Friday, April 28, 2006

Successful Email Marketing

by: William R. Nabaza

No doubt email is still the best way to get a quick response from your prospect. Big companies on the web have realized this that they have implemented free email address service on their web site. This free email awareness has even reached Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, and InfoSeek. They knew that being a search engine is not enough that they've even turned into a hotmail web site. We'll recruit your people under you.

Get Your Free Web-Based Email

Search engines knew that they need to reach their users via email and incorporating successful email marketing that works. I'm here to reveal their secrets.

How can we go about writing successful email marketing that really works.

1. Think Before You Write.

This is obviously the very basic foundation that most of us internet marketers have neglected. For us, words are easy to come by and we haven't done our targeting yet. Target it to your customers and compose an email that will always refer back to your web site and services you sell.

2. Target Narrowly and Carefully.

Search engine categories have helped me a lot in writing a brief but carefully targeted articles. There are even free services that lets you create your own email group such as egroups.com, topica.com and listbot.com

Just be careful not to spam or you'll end up getting flames in your email box.

3. Keep It Short.

No we're not stupid in doing this. Studies have shown that sending a very long email to prospects will let them send it to their waste baskets. Be brief and highlight your product's effectiveness in two to three sentences and provide the URL. Try to discuss one topic per email you send.

more detail..

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

5 Phases to Email Marketing

by: Chris Stirling

When using email marketing to sell a product or service you can’t just start selling to your readers in the first email. The reason is the odds of the reader knowing who you are or what you are all about are pretty low, even if they subscribed to your newsletter from a form on your website. People do not purchase from those they do not know. So the key to a successful email marketing campaign is “warming up” your readers to the sell.

The "warming up" process can be broken down into five distinct phases. It's a good idea to keep these in mind as you work to warm up your lists.

Phase 1 -- "Cold Readers"

These are folks who have just filled out the form on your website, or whose details you have received via co-registration.

You know nothing about them, and they know nothing about you, so at this phase, your primary job is to introduce yourself, and begin to establish yourself as a source of credible and useful *free* information.

I emphasized the word *free* in that, because "cold" leads are very unlikely to buy anything from you, no matter what you do.

PHASE 2 -- "Curious Readers"

At this phase, people may have opened one or two of your emails and have at least decided to stay on your list long enough to find out what you're about, and what they can gain by reading your emails.

Another way of thinking of this group is that they are the ones who are actually opening and reading your emails, whether they open the first or the tenth that you send them.

Your job with this group remains essentially the same as was true at Phase 1 ... you are still in the process of "warming them up" to the idea that you are credible and trustworthy.

Again, not a time to be trying to sell them things, because few of them will buy, anyway.

PHASE 3 -- "Interested Readers"

These are the folks who have opened and read several of your emails, and now continue to read them. Perhaps they have "moved" themselves from your "cold" list by opting-in to one or your newsletters or free mini-courses.

By doing so, they have "told" you that they are interested in what you have to say, willing to read more of your emails, and may, in due time, buy something on the basis of your suggestion.

One way to know who your "interested" prospects are is to offer a free ebook or mini-course, and make them "register" for it by opting in to a second autoresponder.

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Thursday, April 20, 2006

Why Email Marketing?

by William Allen

Why should I use email marketing? Simple. You can achieve outstanding results with email marketing while only investing a small amount of time and even a smaller amount of money. It is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses of all types and sizes.

5 Reasons to use email marketing:

1.It's cheap: Whose marketing budgets aren't tight these days? Email marketing is an affordable way to stretch that tight budget. Direct mail, for example, has high production costs - materials, postage etc. With email marketing the production cost is zero. It costs as little as fractions of a penny per email. That's 20 times more cost effective than direct mail marketing.

2.It's very effective: You don't have to passively wait for your existing customers and prospects to return to your Web site or storefront. Now you can pro-actively communicate with them by simply pushing the send button. It is a very effective way to increase sales, drive site or store traffic and develop loyalty.

3.It's almost instantaneous: Email marketing generates an immediate response. There is a clear call to action: "Click here..." or "to learn more about..." You don't have to wait months or even weeks for the results of any given campaign. Initial response from a campaign generally occurs withing 48 hours of the time the emails are sent.

4.It's very specific: Like direct mail (only easier) you can segment your lists using a variety of criteria or interest groups so that the individuals most likely to respond are the ones that receive the promotion.

