Email Marketing Done Right

Article by Maria Elena Duron

Email marketing is a powerful, cost-effective and flexible way of marketing a business. If done right, you can attract customers, increase sales, spread brand awareness, generate leads, and save time while reducing marketing cost. A lot of people have an email address, and because of technology, most of consumers can read their emails directly from their mobile phones. This gives email marketing a wide reach.It is easy to create an email about your business and send them out, but how effective is it? Because you are marketing your business,you want to make sure that people will open, read, and contact you after reading the email. Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool and you want it to be effective to ensure that all efforts return by means of reaching your goal.There are a lot of ways on how to make email marketing work for you. You need patience and strategy like taking time to write the right content, building a list of target customers, and timing when and how to send your email.

Here are some tips on how to make email marketing work for you:

The Email Content & Design – You want people to read and know more about what you are marketing. Before you can do this, you have to make sure that your content is designed to engage a reader. What you can do is create magazine-like content instead of the normal email format. Add videos and links in your content; make it creative so the person who is looking at your email does not delete it right away. Keep them engaged and give them teasers of articles of what they can find on your website.

Adding active links to your content will also increase your reader’s interest. Make it easy for them to find and learn more about what you are marketing. According to HubSpot, placing the right amount of links on your content will give a higher clickthrough rate. Placing a lot of links in your content will also decrease the unsubscribe rate. Don’t forget to add link tracking on your content because this gives you an idea on the effectiveness of your email.

Make sure that your content is mobile friendly. A lot of people are opening their emails on their smartphones and when they do, this might be the only chance you get with them. It is important that you give them the right impression. Choosing the right subject line is crucial because you want your recipient to open your email. Use subject lines like Posts, Jobs, Survey, and E-newsletter rather than Confirm, Features, Magic, and Raffle.

The List – once you are sending the right email, you start building a list of subscribers. It is important that you manage your list of subscribers by sending them news about your business. Track your emails and watch those that bounce and try to reconnect with them through Twitter or LinkedIn. This will give your subscribers a sense that you value their interest in your business. Start conversations or direct them to your social sites like Twitter or Facebook.

How and When to Send – now it is time to choose the right Email Service Provider (ESP) for your business. Choose a provider that will give you a high deliverability rate, provides reporting, reasonable price, and comes with high quality service. Once you have an ESP, the timing of sending your emails is crucial. According to HubSpot, the best times of the week to send emails are towards the weekend, from Friday to Sunday. These days show that readers are more engaged to look at your content than any other days of the week. Clickthrough rates are higher during these days and readers have more time to understand what you are marketing. In terms of time-of-day, clickthrough rates are highest during early morning and drops to its lowest during the afternoon, then it rises up again as it approaches midnight.

Now that you have your content and you have an idea when to send it out to your readers, it is time to track your email’s success. Look at your email metrics and study how many of your readers opened and clicked-through. You can also track your web metrics and study the traffic that goes to your website. Look at the stats and wait for feedback.

These are all essential in your email marketing success because you will be given an idea of how to improve your next email campaign. You will have an idea of what works for your readers and what topics have grabbed the most attention. Do not be afraid to experiment with topics and timing. And whatever happens, respect your list of readers. In any business, you do your best to give your customers the sense of importance and your business will have a higher chance of succeeding.

Email Marketing – Getting It Right, Getting It Read

Email is one of the most effective direct marketing techniques available. When done well it enables us to talk to large numbers of prospects and customers in an instant; alerting them to offers, telling them about new products and services and forming an ongoing relationship.

Done wrong, email marketing emails get deleted without even being viewed. Even worse, our emails can be viewed as annoying spam, damaging the very relationships we are all trying so hard to nurture. So, as professional marketers, how can we ensure our carefully crafted email marketing pieces get read in the first place?

It starts with the subject line

Research has shown that open rates vary enormously, depending on the subject line used. Common sense tells us that punchy subject lines with attention grabbing headlines are going to do better than dull versions. However, it comes as a big surprise to many marketers to learn that the best open rates are from ‘informative’ rather than ‘creative’ subject lines.

