Tips For Running An Effective Email Marketing Campaign

It seems that what emerged as sound email principles and etiquette apply just as well to email marketing. But its not just email marketing… it’s effective email marketing.

Where previously formal letters and faxes used to be the way to communicate with clients and potential customers, the shift to the ‘softcopy’ world of the Web has meant that this same type of communication would have to happen in a format pertinent to this new venue. Email and email marketing asserted itself as the prime method of contact then. From brochures to customer support, everything can now take place through a few types on the keyboard and few clicks of the mouse.

However, there still is a protocol and a proper manner for effective email marketing:

- Be clear

Email is a shortened form of communication. There is no space for flowery and overtly ego-soothing language. Basic courtesy applies, like proper greetings and such, but on the whole, emails should be short and clear. Get to the point as soon as possible. Let your recipient know what is expected of him, what he stands to gain through this communication, and how he can gain it (for example, what he has to do, such as be within the first hundred to visit a site and thus earn a discount)

- Offer value, not information

Provide incentive for the email reader to read and click through. Add value to your communication. Attract and seduce. Don’t be surprised a boring, hum-drum email is deleted as soon as the recipient reads the first few lines. Entice, and do not provide too much information in the content. The website is there for this purpose. The email is for communication.

- Prefer text

Graphics take long to load and often emails with graphics and attachments are deleted immediately or go to a junk mail folder.

- Label your images if you use them.

Some people get only the text in an email in their browser. If you include graphics but fail to label them, the whole message may not make sense or the reader may not be enticed. Providing labels lets him know what stands at such a place in the message.

- Use a hook

You should aim to catch the attention of your reader from the first line itself. A good hook works then. Its message should be relevant and clear so that the customer can then immediately decide to read on or not. Remember that a reader is won through the first few lines itself.

- Support the hook

In the body of your email, use relevant information to support your hook and its message. However, be concise, as this isn’t an opportunity for an info dump. Your information should simply reinforce your hook.

- Be short and concise

Readers won’t read every word that is down in an email. They usually scan the thing in whole. Use the space you have succinctly to maximize the opportunity to grasp the reader.

- Provide the most important information first

Make efficient use of the top space of your email. Many readers read email through a preview pane. The top third of your email will be displayed in this pane, and based on this information, a reader may decide to read the full or delete the message already.

- Use a legible and easy to grasp format
- Arrange your text in a manner that is pleasant to the eye.
- Delineate text and paragraphs using hyphens or lines.
- Use legible font such as Georgia and Verdana in a readable size.
- Use bullets and lists to more clearly define your message so it can be grasped at first glance.

- Use the active voice

The active voice ‘involves’ the reader in the message and pushes him to react.

- Know your audience

And write accordingly with appropriate wording and information.

- Avoid URLs that are too long

Such addresses in emails can be difficult to click as they lose their link when they are ‘broken’ onto 2 or more lines.
Aim to have a URL on its own line. If needed, shrink the text for the link. Or you can offer the address without a hyperlink but as a ‘copy and paste’ option.

- Avoid caps and excessive use of punctuation marks

That’s basic email etiquette, which carries forward into your business communication.

- Offer an option to unsubscribe

Always offer a ‘way out’ for your recipients. An unsubscribe link is expected to be seen at the bottom of the email.
Providing your recipient with the option to continue receiving emails or to terminate the reception shows caring and courtesy to the reader.

Also ensure that an unsubscription is effective immediately.

- Easy to subscribe as well

Make it easy to subscribe as well. Provide links and offer a way to your guest book or how to provide comments and feedback. This shows consideration on your behalf.
It is also a good idea to let your readers know that they are free to forward the email as well.

- Make it easy to change subscription address

This way, if a client or recipient changes his address, he can make sure the email follows as well.

- Make good use of your subject line

The headline of your message should go in the subject box, as this is the first glimpse recipients will have to your email. Use it judiciously to convey information.

- Address your recipients by their name

This shows consideration and a personal touch. You definitely win over more people through a personalized message than through an impersonal mass bundling.

- Avoid in holiday periods

This time is often holiday from emails too, so keep email marketing communications to the minimum too.
You could however send out a message with the holiday’s greetings and best wishes.

