending on marketing is peanut... or even just pine nut).

A basic principle to stick by is to keep in mind that your subscribers are NOT numbers on your list. You want to treat them as your friends, show that you genuinely care. You want to write conversationally, in your own voice, as if you are talking to a friend.

Here are the 3 secrets to loving up your list:

1. Relevant and Valuable Content

Give them great content that can help them with their challenges. You want them to know that you are a valuable resource, and you understand their problems. Don't be shy about sharing your products and services as a way to help them with their problems - if they find the content you give to be helpful, they will appreciate a way to learn more about how you can help them go further.

2. List-Only Special Discount and Perks

Give your subscribers even more reason to stick with you by offering perks for your list only - this will make them feel special. Some ideas are exclusive discount to your products or services, or first dibs to join your programs with limited quantity bonuses.

A while back I did a list-only discount for a new product that I launched. Not only folks really appreciate this special perks (I got more than a handful of thank you emails!), but I also made a good chunk of change over the limited time offer!

In the promotional email, let your list know that it's a list-only special. Stick to your words - don't let your peeps see the same promo in other places!

3. Cultivate Relationship

Take good care of your clients and customers. I always keep an eye out on what my "gold star" clients are up to - e.g. on Facebook - or check in once in a while. If I come across a resource that I think would benefit one of my clients, I would send a personal email to share the information. When my loyal, returning clients purchase more materials from me, I would give them one of my information products as a thank you gift. Small gesture of appreciation can really go a long way.

How To Keep Your Email Marketing Campaign Interesting

When embarking on an email marketing campaign, the main focus will always be building up the subscriber list as quickly as possible. A decent subscriber list makes up the foundation of any email marketing campaign as without it all the other aspects, such as content, are pointless - there would be no-one to read it.

Building your subscriber list, as unlikely as it seems, is actually the easy part. You should have at least a few dedicated followers of your brand who will sign up straight away, and e-commerce sites will benefit from customers who make a purchase signing up too. You can make one-off offers for signing up, such as discounts or free e-books. From there, you would hope people will share the first few emails you send out, which are packed with great content, and see your subscription list build up that way.

But what happens a few months down the line, when you actually have a list built up? You may notice open rates dropping or even people unsubscribing entirely. It's a common mistake among first-time email marketers is to focus too heavily on making gains rather than sustainability.

Sustaining an email marketing campaign means producing great content on a regular basis which can be incredibly hard - even the greatest minds hit a block eventually. The unpredictable nature of content production means that you need to allow for slow months and make the most of when you're feeling particularly productive.

The best way to plan your email marketing campaign is to create a monthly content plan, with your strongest ideas as the main focal point of each month. This should mean that your emails are consistently strong, and negates the all-too-common dilemma of using up all your good ideas straight away!

You need to build up a rapport with your customers as you want them to think of your messages as something to look forward to rather than dull corporate nonsense. Personalise your messages - even something as simple as addressing the customer by name at the top of the email can work. Consider the tone of your emails too; generally a conversational tone works best when 'humanising' a brand, but you should work towards creating your own 'voice'. You won't hit on this straight away, but as you get more confident in your content you should find your 'voice' naturally breaks through.

Also make sure that you have a hotshot copywriter churning out eye-catching subject lines on a regular basis. Even if a subscriber likes your brand, a boring subject line can be enough to turn them off opening your email. Like your content, consider building up a bank of proven subject line templates - there are plenty of online guides and books that break down the science of great headline (and subject line) writing.

It's well documented that absence makes the heart grow fonder, so make sure you aren't sending out too many emails and boring (or even annoying) your subscribers. Anything more than once a week is too much and will probably lead to your emails being sent to the spam folder. However, you may even find that sending one email a week is affecting the quality of your content so the best option is to send out a well thought-out monthly email or, if you have particularly dedicated subscribers, a comprehensive quarterly.

Get Your Emails Noticed

I would like to share with you a very simple tip to get your emails noticed. This simple tip will make your emails stand out in your mail recipients inbox from the dozens of other emails they receive. Even more it only it only takes a few minutes to do.

Have you noticed that in your inbox all the emails are lined up and you have to scroll through them to find the name of the sender you are looking for. This can be quite a task if you have dozens of unread emails. Some senders names are in capital letters and some are just listed with the senders email address. The effect is still the same, they all appear in a long list and there is nothing that really sets them apart. If you have deleted the message it can be an even greater task looking through many pages of deleted emails.

When you send an email your recipient has the same problem. What will set your message apart. If your business depends on getting your emails noticed them this little tip can make all the difference in converting a prospect into a customer.

If you use one of the many email programs on your PC you will already have the solution at hand. Not only that but it will only take only a few minutes to set up and get your emails noticed.

Here's how to do it. Click on the Email menu on your PC. Scroll down to the Internet Accounts menu. On Windows Mail and Outlook it is found under the Tools menu. On Windows Live it is found under the Accounts menu.

