Email Marketing - Get That Email Address!

Every successfull e-preneur knows this: "The Money Is In The List!". If you are not capturing your website visitors' email addresses, then you are missing out on one of the best sources for generating revenue!

Most website owners concentrate their marketing efforts on gaining new visitors. This is fine & dandy, but what happens when they leave your site?

Maybe this visitor wasn't ready to buy just yet. Maybe he was just doing some research. Maybe he had to let his daughter use the computer to write a book report. Maybe the toilet upstairs started to overflow and his wife was yelling at him to "Come fix this NOW!".

The point is that you may never know if this visitor is genuinely interested in what you have to offer or not. By building a
mailing list from your website you have the opportunity to contact each potential customer from time to time with your latest offers.

Here are some suggestions to help bring in some traffic and repeating sales with email marketing:

1. Make sure you are giving your customers a way to opt-in to a newsletter that offers discount coupons, etc. Make it
clearly visible on your site to grab the attention of "browsers".

2. Give the customer an incentive to sign up for the newsletter. For example, I offer a free sample PLUS an entry into a
monthly prize drawing for the customers that sign up for the newsletter. The customer must still be on the newsletter
subscription list when I draw the name in order to be eligible to win. HINT - This is a great way to get rid of excess inventory that isn't moving, too!

3. Go to a few freebie/sweepstakes forums and list your offer. You will be AMAZED at the traffic it brings. Don't expect to
get any sales from this....that comes later. Freebie posters will find the freebie and will go to other forums to post it. So
all it takes is a few posts and your offer will be on many forums!

4. Once or twice a month, email your newsletter with coupon codes, special deals, etc. If you have already done the drawing
for the past monthly contest, post the winner's name. This will encourage most customers to continue to receive your newsletter.

I'm not guaranteeing you will reap tons of sales from this technique, but it least it will keep your site in the minds of
your visitors!

Many people are "window shoppers" by nature. They want the best quality goods at the best price they can find. If they found
your site 2 months ago but decided at the time not to purchase, do they still remember your site? Probably not! But sending a
newsletter with special offers may make them decide to give you a try the next time they need your "widget"!

Of course...DO NOT SPAM! Make sure each visitor has agreed to receiving your emails by opting in to your list. And please,
please, don't abuse the privilege this visitor has given you by sending massive amounts of emails! Once or twice a month
should be your maximum. I can't tell you how many newsletters I have subscribed to that send me emails every day! It is
really annoying and you may lose that contact if you do this.

RECOMMENDED SERVICES

Here are some email management services you may want to try. Both have free trials, email templates, list management, and will send your emails from their servers.

Constant Contact

iContact

Remember, the "Money's In the List!"....so start building yours today!

Top 10 E-Mail Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

Do you know there's a lot of money to be made if you could properly prepared and correctly executed your email marketing campaign to your subscribers?

It doesn't matter how good your intentions are and it doesn't matter how butt-kicking good your offer is. If you blow the basic rules of e-mail marketing, you're headed for disaster.

Here's I provide a checklist of what NOT to do when you're depending on e-mail to boost your revenue:

1. Failing To Obey The CAN-SPAM Act

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) was passed into law by the United States Congress to establish rules for companies that use e-mail for marketing or other commercial purposes.

The law affects any U.S.-based company or person that sends e-mail containing advertising that promotes a product or service.

Transactional e-mail, which is e-mail that is used solely to update a customer with information that is relative to his or her account or order, is generally exempt from most provisions of the Act except that it may not use "false or misleading routing information."

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is charged with the responsibility of enforcing the CAN-SPAM Act and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is authorized to pursue criminal actions against violators of the Act.

2. Failing To Test Your e-mail Message Before You Send It

e-mail can be displayed differently in different browsers and e-mail clients. That's why it's important to send a few test messages and to then read those test messages using the most commonly used browsers and e-mail clients in order to make sure that what readers see is what you intended them to see.

3. Failing To Use A SPAM Checker Before You Send Your e-mail

With so many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet users running SPAM-blocking software, it has never been more important to see how your e-mail stacks up against the electronic gate guardians that are going to try and stop your reader from receiving it.

4. Forgetting About The "Preview Pane"

Most people have their e-mail clients set up so that all new e-mail messages are displayed in a preview pain. Depending upon their preferences, that preview pane may just display the "To", "From" and "Subject" headers, or it may display all of those as well as the first few sentences of the body of the e-mail.

5. Failing to Use Enough White Space

If you make your e-mail message too long, or you try to cram too many words into a paragraph, your readers' eyes are going to instantly glaze over and they are going to hit the delete key.

Keep your e-mail messages short and get right to the point. Keep your paragraphs short as well.

6. Failure To Test All Imbedded Links

What a waste of time and effort it is to send out an e-mail campaign only to discover that the link to your web site or order page was malformed and it doesn't work. Test, test and then test again before you mail.

7. Locking Prospects Into One Contact Method

Giving prospects only one way to respond to you will cost you sales. Just because you think that e-mail is the best way to communicate doesn't mean that your prospect does. Some people are willing to read e-mail and click on a link to visit a web site, but they're not going to buy unless they can call on the phone or mail in a check.