- Consistency with corporate design

Having the same kind of layout and formatting as your website and other business communication supports ensures that someone recognizes your email at first glance too.

Once you have found the right template/format, use it every time.

- An email address that says who you are

People are more apt to trust a message with a From line containing information about who you are and where you’re from. This will also prevent your email from being listed as spam and from ending in the junk email folder.

- The landing page should fit the email and the offer

Make sure you are leading your reader to the right destination through the links provided in the message.

People hate wasting their time, and if this happens even once, you stand the risk of losing credibility.

By tailoring your landing page for links, you also make better use of your website to further engage the customer’s interest.

- Motivate newsletter sign up with a freebie or bonus
Offer something in return as an incentive. This could win you a lot of new subscriptions.

- Have good multimedia if you are using it

If you are using audio or video, make sure they are of good quality and can be accessed easily.

- Reply to requests within 24 hours

This is basically common courtesy but it pays to be recalled. Ensuring prompt replies show you care and value your customers.

- Email should be service oriented, not marketing oriented as with paper

Your aim through email marketing is to inform and provide an ‘easy’ access to your company.

- Customize so it doesn’t look like spam

Make sure your message is unique in its content and format so it isn’t brushed off as spam.

- Offer user control if possible

Wherever possible, give your reader the opportunity to tailor your communications to him. People are most apt to listen to the information they have asked for.

- Provide contact information for you

Always provide a way of contacting you. The signature in emails is one of your greatest effective email marketing assets.

By making use of these email marketing tips, you should be able to create a successful and effective email marketing campaign.

What is the biggest mistake people make in their email marketing campaigns? It’s not bad strategy – although “poor strategy” is a major factor in ruining any profit-potential a website, product or idea might have. And no, it’s not a lack of leads – building your list is surprisingly easy once you know the right way to go about doing it. The biggest mistake people make is this: They assume that email marketing should be left to experts, and don’t bother learning anything about it!

Folks, I’m not joking about this. There are tons and tons of websites out there with perfectly profitable business plans who are missing out on pure gold by ignoring their email marketing campaigns. And no, sending out monthly newsletters about so and so updates on the site does NOT constitute as email marketing. Email marketing is a process of generating business through maintaining a list of email contacts – people who “sign-up” to your list for one reason or the other (usually to gain access to information or some other resource). A properly run campaign involves at least the following:
* Building a positive, responsive relationship with your list.
* Providing your list with a reason to trust you and your advice (give quality information first, ask for their money later).
* Promoting targeted , useful products to your list (related (directly or indirectly) to the “reason” they signed up for your list.

You’ll see from that list of points that simply mailing promotional offers to a bunch of email addresses does not qualify as email marketing. No. That is spam. Don’t be like most people on the Internet. If you’re operating in a niche online, you’re almost guaranteed to be sitting on a small gold mine. Profit from it by all means possible, and make the effort to set up your own email marketing campaign.

The Tools.

To setup your email marketing campaign, you need the following:
* A reliable autoresponder.
* A lead capture form / landing page.
* Means to bring traffic to that landing page.
* A set of pre-written messages for your list.
* An email marketing plan.
If that sounds like too much, don’t worry about it. All five points are explained in full detail below.

The Autoresponder
An autoresponder is the most powerful tool in your email marketing arsenal. Essentially, it not only automates list management (including subscription and unsubscribe requests), but it can also automate the process of sending emails to your list. You can load a set of emails / messages to your list in your autoresponder, and the script will automatically send the emails out at the dates you specify. The two autoresponders I would recommend are AWeber and GetResponse. Both are reasonably priced and have excellent features. I personally use Aweber myself, although if you want to test autoresponders and see how they work I would suggest that you sign up for the free version of GetResponse and experiment there first. Setting up an autoresponder is fairly simple. Both AWeber and GetResponse have a straightforward sign up procedure, and once you’re in, they provide detailed tutorials to help you set up your list management process.

