Your email program is going strong and now your CMO is asking “what about mobile?” Let’s face it, the world and your customers have gone mobile, so your email program needs to follow suit.

Reaching your target audience today can feel like an exercise in virtual roulette—an assortment of options to choose from, each feeling as much a gamble as the next. Mobile has become a key component of today’s marketing venue, so you need to be prepared to enhance your email program to market to the exponentially growing numbers of mobile users and to introduce mobile messaging into your mix.

Be a mobile marketing maverick

Since your customers have adopted the ease and portability of handhelds and cell phones for media management, it’s time for marketers to adapt and customize their messages based on customer habits and preferences. As digital media adoption rates soar, customer demand for mobile engagement will skyrocket.

Be where your customers are

As an email marketer, it’s essential to be at the center of your customers’ attention if you hope to earn and hold their business. According to AOL Mail’s fourth annual Email Addiction Survey, 16% of survey respondents said they check their email from a mobile device. What’s more, 55% of respondents said they upgraded to a new cell phone in the last year so they could check email on-the-go. Crunch these stats and you’ve got a major trend towards mobile migration.

Clearly, to be successful in today’s market, your email program must adapt to meet consumer demand in the mobile stratosphere. Don’t think of mobile as a replacement to email—think of it as an enhancement to the strategies you already have in place today.

To get started, try out these simple yet powerful tactics for integrating mobile into your email strategy starting today.

Steps to mobile marketing success

Step #1: Create ‘mobile friendly’ formats for your email

Not all email layouts and styles are right for mobile media. As you target your traveling audience, be sure to think simple—design for tiny screens, mobile software, and use patterns most common to portable media devices. Mobile users spend mere instants accessing messages, so say it fast and focus on benefits.

- Craft clear and easily understood offers for the subject line.

- Put the most important subject matter at the top of emails for faster access to substance.

- If you include links, ensure landing pages are optimized for handhelds.

- Make messages brief, concise, and worth it… with clear action items and incentives.

Remember, the size, layout, and design features useful in standard email communication will not produce the same results in mobile messaging, potentially causing recipients to hit the delete key without bothering to read further.

Step #2: Have a plan and stick with it

Plan for success by identifying your goals and the tactics you’ll need to achieve them. Ask yourself, “How can mobile marketing help me build my business and meet marketing milestones?”

The first action item should include an assessment of the unique qualities of the mobile lifestyle. Content and user flow that informs via full-scale Web layout won’t necessarily scale on a Blackberry. Play to the strengths of this small, multifaceted platform and run campaigns that bring value to mobile users, e.g., click for ring tones, access mobile-only special offers.

- Build a mobile marketing strategy that integrates with your overall marketing plans.

- Outline campaigns and relevant offers that specifically appeal to mobile users.

- Set goals with incremental dates and milestones and track performance.

Step #3: Collect mobile data from your Web site visitors

Before you begin a mobile campaign, turn to your own captive audience—your Web site visitors—to see what, when, where and how they want to be communicated with on their mobile device. Within your website’s communications preference page, gather key data points, such as:

- Mobile number

- Mobile opt-in agreement

- Type of information users want from mobile messages

- Basic demographics, like age, gender, DOB, email, phone, zip (geo targeting), and interests

- Mobile phone type and carrier specifications

- Email address

If possible, offer incentives for completing the form to fuel sign-ups. While you’re at it, drop hints indicating that exclusive, top-list deals and announcements are coming soon in future mobile messages from you.

Remember, those who opt-in to receive mobile news are likely:

- Too busy to proactively obtain all their data from the Web, and

- Don’t want to miss the latest, greatest development about their favorite brands, hobbies, and heroes.

Maximize the medium by offering perks that save users time, give them useful tips, and sell them over and over again on your value.

Step #4: Create an infrastructure that’s industry compliant

Mobile marketing, like any medium, has its rules. The good news is, following these guidelines can afford you smooth travels along this new superhighway.

To ensure your infrastructure is up to snuff, first check with the Mobile Marketing Association (www.mmaglobal.com)—their code of conduct and industry best practices cover essential protocol you’ll need to know to keep yourself in good standing.