5.It's almost too easy: For both small and medium businesses you can find Web-based email marketing products. Included in these products are professional HTML templates, list segmentation and targeting capabilities, as well as, automatic tracking and reporting. It handles all of the tech stuff so you are free to focus all of your time on the creative content of the message.

Bottom line - Email marketing is cheap, effective, quick, specific, and easy. It increases sales, drives traffic and builds loyalty with small amounts of time and even smaller amounts of money invested.

Now is the time to put email marketing to work for your business.

source : goarticles.com

Friday, April 14, 2006

10 Essential Steps to Developing a Successful E-Mail Marketing Campaign

by: Fabian Lim

Developing and executing a successful e-mail marketing campaign is becoming more challenging. The SPAM problem isn't improving and laws are tightening their grip on e-mail marketing.

So, you need to carefully develop your e-mail marketing campaign with great care.

Here are 10 steps you can use to develop a successful e-mail marketing campaign:

Step #1 - Define the purpose of your e-mail campaign

Whilst this step may seem pretty obvious, you will be surprised at how many e-mail marketing campaigns are carried out without a clear purpose or goal.
This is especially prevalent with online newsletters or e-zines - many don't provide the reader any valuable or useful information.
So, start your e-mail campaign right - by first defining a clear purpose or goal.

Step #2 - Develop a clear call to action

A call to action is a specific set of instruction(s) contained within the e-mail with the sole purpose of leading the reader to take a specific action.
Here's an example of a call to action: "Click here to download your f~ree Special Report"
With the introduction of the CAN-SPAM act and advancement in SPAM filter technology, it is difficult enough these days to get your e-mail pass SPAM filters, yet alone opened and finally read.
It would be a sheer waste of time for both your reader and yourself if you didn't create a clear call to action in your e-mail.

Step #3 - Personalize your e-mail message

Use your full name in the From: field rather than your company's name.
And use your recipient's name in the subject line.
This will increase the "open rate" of your e-mail (The "open rate" is the percentage of e-mails opened against e-mails successfully delivered), because recipients will more likely open and read e-mails from people they recognize.
Personalization will also reduce the probability of the e-mail being mistaken as SPAM.

Step #4 - Develop an interesting subject line

It's true.
First impressions DO count in e-mail marketing!
If you have an important e-mail you want your reader to open and read, you need to develop an interesting subject line to woo your readers attention.

More detail..

Monday, April 10, 2006

Learn Successful E-Mail Marketing Tips!

by: Stephen Woessner

E-mail marketing campaigns can be integral parts of any organization’s marketing strategy. That’s because e-mail marketing can be a powerful tool for differentiating a brand, driving targeted traffic to a Web site, and increasing sales. In addition, one of the greatest benefits of an e-mail marketing campaign is that online reporting tools make measuring results easy and data is available nearly instantaneously after launching a campaign.

The keys to success are the relevancy of the content provided to the target audience as well as the quality and segmentation of the sender’s e-mail list. Organizations that pay attention to these critical points will increase the probability of accomplishing their goals.

This article contains practical tips that you can use to develop and implement an e-mail marketing strategy.

Developing your e-mail marketing strategy

Who is your audience? What is your message? How often will you launch a campaign? Develop a clear strategy that answers these questions while remaining consistent with your overall marketing strategy. Consider the following four components when developing your e-mail marketing strategy:

Set realistic goals.

What specific, tangible benefits do you want your e-mail marketing campaign to help your organization achieve? Some examples might include:

Increase sales leads from A to B.

Increase product or service sales from A to B.

Enhance customer relationships by increasing the number of times that your organization connects with customers from A to B.

Differentiate your brand by providing customers with expert advice they can apply to their business.

Drive traffic to a specific content section within your Web site.

Analyze and segment your e-mail list. Get to know your customers and determine what topics grab their attention. Then segment your e-mail list into smaller lists based on the identified commonalities. Remember to update e-mail addresses that have changed.

Develop relevant content based on your segmentation.

A segmented e-mail list gives you the freedom to develop customized content, increasing the odds that your audience will respond. Provide your audience with content that is interesting to them. Highlight product and service features that are highly relevant to your audience and unique from your competitors. These types of features are called drivers.

Providing relevant content also reduces the risk that your audience would consider your e-mail marketing campaigns to be distractions, or even worse, spam.