Pre-written messages
List management is really simple with autoresponders. You can preload your account with template responses for any of the following occasions:
* When someone signs up through a lead capture form.
* When someone confirms their subscription to your list.
* When someone unsubscribes from your list.
* When someone sends an email to your autoresponder email address (you can configure this message to tell the sender that you will respond within a certain time, or redirect them to a different email address).
In addition, you can write up several emails in advance (in case you want to send messages to your subscribers at specific dates in the future) and load them in your autoresponder. Then, just specify the dates you want each message to be sent on, and your work is done . The autoresponder takes care of everything else. Pre-loading messages into your autoresponder is a great way to schedule an informational email course, or if you want to send several promotional emails for the same product. Most autoresponders (including AWeber and GetResponse) offer templates for generic messages (such as the list above), making your job a lot simpler. All you really need is to customize these templates if necessary, and then upload your own messages.

Building Your List.
Once you’ve set up your autoresponder, it’s time to build your list. For this, you need to do two things:
* Set up a landing page through which people can sign up on your list.
* Drive traffic (hint: targeted traffic – people who are likely to be interested in hearing what you have to say i.e. people interested in your niche) to that landing page.
Let’s look at these individually.

Landing Page
A lot of people simply use a “sign up for our newsletter” type of box on their main pages and expect people to come barging in. That’s not how it works. For people to sign up for your list, they have to be interested in what you have to say. This means that first you have to educate your potential subscribers to what they have to gain by handing over their email addresses to you. Set up a separate page on your website – a “ landing page ”. On this page, you would include a description of your newsletter as well as the key benefits to your subscribers for signing up to the newsletter (a free report on plus weekly updates, or regular dating tips, or whatever your niche is). The key here is to convince the reader that if they are interested in your field, it’s in their benefit to sign for your newsletter because it is THE place to get the best information about that field. And of course, provide a simple form for the visitors to fill in and sign up to your newsletter.

Drive Traffic
By now, you’re all set to build your list and crank out the sales pitches through your autoresponder. But first, you need to drive traffic (read real people) to your landing page so that they can sign up to your list. Here’s a quick discussion of a few tactics you can use:
* Write and submit articles in a niche article directory . Make sure you include your resource box at the end of the article, with some text describing your email course and a link going back to your landing page. This is fairly elementary, but its still surprising how few people end up taking advantage of this technique.Make sure that you focus on the top content-rich sites in your niche when you are submitting these articles.
* If you expect to profit significantly from your subscribers (in the next lesson I’ll tell you how you can calculate the lifetime value of your subscriber), you can afford to spend some money on building your list. Use Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing to drive targeted traffic to your landing page. The key here is to bid on very specific two-word and three-word phrases, so that not only your traffic is targeted, but that you can get these clicks for cheap.Make sure that you’re not paying too high a price for each click (1 visitor), otherwise the process might backfire on you.
* Simple as it sounds, make sure to promote your newsletter on your website . Don’t just settle for a link on every page – include some text and actually explain in a few words what the newsletter offers (kind of like a PPC ad).
* Offer a freebie – this could either be a free tool or access to a section of your website (where you keep the good content) or even a downloadable report. This is by far the most common hook marketers use to build their list.
* If you have a sales pitch on your website, make sure that your “free” newsletter features prominently in it. It will provide readers with a risk-free alternative to test you and find out if you can really deliver on any claims you make in the sales pitch. In addition, many people don’t buy immediately – they tend to evaluate the pros and cons and deliberate over buying decisions (especially costly buying decisions) quite a lot. By offering them an option to sign up to your newsletter, you secure an inside track to the “buy or not” debate in their minds and are in a position to win their trust and earn their money.

Email marketing is an old way to advertise your product but all Internet marketers who have tried it should admit how powerful email marketing in persuading people to whip off their credit card. Before start doing your homework in building email marketing list, there are some myths and misconception that should be cleared.Here are some of them.

1.Not a lot of people use email

The most important reason why email marketing is one of the best marketing tools is because almost everyone have email and check their email regularly. Email works like a nest for a bird. People who do not have email is like a bird without a nest, because there is no way to address them.