Simple things like using compliant SMS aggregators and sending permission-based communications are big deals in the small world of handhelds. Just like in the email arena, there’s no spam allowed! Also take note: clear, accurate and age-appropriate messages are keys to fair game.

Step #5: Get down to details—develop campaigns, then track results

Since mobile marketing is actually a segment of your overall marketing strategy, sync it up with business goals and develop campaigns that mirror and compliment what you’re doing in other venues. Get your hands in the details, set quarterly goals, and outline the steps that get the job done.

Take stock of these integrated tactics along the way:

- Compliment current promotions with mobile-only offers.

- Encourage mobile user interaction by emailing, mailing or broadcasting special offer access codes that deliver a “gimmee” (e.g., song, ring tone, coupon, widget).

- Use mobile messages to: drive people back to your Web site, build your brand, and promote your services.

- Set up a testing calendar to try out SMS methods, calls to action, and audience receptivity.

- Measure response time: speed, time-of-day, day-of-week; and create a matrix of best times and types of messages to send.

- Test calls-to-action that incorporate coupon redemption, click-through rewards, and latest/breakthrough news; adjust tactics based on results.

- Send different emails to different audience groups; test which performs best and modify future sends accordingly.

- Ask yourself, “What makes my audience respond?” and do that.

Step #6: Analyze and apply campaign success

As you wage campaigns, your testing and tracking activity will reveal what’s working and what’s not. Now’s the time to fine-tune your methods and build a strategy that grows with your business goals.

If a campaign results in a high number of opt-outs, take note and analyze the demographics, subject lines, calls-to-action, times-of-day, and message offers to locate the source of failure. On the flip side, if a campaign hits the roof, boosts sign-ups, surges sales, and triples Web site traffic, try to identify the muscle behind the homerun—and create a few clones!

Criteria by which to analyze campaign success:

- What was the level of interaction on handsets?

- How many recipients unsubscribed?

- How many new users subscribed?

- How many recipients sent in the survey?

- What days of the week and times-of-day did users respond?

- How long did recipients wait to respond?

- How many coupons were redeemed, songs/ring tones/skins/widgets downloaded?

- How many recipients clicked the call-to-action link and/or clicked to my Web site?

- What other responses did the campaign yield?

Stay focused and get in the game

As the face of email marketing forever changes, take charge and evolve with the times. Integrating mobile strategies into your marketing mix will help you reach more customers, more often, and more reliably. With a few adjustments to your program, you can create scalable campaigns catered to mobile devices that get you in the game to win.

If you haven’t gotten to email marketing, there is no opportunity like the present. This powerful form of marketing can let you direct targeted traffic to your website, stay you in communication providing your customers, and more. When begun an email marketing campaign, you’re going to want to be careful about how you go about it.

Here are some tips for setting up an email marketing campaign. Double Opt-in The most top notch kind of email list is one accumulated via the dual opt-in method. What this means, basically, is overly people experience to opt-in to receive the emails in a two-step process. They brand their email into a form on your site, but they consequently hold to click a link in a confirmation email they receive.

This seems desire it would be bad as it could indicate some people to not sign-up for the list by not completing the second step. The thing is, though, is those that do complete that moment stage really, really want access to the emails you send out. This makes them very valuable to have as you know they’re right now interested in the material you’re going to be sending. Don’t take a short-cut to try to substantiate the raw numbers of your list.

You’ll end up amidst a egregious list that performs at or below industry criteria for conversion rates. By insisting that subscribers dual opt-in to get on your list, you ensure the they’re passionate about getting tips from you and therefore more innate to click links or act on offers you present in front of them. Don’t Go Overboard One of the quickest ways to get a lot of purchasers to opt-out of your email list after you have carefully put up it up is to bombard them providing too many emails or too several off target emails.

Either of these methods can kill your email selling attempts before they get off the ground. People are busy. If you send too various email newsletters, clogging up their email Inbox, they’re lessened likely to was reading any of them. Limiting yourself to sending out carefully crafted email newsletters relatively than blasting any old garbage to your store will go a extended way in making sure not too many homeowners quit your list.

Even if you only send one email a week or one email a month, if it is not super targeted to the group of households who signed up for the list, it’s not going to be truly successful. If you send out things that aren’t of financial to the people on your list, they’re being handed out to commence to wonder why they signed up for your email include in the above all place.