Then click on the Properties menu. Go to the User Information tab. In the Username box will be the name that will appear in your recipients inbox. Here is the simple trick to get your emails noticed. Just insert a couple of asterisks or dashes before and after your name so it looks like this **Jonathan Bruce Jarvis**. Then save the changes you have made by clicking Apply and OK.

Test it by sending an email to yourself and you will see that your name will be offset from the rest of the messages in your inbox and the dashes will give your name extra emphasis. You can experiment by using different symbols such as stars or dollar signs. A good source different symbols to insert can be found by accessing the special characters section on your PC.

Micromanaging Your Email Campaign

Definition of MICROMANAGE

transitive verb: to manage especially with excessive control or attention to details

Control is, undoubtedly, one of the innate tendencies of human beings. We like to think we can control every aspect of our own life in order to reach our desired outcome. However, as difficult as it is to admit, there are certain things that fall outside our range of control.

If we had complete control over the message that we send to others and how those people perceive you, why are there so many people out there with bad raps? Why, when it appears as if you are doing everything right to develop a great reputation, some people just won't give you the time of day?

Email marketing is no different. I deal with businesses on a day to day basis who attempt to micromanage their email campaigns in an effort to predict performance. They then wonder why, after making only minor tweaks to their message, they continue to see drastic changes with each and every deployment. Some deployments will deliver "out of the ballpark" conversions while others will tank. With an unlimited number of variables that are involved in each email campaign, it is close to impossible to calculate the expected open rates, click through rates, and conversion ratio. When you consider all of the elements involved in an email campaign, including the email creative you send out, the database you market to, the state of mind of the email recipient, the time of day you launch your campaign, the subject lines you use, and the landing page you direct your email recipients to, it's pretty safe to say that you have better luck at winning the lottery than you do in predicting the behavior and purchase patterns of your audience.

Put yourself in the email marketing equation. As a recipient of a promotional email, are you more inclined to view it on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon? What if, just before you received an email advertising a sale at your favorite store, you received tragic news about a family member. Are you likely to give that email your complete, undivided attention? Of course not. However, say you got a promotion at your job 30 minutes prior to receiving that same email. Aren't you now more inclined to whip out your credit card and give in to your buying impulses?

It's hard enough to predict one individual's typical response to a promotional message. Keep in mind that email marketing campaigns are sent to a mass audience with difference demographic and psychographic criteria.

If it were remotely possible to micromanage your email campaign to get a host of new sales leads, sign-ups, and website conversions with each and every deployment, wouldn't everyone out there be following the same formula to maximize their email marketing campaigns?

To the dismay of most, email marketing is not a math or a science. There is no secret algorithm that will guarantee optimal results for each deployment, only best practices to follow.

The benefits of email marketing lie in being able to test different email creatives to different groups of people at different times of the day on different days of the week using different subject lines to determine the best combination of variables for your particular business offering. Success in email marketing is not achieved by micromanaging your email campaign in an attempt to dictate the performance of each deployment. It's achieved by looking at the big picture to determine how your email marketing campaign fits into your overall marketing strategy.

Delivery And Delivering Ability: Know Them To Improve Email Marketing Campaigns

The two terms Delivery and Delivering ability are often used in the email marketing campaigns. They both look so similar that distinguishing them somehow looks difficult. But comprehending the distinction between these two completely different modes of marketing is essential as it can turn your prospects into potential clients.

What Is Delivery?

No doubt, email marketing has become a powerful tool to market your products & services with a lot of influence and to know how people are responding to your marketing message. Hence, the acceptance rate of emails is the mainstay of the success of your email marketing techniques. It is the acceptance rate of mails by in-box, junk, and black hole list of recipients. That what delivery is all about!

What Is Delivering Ability?

It is the amount of delivered mails that may include sender name, user interaction, content and other information sent to in-box. A sender can easily check the amount of delivered messages from the seed accounts. You can place them on emails that contain email addresses. This strategy enables you to know what messages you deliver, the delivery rate as well as the look & feel of the delivered messages. You can also place them on websites that not only help you to check the rate but also to track Spammers' harvesting activities. Harnessing the technology of seed account, you can easily know the amount of your sent emails to junk or in-box.

Delivery and Delivering Ability: Two Sides Of A Coin

Delivery and Delivering ability are the two sides of a coin that is internet marketing. Dissimilar in meaning and function, but they both directly depend on each other. If you focus only on delivery and not its ability, you cannot meet your goal of the email marketing campaign. A huge imbalance was noticed between them in the year 2011. In this year, only 81% of all emails was received by consumers' in-box. According to the report which was presented by The Global Email Ability of Delivery Benchmark, 7% was of all emails was SPAM, where 12% was missing. If the Inbox Delivery rate of the e-mails is the same, but profits are getting higher, its credit goes to the fluctuations of deliver ability, maybe reduced or improved.