8. Ignoring Your Bounce Rate

If you're sending e-mail, you can bet some of it is bouncing. You need to be aware of not only how many messages are bouncing, but why they are bouncing. Finding out how much e-mail is bouncing and why can be as simple as checking your mail server logs. Most hosting accounts provide them as well as a tool to view them.

9. Taking Down Your Landing Page Or Other E-mail-Connected Items Too Soon

It can sometimes take a few weeks for someone to get around to reading your e-mail for any number of reasons including illness or vacation. If you take your landing page down too soon or you delete any supporting graphics that the e-mail needs, you'll lose sales. Don't be in too much of a rush to end the campaign.

10. Not Taking Time To Proofread

Nothing makes you look more unprofessional than sending out an e-mail that's full of spelling and grammar mistakes. Don't depend on your spell checker alone. Print the message out and read it carefully, one word at a time. Then give it to at least two more people and have them do the same thing.

Basically, this are the 10 most mistake usually people made it while sending their email marketing promotion out to their list and been wondering why there is no effect at all and if you could avoid this 10 mistake I am sure you could make a sure fire on your email marketing success.

Avoiding The Spam Filter - Email Campaigns That Win People Over

If we ignore for a moment the critics who seek to torpedo anything that remotely resembles email, we'll see that email as a marketing tool still receives great favour with big businesses. Book a flight with any of the well know operators and a useful flow of email usually ensues, keeping us informed of any changes to flight times whilst at the same time sneaking us few discount offers. Within a few days of travel a cheery emails wishes all the best and thanks us for our business. This seems all very courteous and doesn't feel at all intrusive. It does after all save all those pest follow up phone calls or documents in the post. Should it get too much email allows for an easy method of termination…..the delete key. Quite the opposite to the endless dribble of viagra and bogus banking emails you find after your week away in the Algarve. OK the delete key still works but there is a massive differences between email that tells us something reasonable useful and the spam we are all generally drowning under.

Good, well-designed and well thought through email campaigns should not be thrown in the mix with the likes of viagra spam. Far from it, attractive designs coupled with a splodge of quality information can actually be very useful and be more than welcomed by recipients. Obviously a lot depends on proper targeting and profiling of recipients. If we assume mailing lists are clean and measure up to current legislation then organisations should not feel lame in exploiting email. Skilful designers can put together smart looking campaigns in a number of hours, tagging hyperlinks so that important statistics can be quantified further down the line. Not only can we reach clients in a cost effective manner, we can track and measure delivery, open and click throughs, giving us feedback on our return on investment (ROI). Link this with website analytics and we begin to follow visitors paths and behaviours. For those who want to get the most out of their email campaigns its essential that conversion tracking along with post click and post view are properly monitored and analysed. Post click illustrates the actions of web site visitors after clicking through from an email, whereas post view provides details of the people who visited the web site at a later date. By monitoring if a particular campaign delivered on its goal to take visitors to the point of ordering, booking, enquiring etc. email delivers much more than most other forms of marketing.

The number and staging of email is crucial in order to get the best out of any campaign. This is especially true if the campaign consists of several steps. Send out too many too often and you risk alienating the audience. If the message carries little of anything that's useful and smacks of nothing more than blatant marketing, then the recipient may decide to opt-out. Bombard the audience and again heavy opting out may result. If we continue the flight booking scenario we'd expect a confirmation email followed by perhaps a scattering of offers relating to accommodation, places to visit and car hire, to name but a few. As the flight dates approach perhaps an email re-confirming the flight times would be useful. Last minute changes could also be flagged, not to mention a reminder to take your travel documents, passport, euros and so forth. After the event - at a later date, maybe a few more offers relating to similar destinations would be reasonable.

Overdue the campaign and people may start to feel a little abused. It's a bit like overstaying your welcome or constantly knocking the neighbours door to update them with the latest gossip. But if the campaign provides mainly good information, the campaign may make people feel special, even cared for. It goes without saying much depends on the individual, but we need to be cautious and play it somewhat conservatively.

Far to many campaigns make the mistake of never knowing when to stop. They wrongly assume that because we took a short flight with them, we'll want a weekly update of offers. Once the initial courtship is done they should realise that emails should be scaled back. They'll most likely be little need in their services again for quite a while and any regular web user will be checking out competitor prices all over again. Possibly a once a month update is about right. OK, so we always have the delete key, but being too pushing can become an easy turn off. Through good profiling of clients it should be possible to determine the regular flyer from the intermittent flyer and therefore establish whom to best hit with more frequent information.

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Email Marketing - Create a Unique Website Content and Get Rich

You may have created a web site that is good to go to do business. But as days passed by, you discover that it is just you and some close family friends that visit the web site. So how would you go along with this situation?

You see, creating a web site is not just the main thing here. You need to create a unique site to make it big in the online industry. Once you have created a unique site that has informative content, then the next step would be letting the people know about it. And what perfect means should you use than using e-mail? Yes, e-mail marketing is the best and cheapest way to make sure that the whole world knows that there is a wonderful site that exists in the World Wide Web.