This is not the thought you want going through their mind when properties open your email newsletter. Final Thoughts Email marketing is a great way to build and maintain relationships with customers and potential customers. If you’ve not thought up it before, you’re missing out on one of the firmest ways to sell your brand online. Download your FREE Internet Marketing Preview Ebook @ http://tinyurl.com/7oaydp now.

Over the past few years, research has continued to prove the benefits of e-mail marketing for business: low costs, high conversion rates and detailed tracking are all notable features. But e-mail marketing is becoming much more than just a tool for spammers and e-businesses. Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy on the differences between spam and permission-based emails, and more and more of them are accepting permission-based e-mail marketing as a positive replacement for direct mail.

The best news is that the majority of people who receive permission-based e-mails open, on average, 78% of them.

Jupiter Research reports effective email marketing campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits of broadcast mailings. But crafting an effective business email is both an art and a science. Here is a list of factors, potential problems and effective solutions to keep in mind:

1. Spam! Spam! Spam! I don’t need any Viagra!

The average consumer receives more than 300 emails a week, 62% of which are spam. No wonder there’s such hostility towards the industry. But spam filters, bulk folders and “report spam” features are helping consumers become more at ease about the perils of spam. While 89% of users cited spam as a major concern in 2003, that number dropped to 85% in 2004, proportionally to an increase in the use of spam-fighting tools.

So as a permission-based business email marketer, what can you do? One tip is to remind your subscribers to add you to their “safe senders” list. The second, and most important, tactic is to make sure your email marketing service provider has a good relationship with ISPs. This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns go into your subscribers’ inboxes, not their junk mail folders. When choosing an email marketing software, make sure the company has strict anti-spam policies and complies with the guidelines of Can-Spam.

2. Images and formatting: Why do my emails look broken?

Broken email campaigns are an increasing concern among email marketers, especially since several companies and web-based email providers now block graphics as a measure to combat spam. In fact, according to ClickZ, 40% of email marketing messages delivered to inboxes are “broken.”

This was actually something that came up during Eliteweb.cc’s beta-testing phases, as we had a client in the Canadian Government whose recipients were mostly using highly secure email programs. The solution we came up has now become one of our key competitive advantages.

What Eliteweb.cc does is it publishes every single email marketing campaign sent to a secure location on the web (a location only original recipients of the email can access, thanks to encrypted technology that automatically authenticates the user). The technology also ensures you can track your users’ behaviors, even if they are reading your email campaign at the secure web location.

3. Personalization and relevant content: In a business e-mail, one size does not fit all.

In a recent study by DoubleClick, email users were 72% more likely to respond to a business e-mail if its content was based on the interests they had specified. That number points out the absolute importance of allowing users to choose their own interest groups and have control over which business e-mails they receive. The most popular interest categories, according to the study, are coupons and household goods.

But your coupon is no good unless the user opens the email. Users in the study said the most compelling reason for them to open a business email is the name in the “from” field. So it’s a good idea to make sure your company name is clearly stated there. Another major factor is the “subject” line. Users cite discount offers and interesting news as the most compelling subject lines, followed by new product announcements and free shipping offers.

4. Click-through and conversion: Show me the money!

So the user has opened your email and read the content. Great. But where’s the sale? There’s good news here. For one, consumers are increasingly likely to make purchases as a direct result of a business email campaign. One-third of users in the DoubleClick study had purchased something by clicking a link on an email. Another 42% clicked on an email link for more information, then purchased the product at a later time. Second, online couponing is booming: 73% of consumers have redeemed an online coupon for an online purchase, and 59% have redeemed an online coupon offline.

In terms of industries, the top performers are travel, hardware/software, electronics, apparel, food, home furnishings, gifts/flowers and sporting goods. All companies sending business emails in those categories said between 71% and 80% of recipients have purchased their products because of an email campaign.

There’s no need to fret if your company doesn’t fit in to one of those industries. The overall landscape for email marketing conversions is looking brighter every day. The average click-to-purchase rate has increased nearly 30% since 2004 and the average orders-per-email-delivered rate has increased more than 18% since last year.