If you really want that recipients see every email of yours, work on the email delivering ability part. If those things are going well, just increase delivery of e-mails to the prospects to enhance ROI and trade leads. This is the best strategy of marketing your brand and business through email marketing.

When Email Marketing Goes Wrong

I sometimes get approached by clients who have had bad experiences with email marketing, or have tried email marketing for a while and simply run out of ideas. If your email marketing is not as successful as it used to be and you're not sure what to do next, give the following a try:

If you are always sending out promotions and asking the recipient to buy something from you, maybe it's time to try something new. Nobody likes being sold to all of the time. Maybe invite them to read your blog, or provide some useful business hints and tips, perhaps feature a video or give away a freebie. Do something new to re-engage your subscribers.

If your current email format isn't working, revamp it. Change the look of the email. Maybe change the style and tone of the copy. Yes you may lose some of your existing audience but you will gain a new audience too.

Revisit your segmentation strategy. Are you sending the right messages to the right people? Take a look at what you are offering in your email and direct it to client groups where there could be a need for that product or service. Don't send the same message to everyone..people will start to switch off.

Related to revamping your email, consider running a competition with a nice little prize up for grabs. Competitions are a great way of growing your database and also re-engaging your existing customer base.

Be consistent. Emails that change in design, size, colour and format every week or month are confusing for your customer base. Follow a consistent brand theme and keep building that brand through your email strategy. This may seem slightly contradictory to the previous bullet point about revamping your email strategy, but it isn't. Revamping an email campaign is fine... just don't do it every week!

Ask your email subscribers what they think. If you have noticed a drop off on sales conversions through your email campaign maybe it's time to ask them a few questions. Do a customer survey. Give them an incentive for completing a survey. If your subscribers have fallen out of love with your emails it's probably time to woo them again!

Take a look at your website and make sure it is easy for them to sign up to your newsletter. Make the content on your website compelling so that they have a good reason for signing up to receive emails from you and so that they know what to expect. You have already whetted the appetite of those people who have signed up to receive your emails so give them what they expect and don't disappoint. If your email marketing strategy is no longer working, it doesn't mean you should abandon it. Like any marketing strategy you have to test, re-evaluate, learn, and make changes. The needs, motivations and behaviours of your clients will change and you need to keep pace with this when designing your email campaigns.

If your email marketing is not living up to expectation and you need advice from an email marketing specialist who has experience of revamping campaigns and getting email strategies back on track, then please contact Hayley Cashmore on 0845 116 2723 or email info@threespiresconsulting.co.uk

2 Tips For Making Effective Email Marketing Work For You

You will never come to know about the flaws in your campaign unless you run a few basic test runs and analyze it on a regular basis. This is a thing that not many marketers have no interest. It is as difficult as fighting the SEO battle for Google Page 1. One should simply add the lists of messages, try to sell the emails, and gain max profit from the least effort. This will get the traffic going and you will have a good amount of daily visitors.

If you are already on the path of marketing without any effective strategy, it's about time that you rethink your approach and analyze your campaign. If you are wondering how to do this and correct the flaws, Here are a few tips that will get you well on track with your rethinking of the email marketing strategy.

• Keep a nice subject

The first thing that annoys the visitors is a cheesy subject line. You should keep in mind, that visitors first see just the email's subject line in their mailbox. SO you should keep it catchy but not flashy. Going far on the flashy side may increase the risk of your mail going into the spam box. So try to keep a balance and make it interesting for the readers. It is as similar as giving a classified ad. You do not require any kind of writing skills to make an ad. Just the pure intellect and presence of mind is enough.

• Keep it succinct

Never keep your email's body very long like an essay. In email marketing the most important thing is to kindle the sense of curiosity in the reader's minds so that they will click on the links back and visit your website. So it is necessary that you keep the body of your email not too short and not too long. Try to keep a brief introduction, a slight overview and few positive aspects so that the readers will be excited to know more. Try to keep it around 250 - 300 words and excite them to click on that link and visit your landing page. Ensuring that all those who receive read is more important than ensuring that all of them just receive it.

The above two tips are the front runner changes which most of the novice marketers fail to implement in their first email marketing campaigns and so you too need to analyze it in yours now. The more the testing and analyzing goes, the more flaws you will detect at first. But later on removing these will help you immensely in running a very successful marketing campaign.

Choosing Website Style HTML Emails Or Plain Text?

It is normally difficult to decide which gives better response whether HTML or plain text email. At first glance you might think that HTML would win hands-down, but the real truth might surprise you.

Needless to say, HTML-based email provides more "eye-candy" than plain text does. It is particularly well suited for creating eye-appealing ads to promote products that look good. That benefit is somewhat lost, however if all you are sending is a newsletter that is rich in content but short on graphics.

