A Couple Of Vital Pointers For Successful Email Marketing
We keep hearing the over used term “the money is in the list”. This is becoming like the old saying “the cheque is in the mail”. There are 2 common factors in the afore mentioned expressions, the money and the mailing list, but that is where the similarities end. We must acknowledge that the surest way to make sales and money is by selling to your mailing list. Thus, the most precious asset in your arsenal is – your list.
The website, advertising, search engine optimisation, hosting plan, choice of payment processing, selection of products, name of your business and all the other factors that make up your marketing campaign, are all important parts of the process, of getting the customer’s money and giving him his delivery, or download, but NONE is indispensable, apart from your list. Just let that sink in again. You can replace, buy, beg, borrow all other resources without too much hassle, but without your list, you are history! One of the biggest, best internet marketing gurus was heard to say “ If I had a gun to my head and had to the crook all my assets, I would let him take anything he wanted, except my list. He would have to shoot me for that”. Now, that certainly shows where his business comes from.
One of the most critical factors to succeeding online is building an email list, you hear it time and time again the money is in the list and when you understand this concept, you will start making money. To a certain extent that is true, but it needs to be a responsive list. You could have a list of 100,000 email addresses in your database, but if they are the people who are not really interested, or freebie seekers, or not truly satisfied that you are offering an honest deal, then that won’t help you at all. Worse still, is the fact that your e-mails might be ending up in the spam bin and not even being read. These pointers should help you to form a highly targeted list of hungry subscribers.
Get yourself a decent auto-responder. This is something that is vital to your email marketing success. There are certain times when the word “free” has its place in an online business, but auto-responders are not one of them. This is your single most important tool. You will have a lot of problems and a lot of manual follow ups, if this is not set to work effectively. If you want your e-mails to reach your subscriber’s inbox and be opened, then you must use a reputable auto-responder service. Because of the spam issue, this should no longer be a problem. If you use a good auto-responder service, they should have built a good relationship with most of the e-mail providers, to help get your e-mail delivered, instead of it being thrown out, as spam. A good auto-responder service will have a function, where you can check your e-mail for spam triggers, before you even send it out. You should also take precautions, to ensure your subscribers are double opt in. This basically means that when a visitor signs up to be on your e-mail list, a good auto-responder service will immediately send them a link to be verified, in order to say that they have, in fact, agreed to be on your list and receive your e-mails.
Another big reason for using an auto-responder is of course the amount of effort required to do these tasks manually. If you try to send out promotional e-mails on a regular basis and reply to each one and then thank them and give them their download link and then sort the results into groups according to their interests, or response, you will never keep up. Your auto-responder is able to do all this and more.
It is imperative that you test your subject line. The first thing your subscriber will see, when checking his, or her e-mail, is the subject line of the e-mail. What you need to do, is make it compelling enough, for your subscriber to want to open the e-mail, especially if it is a promotional e-mail. The best way to get an indication of whether your e-mail will be opened, or not, is to test different subject lines. How do you do this? Well you would send the promotional e-mail, with different headers and catchphrases to different sections of your full subscriber list. Say for example, you had a list of 10,000, then maybe you could select the first 250 in your database and send them one format. The next 250 would receive a different subject line and the next would receive yet another format. You could then judge your response rate, by the number of e-mails responded to in each group. This will give you a good idea of which format works best. You then stick to that format and blast it to the full list.
The next point worth consideration is which format to use, html or text? This is something that a lot of new internet marketers will not even think about, but it is very important. When sending out e-mails, most auto-responder services will give you the option of plain text, or html. There are many e-mail clients, who only read plain text, so when they receive an html e-mail, it shows up in html code, making it completely unreadable. As most people have set their e-mail program to show in plain text, this is obviously the better bet. If you want to show off your fancy layout, send them to your webpage. Keep the e-mail short, to the point, informative, entertaining and compellingly persuasive. Insert the link more than once and also have some back up plan. This way if the reader is not interested in your first offer, there still may be a chance that the other one grabs his attention.