Here are the tips to consider when using email marketing.

1. Write reasons why your site is unique. You need to make sure that you have enough reasons to tell the people about how good you site is. Give these reasons to people that you will email.

2. Provide a good subject for your e-mail. Subjects should summarize the whole content of the email. Also most of the time the subjects are the basis for blocking certain emails.

3. Supply your signature. It is better if you could provide a signature that would introduce you to the readers. In this way, they would eventually know who this person that is sending them these emails.

Email Marketing - Are You A Gambler?

In 2006 businesses spent nearly $400 million on email marketing. This figure is staggering, yet it proves just how important online businesses believe email marketing to be.

Most marketing experts would likely rank Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies as the number one marketing mechanism for online businesses. However, it is email marketing that comes in second. The reason this marketing technique is so highly touted is because it doesn't wait for business to trickle in. Email marketing takes your message directly to the people providing a sense of immediacy and purpose.

SEO strategies are essential for the long term viability of your marketing strategy, but for the most significant return on investment (ROI) email marketing has consistently held an edge over other marketing strategies such as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising or banner advertising.

Email lists that are organically grown typically hold the greatest ROI, but some online businesses have found a modicum of success using rented or purchased lists, but there is always a price.

The reason many businesses look for lists that have already been compiled by third parities is because they can begin to market immediately. The problem many encounter with this strategy is that many of those on the email list may not be very happy with their private information being made available to the highest bidder. Recipients may also be hostile to any overtures from unknown companies.

You will discover that the best response you receive will be a direct result of interacting with existing, satisfied customers. They are the ones who already have an affinity for your product and do not tend to view your emails as unwanted material or spam.

The propagation of spam has made email marketing a bit more of a challenge for online businesses, which has placed a greater emphasis on trust, worthwhile correspondence and value for the existing customer.

Another reason purchased or rented lists are suspect with recipients is that legitimate email delivery is either personal or opt-in. If recipients have not signed up for the email in question they will not likely be excited to receive it. These unhappy recipients can (and often will) report your email as spam and you could be blocked from being able to send future emails – not just to the recipient who reported you, but also to any others that may be using the email service provider (e.g. Yahoo, MSN, etc.).

The value of email marketing is well noted and it can be tempting to take shortcuts from which to glean potential customers. In the end you may be gambling with your potential to send email to customers in the future if hostile recipients view your company email as spam.

Email Marketing - Why do You Want to Be Different to Excell?

The competition in the online world is on a rise from the last few years. To stand out of the crowd is becoming even more difficult for the websites after each passing day. The internet marketers go for a variety of marketing tools and styles to make their website a people's favorite. It is a fact that no website can survive today on the World Wide Web until and unless it experiences a regular flow of traffic. As millions and millions of internet marketers and websites are using almost similar techniques to market themselves through e-mail marketing, a campaign in such a competitive environment cannot be effective until and unless it drags the attention of quality traffic towards your website. Thus being different is important.

Many of the companies are using Email marketing as the most important way of marketing their company online. In this situation where the prospective customers receive many promotional offers and emails on daily basis, they can only be affected by an email which is effective enough for them. There is another problem which needs to be taken care of at this stage. An impressive email can only be impressive if the recipient opens it and reads it. The biggest drawback of email marketing is that the open rate of these emails may not be very high. You must be careful about the subject line, the senders address and the frequency of your promotional emails. If you do not pay due attention towards this dimension, your email marketing campaign may fail as your emails may be taken as spam email.

Email Marketing - Why Should You Use an Autoresponder Service?

Why should you use an autoresponder service instead of hosting your own autoresponder?
The bottom line is my time is too valuable in my personal opinion to ever mess with trying to host my own auto responder on my website. And there's lots of reasons why I don't like, why I wouldn't want to host it on my website. If I get spam complaints I have to deal with it, if the spam law changes I have to deal with it, personally I don't think my time is worth dealing with that. An autoresponder service charges me a very fair fee every single month, and if I were to have an autoresponder service; let's just say I have a 100000 subscribers on my list, for example.

Now keep in mind if I had a 100000 subscribers on my list, I would be at what, 200000 dollars in monthly income. Now if I had 200000 dollars in monthly income, and I don't know what the exact number is, but let's just say an autoresponder service charged me a 1000 dollars a month, and I'm sure that's not the case, it's probably more like a 100 dollars a month. But if it was a1000 dollars a month it would still be worth my time, my money to allow them to do all of my list maintenance for me.

And then I would still clear 199000 dollars and I wouldn't have to worry about spam laws, and I wouldn't have to worry about AOL and Yahoo and Google, and internet explorer and individual people that think I'm spamming them after they've already opted in to my list or double opted into my list. So, I prefer using an autoresponder service, I don't think there's any number of people on my list that could persuade me to change from an autoresponder service, unless an autoresponder service's service goes down, and the service of the one I use has only gone up in the last 8 months.