Measure your results.

Most leading e-mail marketing distribution tools provide real-time data as part of their package. The AVS Group uses Constant Contact for our campaigns. For a broader view of your Web site’s performance, Webtrends is a leading Web analytics tool that generates detailed traffic statistics.

Differentiating your brand

Can e-mail marketing be useful in differentiating a brand? Absolutely, and here’s how.

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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Using Email Creatively to Market Your Company

by Ross Johnson

The average employee corresponds to other companies via e-mail over ten times a day

Ten times a day is a rather frequently, especially when you look at it over the span of the whole company. Even a small company with 5 people, you are sending out fifty e-mails a day.

Now consider turning your email into a subtle marketing campaign. That is fifty potential advertisements a day, possibly more. Even if you are responding back and forth with the same people, each time they see the advertisement they are more likely to be interested. Think about how many times you see the same commercial on TV before you buy a product/service/etc.

So now the question is what can you do to turn your email into a marketing campaign.

The best way to go about it is to be as subtle as possible. People are very sensitive to spam now days, and if you make an e-mail full of images and HTML they are likely to be turned off quickly.

My best recommendation is to use your signature, insert links to pages of your site where you have affiliate links, services, products, etc for sale. That way every time they read your e-mail they are likely to see them.

However - this is not a new idea, and you may already be doing this. There is a twist, and that is how you are labeling your links and additional text that you can put with it.

Instead of just putting "Joes Plumbing" and linking it to your website, think of some aspect of your website that would interest people into going. Change the link to "Why pay a plumber to do a five minute job?" and link to your page where you have some basic how-to's.

Further, you can add additional text to help increase the interest of every person who reads your e-mail. Every week put a different quote in the signature below your link, taken from an interesting part of your website.

For example -

Why pay a plumber to do a five minute job? <--- Link to the site

"Most drain clogs are simply the result of food backup in the drain, with the right house hold tools you can dislodge the backup..."

I try and avoid images in my signature, simply because a lot of email clients don't show them by default to avoid possible virii and scripts. The result is your e-mail looks bad, and the information you want to convey through the image is lost.

I recommened this method to an Ann Arbor company I did Web Design for, and they saw on average 5 more unique visitors a day. That is 245 new visitors a week.

source : goarticles.com

Saturday, April 01, 2006

E-mail Marketing

by Jeff Phelps

Even some of the most crafty marketers you know the ones just about everyone hates the spammer, will admit Spam is almost dead. It has been greatly taken over by the use of e-mail marketing. It is said that Spam is on the decline, contrary to popular belief. The rate that it is falling is approximately 13% per year. Why? Because the marketer now sees that e-mail is the marketing choice for the pros. By the year 2010 they say that Spam will in fact be a thing of the past. It is also interesting to note that the market spending in this fashion will grow from $885 million, to $1.1 billion dollars in as little time as well.

It is said that the bulk of the e-mailing for businesses in the year 2010 will be of the transactional, acquisitioned, and retention methods. With the remainder of e-mail leveling out between customers gain and personal e-mails heading up the rest. It is clear to see why the Spam is diminishing at such a rapid rate; the e-mail filtering is getting stronger almost monthly. The amount of Spam that the everyday normal user will see Spam cut in half from 2005 to 2010. This will set the pace for the e-mail marketing to take over. With new technology in place, it is easy for someone to rec
ognize the difference between Spam and an actual e-mail from a company that is doing a follow up for business purposes.

It is clear by consumer reports that individuals will stay clear from e-mail servers that do not offer top of the line Spam filters. This is not to say that there are not still a plethora of servers available to the open market. The reason for the big concern right now is the cost of incorrectly blocked e-mails. This rate is at approximately $107 million dollars right now; it is expected to fall to approximately $88 million by 2010. In turn this will make for a much easier time to reach out to the consumer, by way of e-mail marketing once the Spam is truly eradicated. It is the idea that there will be a very organized arena for e-mail marketing that has business owners in hoots and hollers. They truly know the potential for this wonderful and inexpensive medium.

The improvement of the practices in list management will be stronger, and the ISP will have a stranglehold on the Spam. With all this technology, and the will to make the marketplace a safer business realm, it is clear that e-mail marketing can easily be allowed into the fold as one of the most productive marketing and business tools for the future. For now we still have to deal with all this junk called Spam. *****

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source : goarticles.com