Make sure you have an opt in form, placed strategically on your website. The first thing that the visitor sees, should be some irresistible offer in return for his address. This is absolutely essential. You could also have a plan B in place, so that if he doesn’t want to subscribe to your newsletter, he may want the freebie, or the membership or other. Just make sure that he gives you his name and e-mail. What is the point of all your advertising and marketing, if the guy comes to your site, has a look around and leaves, never to be seen again? You must make him a potential customer. It has been said that on average, a customer bites on the 10th approach. If you only give yourself one crack at him and then lose him, you will not do very well.
Remember that if you achieve nothing else, you must at least be able to add your visitors to your list, for next time. This is really the best advice I can give you. Give something away if need be, but always, always force the visitor to leave his contact details. Even if you are still building your website and finding products and getting used to your responder and advertising and optimising and uploading files and testing mails and finding a payment processor and opening a bank account and any other excuse you might think of – start building your list and start immediately sending to them. Get to know them and let them build up trust with you. Even if you don’t yet have a product to sell, keep in touch. Make up a newsletter and just keep them informed. Later, when they see an e-mail from you, you want them to open it and read it because they WANT to.
Make use of your stats. All decent web-hosts will either supply you, or allow you to install your own methods of statistics collection. Read and analyse these regularly. They will tell you how many visitors you have had, where they came from, how long they stayed, which pages interested them, how often they come back, how many forms they have joined and all sorts of other things too .Another point, seldom considered, is the opened/unopened stats from your e-mail marketing campaign. When you send out an e-mail message, especially a promotional e-mail, check your unopened stats. Most of the better auto-responder services have a function that shows you who on your list did not open your e-mail. You have to consider that even with the best subject, there is always a chance that your e-mail will slip through the net, especially if your prospect is on many e-mail lists and receives a pile of mail each day, or he might be away. You can re-send the e-mail to the people who did not open your first one. You can also check from the stats how many did open it, how many clicked for more information, how many actually bought and this way you can break your list down into several smaller sections, based on the results.
Remember, when you find a nice new product and you get ready to promote it, so are thousands of others. Don’t use exactly the same sales page and exactly the same pitch. If your list receives many e-mails, they could quite likely see that exact same spiel a few times. Be original. Change things a bit and realise that the potential customer is not looking for compelling, impressive technical data, he is looking for a personal recommendation from you. Many successful marketers don’t even have their own websites. They promote by mail and send the prospect to someone else’s site to buy. By keeping accurate stats, they then get paid commissions for successful sales.
Marketing on the internet changes frequently as people find new methods of increasing their sales. Always remember your job is marketing. You are not a salesman, not a scriptwriter, not a graphics designer, not the most informed in your field, not offering the best service, not having the best price, not the proud owner of the best looking website, not the most consistent advertiser, not the king of optimisation, not the boffin on keywords, not the stockist of the most products. No everyone on the internet is the same – they are marketers. Simple, you are an internet marketer, nothing more and nothing less, just a marketer. Now try to be the best marketer that you can be. Don’t try to sell the product, try to sell yourself. That is why the top boys are so successful. It has taken them years to build up a reputation. People know and trust them, so much so that often they are asked to endorse a new product and just by using their names, the launch is a runaway success. It might not necessarily be the best product, but it has the top marketer’s name attached to it and thousands of people will buy, just because that guy recommended it. Wouldn’t it be nice to be that well known and trusted? That is success.
To learn more about how to write killer emails, that hook your subscribers every time and ring
Derek Robson is an up and coming, South African internet marketer, with a vision of empowering all fellow South Africans and non U.S folk, to have equal opportunity and success on the internet. He has started a string of sites, resources, courses and articles, as part of Dersalsites
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Tags: derek robson, dersalsites, email marketing, Internet Marketing
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