Email Marketing – Day 17

I’ll be honest to be the first to tell you that I haven’t utilized email marketing like I should, YET! I have for some other projects but I haven’t started it yet for some of my main campaigns. I really should start it for those NOW though as the results of my previous experiences with email marketing have been great.

Here are some facts to consider, in 2005 a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 53% of Americans consider e-mail less trustworthy due to spam. Postini, an e-mail security company found that 87% of ALL e-mail messages sent were spam. Finally Opinion Research Corp found that the average person spends over an hour a day reading and sending emails.

What’s this mean for you?

• We all love our email but hate getting inundated with spam!
• Since spam is so high, it is hard for commercial emails to get lost to spam filters
• You need to have a focused and personalized email newsletter or system to get the reader to READ your email

Keep in mind you will want to abide by the CAN-Spam act that was passed by U.S. Congress which sets laws regarding how businesses can send commercial email.

So why use e-mail marketing?

Using email correctly is a huge marketing tool for increasing brand recognition, increasing your sales and driving traffic to your Website. Here are some reasons why e-mail marketing may be effective for you.

• Personalized Messages to Target Market – By achieving someone on your email list they have to go through an opt-in process so that you can abide by the CAN-Spam bill. This means people have ‘approved’ the process of you to email them by opting in to your list. These people obviously joined from your website and thus are interested in what you have to say. At this point you can personalize your emails and build a nice readership.
• Fast – Email is fast, plain and simple. You can create emails quickly and sending them takes seconds. People will have the email within seconds of sending it. Research indicates that 80% of your customers that read the email will act on that piece within 48 hours!
• Inexpensive – It isn’t expensive to create and manage an email campaign. Aweber is a great solution to manage an email campaign, make sure you abide by the laws, and create templates and ‘auto-campaigns’. All this for only $20/mo! Not bad when you begin building a huge database of potential/previous customers emails.
• Verifiable Results – After creating a campaign you have the ability to actually SEE how effective it is via tracking (Aweber includes this function). You don’t have to guess on how successful your email campaign was, you can actually see evidence of the success or lack of success.

How to Build an E-mail Campaign

First and foremost you are going to have to have a way to capture people’s email addresses. Remember we are abiding by laws and cannot go out and buy crappy email lists that are dated and overall of no use. We need to build ‘targeted’ and legal lists. You can accomplish this task by placing either the Aweber email list code on your site, or generate a form to capture people’s email addresses.

Incentives work WONDERS when trying to build a targeted list. Create some sort of e-book, or find PLR articles/e-books to offer for FREE when someone enters their email address to your list. This is how all the pro’s build quality lists, so why not follow suit?

Before I continue though I really want to touch on the CAN-Spam law passed by Congress. You really don’t want to something to jeopardize your business or livelihood so follow these rules when working with an email campaign.

• You need to obtain your customers’ permission to send them an email by giving a way to opt-in. Make sure that it is clear that you are asking them to receive future commercial emails and information about your company, products, or services. Make it an easy to fill out form so that you don’t lose people over the filling out a form part.
• Make sure that you have clearly explained your privacy policy so that people know what you are going to do with this email opt in list.

Understand your E-mail Campaign Goals

Like with any type of marketing you need to have a defined goal list for your email campaign. What are you attempting to do? Create a brand awareness? Are you trying to upsell a list of previous clients? Are you trying to sell to a potential client? Figuring these things out before your begin is essential. Don’t attempt an email campaign without having these ideas sorted out. It wont’ be successful if it isn’t laser targeted on a goal.

Determine your Target Market

Once again, by having a define goal, you will need to have a defined target market. They really go hand in hand. Some suggest adding questions to your opt-in form about their hobbies or something similar so that you can truly target each segment efficiently. By having a very targeted email list your conversion rate will skyrocket for that email campaign.