One notable study revealed subject lines such as, “[COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – February 2009″ typically outperform lines such as “The Future of International Trade” by a factor of 5 or more. The simple truth is that the best performing subject lines describe the subject of the email. To do something different flies in the face of hard evidence and is only attempted by the very brave or the foolhardy.

Not all email readers display the entire subject line. Just because you use Microsoft Mail doesn’t mean that all your readers do too. Keeping your subject line length below 51 characters will ensure that everyone can see all of your subject line, no matter what email program they are using.

Some words are better than others

Be wary of words that trigger spam filters. The obvious ones are “free” and “discount”. Most spam filtering works by scoring the email according to length, origin, words used, images and so on. Once a threshold has been reached the email is classified as spam and the software rejects it. Even punctuation such as exclamation marks in a subject line can increase your score, bringing you closer to the threshold. If you are unsure about how to avoid spam triggers in your email marketing copy, a professional email broadcaster will be happy to advise you.

Grab Attention above the Fold

In email marketing, preview panes are the equivalent of the copy that falls above the fold of a letter. Preview panes have become the standard way of quickly glancing at an email and deciding whether it’s worth reading or not. In our quest to get our emails read, our mission is to grab attention “above the fold” using our most compelling copy and imagery.

Design and write your email so that your offer, call-to-action, urgency indicator and branding all appear “above the fold”.

Be aware that each email reader will have a different preference for their preview pane. This results in the area available to grab attention being significantly different for each. Design and test your email marketing pieces in different formats to ensure your “above the fold” copy can be viewed in each.

Many preview panes block images by default, so ‘alt tag’ considerations should be included in the creative and design process. Alt tags also help improve accessibility to those with visual impairments. UK Companies are required by law to take reasonable steps to ensure accessibility under the 2005 amendments to the Disability Discrimination Act, so missing out alt tags could prove a costly mistake.

Perhaps because email is so ubiquitous and everyone writes emails every day, companies have a tendency to devalue them. However, as this article has shown, there is a lot to think about when planning an email marketing piece.

A final suggestion is that precisely because there is such a lot to think about and because things are changing so quickly in the world of email marketing, calling a friendly expert once in a while is a great shortcut to success.

More Email Marketing Articles

Does your business find itself lacking a little in the service department? Are you getting complaints about not getting back to people or do you think that you need to use a newer fresher style of marketing? If so then perhaps it is time that you started looking into one of the many different autoresponder services that are out there. These autoresponder services can change the face of your business and help you to pull in many more sales than you have ever seen in the past. In fact, with a good autoresponder service on your side you could up your business as quickly as in one week.

When it comes to an autoresponder service you need decide on what kind you want. You can get an autoresponder service that will be a software program or one that is an actual autoresponder service. If you choose to purchase autoresponder service programs you will only have to make a one time payment to them. This is usually affordable and simple to do, you will be able to use your autoresponder service programs or scripts as many times as you want and you will never have to pay more than your initial investment.

You can also choose to get an actual autoresponder service. This autoresponder service will save you time and energy in a big way. It is so simple and easy to use an autoresponder service that there is a very good chance that you will never look back. Many people have switched form an autoresponder service to a script and then regretted it.

When you are using a script and something goes wrong you have to figure out where the problem lies and how to fix it. When you are using an autoresponder service they do all of this hard work for you. They find the problem and they fix it for free. This is a great selling point on the part of an autoresponder service, especially if you are new to the entire concept.

When you choose an autoresponder service you will also have the peace of mind knowing that they are keeping on top of all the newest and hottest developments in this industry. Bulk mailing is a growing industry and it is changing all of the time. When you have signed on to an autoresponder service you will have the benefits of getting all of the latest technology. If you are running your own script it will never change on its own and you could be missing out on some powerful autoresponder service features. Features that could change your business for the better.

An autoresponder service is a simple and affordable way for you to keep in touch with potential clients. When you are using an autoresponder service you will always know you are getting your messages out to the public and that you are making a splash, a big one. So find out more about the many great autoresponder services online today.