The decision between using HTML becomes further confounded when you consider all of the down-sides of sending out richly formatted email to an audience that may not be capable of reading it.

HTML email advertisements provide rich text formatting capabilities and the ability to use graphics to liven up the email and present products in their best light.

There is a lot of freedom in creating nice designs and to layout your message like a newspaper or magazine would as HTML email works by adding special encoding and links to content or images that are stored elsewhere on the Internet. This can present as a problem if someone is reading your email offline as they will not have access to the content or images.

There are countless examples illustrating that HTML design capabilities can actually work against you because of flaws in the technology and artificial barriers that some email programs and mail providers have placed in the way.

One of the biggest obstacles to HTML-based email performance was broken, missing or blocked images caused by email programs that did not support images (or had their imaging support turned off manually by the user) followed by email programs such as Windows Mail or Outlook and services such as Google's Gmail that automatically blocks images.

The major drawback here is that if enough of your subscribers have difficulty viewing email messages over time your un-subscribe rate will go way up and will lose a good percentage of your list.

What are the benefits of HTML email? 1. HTML advertisements provide you with a mean to track open rates. 2. HTML ads can include your logo and other images, including product shots that make your message more eye-catching. 3. HTML ads provide the ability to use special formatting such as underlining, bold, text alignment features, tables and more. 4. HTML email can include forms and other technical features that text-based email cannot.

What are the limitations of HTML email? 1. Using too many graphics can be distracting and slow down the message delivery. 2. There are many technological barriers preventing proper HTML email delivery. 3. Legitimate HTML ads are more easily caught by SPAM filters that recognize then as advertising.

Text-based email advertisements If you are just starting out in email marketing, you might want to consider sticking with text-based email. It is easier to produce and everyone can read it. You can also spend more time focusing on the subject line, body and call to action and not spend hours trying to get your HTML coding done correctly.

What are the benefits of Text-based email? 1. Text-based ads are easy to produce. 2. No graphics means no distractions for your readers. 3. Text-based email can be received on hand-held computing devices.

What are the limitations of Text-based email? 1. All hyperlinks must be fully typed out. 2. Unable to hyperlink to webpages with words such as "Click Here". 3. Unable to brand the email with your logo. 4. Unable to track the message's open rate.

Capture Attention With Email Marketing

Email is now a powerful way of reaching out to the world wide web. If you can build a list of customers' emails you can then offer new products to that list of customers when ever you want. There are many ways to build an email list, but something that's now very popular with affiliate marketers is to publish an email newsletter.

The newsletter is then distributed to your list and you can then sell products to those subscribers. Here are a few ways to create a good email newsletter.

1: Try to stay focused.

If you can stay focused on the subject in hand a newsletter performs better than if you just try to push several products and topics all at once.

This is because if you stick with one subject you will find you get more people subscribe to your list and newsletter. You can also sell targeted products in the newsletter that the reader is more likely to purchase, if you were to publish an email newsletter on say horse riding holidays, it should perform better than a newsletter on horse riding general.

2. Sign up for a good auto-responder.

It's important that your email newsletter gets passed all spam filters and straight into that person's email inbox.

One of the best auto-responder on the market at the moment is Aweber but there are several, just Google search for them.

3. Do try and be consistent.

The more regularly you can publish your newsletter the better, don't over do it every day would be a little excessive, once a week is about right. It's more important that you have some sort of schedule and try to stick to it. What ever your schedule is going to be, say monthly, then you must publish every month at the same date, as you readers will be expecting it to be around the same time and date for each edition.

4. Provide information that is of benefit to your readers.

Keep in mind that it's a newsletter and not a sales paper. even though you will be throwing in a few links to your affiliate products. You could always send out another separate email with more of a sales theme to it at a different date and time.

If your readers receive useful information, they will be happy that they have subscribed to your newsletter and list, Also try to keep the information unique, if your newsletter is for readers who are interested in say wind generators, give them some news tips on some new generator parts that you have seen being by a new company.

5. Sell advertising space in your news letter.

You could place some sponsored adverts in side bar or at the bottom of your newsletter, if you start to get a popular following people will want to place an advert with you and therefore you will earn an income from your newsletter, It's best to keep these adverts small and away from your main headlines.

6. Brand your newsletter

Ensure that the header is well designed and keep it for all your published articles. When you use colours in your newsletter header make it match the theme of your website or blog page. This way when people see your newsletter, posts, website or blog, they will associate it with your company,

7. Publish multiple email newsletters.

Top Internet marketers often publish for multiple niches that they are affiliated to, this will widen your chances of generating an income, If you concentrate on adding subscribers to each of your newsletters, you will not only increase your subscribers list but your income will rise as well.

With time and practice your newsletter will grow and if you constantly publish good content, you will find that it's become a very valuable asset to your online business.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

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