Creating the E-mail Message

Now that you have your ultimate goal in mind and the targeted email list it is time to begin your e-mail campaign. One of the keys that will lead to a successful campaign is personalization. You must appeal to your audience if you plan on being effective! You need to stand out to your customer and make the customer READ your email! How can you achieve that? Captivating headlines. Head over to Google News and check out some of the headlines, try using their techniques. Here are some captivating email titles of a popular marketing guru.

• “Obey Or Else!”
• This will probably piss people off… Oh well…
• Build a downline or an empire?
• I almost threw up…
• Its a perfect storm for you …

Attention grabbing, are they not? Most of the titles also included my name after them. Obviously this won’t work for anyone and everyone. This was orientated towards direct sales type of people, so very captivating titles are needed.

Here are some other ideas in regarding building your email message.

• The “TO” line of the email should include their name. Obviously this is hard to do if you are manually managing your email campaign (which is crazy to even consider). That is why Aweber is the best website to manage your list and enabling personalized emails. You can manage all this within the their email system.
• From line should be clear to indicate who you are or your business name. Return Path Inc. revealed that by recognizing a name of a person or business helped influence over 60% to open the emails.
• It doesn’t get more important then the Subject. We have already been over the ideas for generating a captivating title. It needs to be an attention grabber, but don’t overdo it. Don’t add things like Free or other keywords that turn people off. People want things to be personal, not pitchy or have a sales pitch persona. Keep the subject as short as possible too, notice the trend with the titles above? EmailLabs indicated that their research shows that open rates increased by 12.5% and click through rates skyrocketed to over 75% when a subject line contained 50 characters or less.
• Your body needs to be personalized again, addressing the customer by name. Remember short and sweet is key, you generally want your message to be as short as possible. Remember to end with a call to action! Don’t miss the whole point of your campaign. Tell them EXACTLY what you want them to do. I can’t tell you how much your conversion rates will increase if you tell them what to do.
• Create an HTML email! You can build your ‘branding as well as the overall beauty appearance. People like things that look good, simple text emails don’t do it in todays day and age. However, avoid adding pictures and many graphics to your email. You don’t want customers with old computers or slow connections to click out of your email because it takes to long to load.

Measure Your Email Campaigns Success

As with any form of marketing you want to measure its success. The beauty of an email campaign is your ability to monitor its success, and quickly. You don’t need to wait for it to be published in any paper or approved by any editor. It’s instant and usually so are the results! Here are the metrics that you are going to want to track.

• Sent: Just keep a general tab on the number of sent emails.
• Bounced: These are the number of emails that you received back as they were determined to be undeliverable. Some of these may be a result as a result of temporary issues, either from their ISP or because their account is no longer active. If email an email is undeliverable after three consecutive emails then you should remove them from your list.
• Delivered:The number of emails sent, minus the bounce rate, equals the number actually received by your customers. Keep in mind Aweber manages all this for you, without having to take extra time tracking this info.
• Opened: This is the number of e-mails actually opened by your customers. DoubleClick states that an average of 34.3% of all email are opened. Thats why you need to begin building a list, and build a captivating Subject.
• Opt-Out: Track how many people have begun to opt out of your campaign, analyze why, when and what are the patterns? Understand that there are patterns to opt outs. Did they occur after a certain email? Why? Analyze it from your customers perspective.
• Click Through Ratio (CTR): How many actually opened, and completed your call to action. When someone performs the whole task at hand, received the email, opened and clicked your link thats one conversion. This is your percentage ratio for the whole process for all of your list.
• Conversion: This is the real ratio, who then converted into sales. This is the ultimate number of successes for that email sent.

The beauty of email campaigning is that it is inexpensive and you can try so many different things to dial in your campaign. You are able to experiment so well with email campaigns and can see what works and what doesn’t, within a day or two. Make sure to keep your email messages fresh and relevant by adding new customers and weeding out old, expired and inactive members.

Obviously its next to near impossible to manage your own campaign, that’s why I use and suggest Aweber for this task. They give you a free 30 day trial, and the analytics they provide is awesome! I can’t emphasize how great this product really is.

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