5. Stats tracking: Who are my real consumers?

E-mail marketing is an increasingly popular tool in effective CRM, and it’s about time more businesses recognize that. First off, if your provider’s email services for business do not include detailed, real-time tracking, you’re getting a raw deal. Real-time tracking is now an industry standard, and it’s highly valuable, as it allows you to see the exact moment a user opens your campaign, clicks on your link and makes that purchase. Studying your users can help you improve your communications efforts, so each campaign performs better than the last (several email service providers also let you compare the performance of your campaigns).

But many marketers are still in the dark. According to a recent WebTrends research, only 5% of marketers are very confident in the measurement of their online marketing efforts, while 26% admit they’re “flying blind.” WebTrends says the low confidence comes from a lack of knowledge when it comes to measurement, which means there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In email marketing, a blind shot won’t take you very far. But if you aim properly by following these essential rules of play, you should soon be reaping the same major results as so many online and offline businesses.

Many organizations spend huge amount of capital into advertisement to get prospect but they fail to market their Product/Service to them .Email communication is of the most effective ways of cultivating the type of relationship needed to turn your prospects into customers.

First and foremost thing in Email Marketing is to understand the purpose for mailing and provide relevant information to person who has requested it.

When designing your email, always keep in mind the amount of time you can expect your the reader to spend viewing it. Today, everyone needs information but no one has time to read it. They want detailed though precise information. Thus, to make your email campaign success, it is important to follow the given steps:

Tip 1# Make a plan regarding ‘type and frequency’ of email communication you will be sending. For newsletters the right volume could be weekly, biweekly or monthly. You can send promotional mails also in case of special discount or offers.
Tip 2# Add Sign-up to your website. From there you can get subscriptions and can import email ids into your existing mailing list.
Tip 3# Design a good email template. For this, either you can use integrated templates of emailing software or can search on web.
Tip 4# Create quality content for newsletter and try to convey your message clearly. Try to keep the email short with compelling and interesting subject line.
Tip 5# Add sign to every email with your name, company name, email-id and contact number so that it may not look like a spam mail.
Tip 6# Use email marketing software that can easily show you the statistic of click through, open, number of subscription, unsubscription, bounce rate etc.
Tip 7# Continue sending newsletters, message, promotions, announcements consistently.

You can notice the difference after implementing these tips in your email communication. Rather than blasting out a promotion whenever sales are lagging, schedule emailing newsletter. Never forget to give your readers a reason and means to share your email with others. Staying in touch with customers by providing imperative information is the ever best marketing technique.

Anyone who owns a website can gain a world of benefit from an autoresponder. If you own a website, you probably have hundreds of visitors on a daily basis. Through the use of an autoresponder, you can take their emails addresses and contact them anytime you wish. Although an autoresponder is a great thing – you should be very careful when you choose the one for your website.

When you select your autoresponder, you want to purchase from a company that has a history of being stable and reliable. There have been several companies in the past that have went out of business, taking customer lists and leaving those with their autoresponders hanging. This can be very devastating to a company, and you should avoid it at all costs. You should always choose a company that you can rely on, and never go by price. If you try to save yourself some money, you could end up paying for it down the road.

If you run a big company, you’ll want an autoresponder that supports multiple lists and allows you to follow up with customers as many times as you wish. An autoresponder can do more than just answer emails, which is why you should pay close attention to features. Although you may have just one website now, you’ll want to plan ahead for the future just in case you decide to run more than one site.

If you don’t know a lot about computers, you’ll want to choose an autoresponder that is easy to set up. Non technical autoresponders are always the best, as virtually anyone can install them. Integration is also important, especially if you have a lot of other components on your website such as a shopping cart or a checkout. If you are paying for hosting with your website, you should check and see if the package comes with an autoresponder.

For many, price is a very important factor. If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, this will be a crucial consideration. Although there are free autoresponders out there, you should usually use them, as they come with ads and other annoyances. If you search around on the Internet, you may be able to find a complete package that offers you web hosting and an autoresponder together for one low price. The savings here can be really good, especially if you use a long term option.

If you take your time and choose a reliable autoresponder, you’ll save your company and yourself a lot of money in the long run. Buying or downloading a free or cheap autoresponder is never a good idea, as it will end up costing you both money and time. The ideal way to find the best autoresponder is weigh out your options, take your time, and select best autoresponder for your company.