As amazing as autoresponders are, I am surprised that not everyone and
every business is using them. For those that don’t know, an autoresponder is a
simple email program that responds automatically to emails that are sent to it.

Not only that, but it can also be used to set up a series of follow up emails
and provide you with mailing list management.

If you have a business, online or off, having an autoresponder is almost a
necessity if you want to fully maximize your sales potential.

Here is what typically happens:

You own a website that sells a product or service. Through your marketing
efforts, you get several visitors a day. You get about a sale daily, but for
those that don’t purchase, they are lost to you forever.

Now, let’s say that you are going to use an autoresponder to increase your
income. You need to know a very important fact about sales: “Most people
need to see an offer about 5 times before they decide to purchase.” What
this means is that you need a way of connecting with your visitors at least five
times, and autoresponders will do it for you…AUTOMATICALLY.

Back to your website. Your marketing efforts haven’t change and you continue to
get several visitors a day. But, you have written a 5 part eCourse about using
your product or service.

So now when you get a visitor, a little pop-up comes on (or you have a sign up
spot in the sidebar) telling them that you are offering a FREE eCourse. All
they need to do is supply you with their email addresses, and you’ll send it
right over.

Now, you will still get that quick sale. However, those visitors that were on
the fence about purchasing or who didn’t have enough time to look your offer over
will sign up to get the free eCourse.

And now, in automated fashion, your autoresponder will send them the eCourse (of
5 lessons) and also continue sending as many follow up emails as you want.

Not only that, but now you have started your own mailing list, and we all know
that the power is in the list. So six months down the road when you want to run
a special and reduce your prices by $50 for one day only, you can send an email
to your entire list with the details.

The best autoresponders are run by third party companies (desktop autoresponders
handled by yourself tend to get blacklisted quicker and have lower delivery
rates).

If you are going to pick an autoresponder, the best bets are Big Three:
GetResponse, Aweber, and EmailAces. Each has its own strength and weakness, so
you are going to need to evaluate your situation and goals to match it up
properly with the appropriate autoresponder company.

Here is a basic overview of the three:

1. GetResponse (www.Get-Response.com). Many people start off using GR. The
main reason is because they have a free version of their autoresponder service.
This isn’t a free trial that expires in 30 days. The free service doesn’t have
all of the features of the premium service and it does contain ads, but as far
as getting your feet wet, it is a good option. Other features include:
unlimited autoresponders, unlimited follow-ups (only 5 in free version), mailing
list management, pop-up creator and a neat tool that checks your messages to see
if email service providers will think they are spam. The premium service runs
for $17.95 per month.

2. Aweber (www.Aweber-Responder.com). People who have been using autoresponders
for a while eventually switch to Aweber (especially those involved in internet
marketing). It has a 30 day free trial so you can try before you buy. The
features include: unlimited autoresponders, unlimited follow-up messages, a Spam
checker, mailing list management and tools to create pop-ups. It also
integrates nicely with PayPal. This is important if you want to use the
autoresponder to automatically deliver your digital products when sales are made
on your website. Their service runs $19.95 a month.

3. EmailAces (www.EmailAces.com). This is a newer company than the other three
but has similar features. You also get unlimited autoresponders and follow-ups,
unlimited mailing list size, WYSIWYG HTML editor, and strong customer service.
Their service runs $19.95 a month for the unlimited autoresponder package (and
just $7.95 for the first month).

The question shouldn’t be whether or not you need an autoresponder. You do.
Especially if you want to maximize your income online (I can’t think of a more
important tool).

The question you should ask is WHICH autoresponder do I choose. And it all
depends on your individual situation. So figure out what you want to
accomplish, research the big 3 autoresponder companies, and decide on one.

It will be the best business decision you have made yet.

I wrote an ebook and I am finishing up the website and the autoresponder. I am now looking to find out how to automatically send my ebook to my customers right after they buy it. Sending it through an email follow up would be good or also if they had the opportunity to download it right after they purchased it would be good too. I would appreciate any help I could get on the subject.