2.Email marketing campaign is impolite

People often judge email marketing as spamming and intruding someone’s privacy. From the recipient perspective I have to admit sometimes email marketing is really make lots of people upset, I think the sender just bulking up my email with bunch of junks. But I finally realized that email marketing is different from spamming. Email marketing is permission-based, the message is send to people who agree to received while spamming is have no permission.

3.Sending email to all the people is stupid thing

The best way to solve this problem is by analyzing your list before sending your email. There is a tools called customer segmentation that can help you to send your mails to certain group of people. You have to interact with your list, it should be two way communication, you have to get some feedback and adapt to it.

To conclude it, you should make this point really clear in your mind before start your email marketing campaign. Start building your list and prepare your goal and marketing strategy.

I wish YOU good luck,

Rudy Yonatan

The objective of marketing is to spark interest, provoke curiosity for the products and services and generate sales of the goods. Email marketing is just what you think – sending messages to existing or potential customers via email. Email marketing is an extremely powerful and effective marketing technique; it is also one of the most cost effective ways to tell the world about the products and services you offer. It’s much cheaper than a traditional advertising and may have a larger impact on immediate sales and long-term relationship strength.

Email marketing makes it possible for a seller and a buyer to communicate quickly and easily with one another creating a trust relationship. It’s “good” email marketing. But we must admit that there is a reverse side of email marketing. Yes, I mean Spam. Not all email marketers are warm and fuzzy. There are many among them who send unsolicited email promotions. Sending spam ruins a good reputation of any legitimate company or organization and can turn your happy customers into your worst enemies.

So, if you value your fair name and want to build a long-term relationship with your clients remember the rule number one of email marketing – not send unsolicited email.

Send permission-based email messages. The core of permission-based email marketing is that effective, targeted email messages are sent to a carefully controlled list of recipients who gave you the permission to contact them. It means that people on your list requested that you send them emails. And you would be wiser if you ask them to confirm their wish to be added to your list just to ensure that they didn’t subscribe by mistake, or that someone else didn’t subscribe them to your list. All this will serve you as a proof that you are not spamming. Permission-based email marketing allows you focusing on the prospects and customers who are really interested in what you are offering and are more than willing to become repeat customers.

Permission-based email campaign outlines Where to start from? How to collect people for a permission-based email campaign? How to manage a list of collected recipients? Every intelligent email marketer asks himself these obvious questions. We’ll review the process of putting a successful permission-based email campaign into effect below:

1) Get a system to manage your email marketing subscribers and mailings. You’ll need bulk email management software that will allow you create newsletters, manage subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces, and view reporting statistics like opens and clickthroughs. You can buy a program and run your email campaign yourself, or you can pay someone else to run it for you.

2) Create a sign-up form on your web site so you can start collecting subscribers. If you already have any lists of subscribers that have requested your communications, import those lists into you email management software.

3) Design a good email template for your newsletters. If you are not a HTML email designer, you can choose a template provided with email software, or hire someone else to create a template for you. G-Lock EasyMail provides you with several email templates within the software that can be used free of charge. A rich library of email templates is here: http://www.hotemailtemplates.com/

4) Compose the content for your newsletter. Your newsletter must contain your logo, information on your products and services, and links to your web sites. Send only a quality relevant content. Do not send meaningless emails. Check the spelling of your message carefully. Have someone else read it too.

5) Test your email newsletter. It would be smart to test your email message before sending it out to the world. Send it to yourself or to your associates to ensure that it looks like you expected.

6) Send your newsletter to your list. Think about the frequency of the email newsletter you will be sending. We recommend that you send a newsletter once a month at least. You can certainly send multiple newsletters if you sell different types of products, or have multiple email lists with relevant customers. You can also send promotional messages from time to time offering a discount coupon for a product or service, or providing your customers with the information they may be interested in. Sending your newsletters with a consistent frequency will let your subscribers know that you are in business and care about them. As your list grows, you will notice increased traffic (and increased sales) on the day of and the days following an email send.

7) Manage your bounces and unsubscribes. It’s nice if your email management software does this automatically. Do not send the messages to bounced email addresses, or to people who unsubscribed.

Wisely and correctly done email marketing can give you a great return for less investment of time and money.