Internet Marketing News – Search Engine Marketing

No two email advertising campaigns are alike, just as no two email messages are alike. A good email marketing campaign consists of many different ingredients. These ingredients include proper wording, a strong call to action, and identifying and attending to your target audience’s needs, wants, and desires. Do you know what good email advertising is? Can you identify it when you see it?

Good vs. Bad Email Advertising

Good email advertising makes you read on. It is the type of email advertising that encourages you to click on an email because the subject line is enticing. Email advertising done right ensures you not only open the email, but also read it and click through to the site or purchase a product or service.

How do you get to that point? Any good email advertiser knows that you have to figure out how to inspire people if you want to get them to buy your products and services. How do you do that? It isn’t as hard as you may think. Here are some tips for creating great messages as part of your email advertising campaign. Keep in mind that email advertising should be included as part of a comprehensive Internet marketing campaign.

* First, get personal. It is difficult to connect with a target audience through a computer, but start by greeting your prospects, and then identifying with them. To do this, figure out what needs you can fulfill for your prospects, and then define them.

* Next, stay personal. People want to feel like you care about them, and are not just selling a product or service. One effective tactic is storytelling. People like to read stories – but only if they’re plausible. If you continue a storyline through the course of several email advertising messages, most people will keep reading just to find out what happens.

* Make sure your sales copy is not over the top. People don’t like to be harassed when they enter a retail store by sales personnel. The same is true of email advertising. No one wants to open an email message, only to be bombarded by a sales pitch right away or by a call to action BEFORE you get to know him or her. While your email messages should always include a call for action, make sure you approach your prospects gently – at least in the beginning when you are trying to establish a relationship.

Business email marketing is seen by some as a low-return strategy, and by others as an outdated medium now that Facebook and Twitter have come about. Yet there are literally thousands of businesses out there that are reaping the rewards of business email marketing every week … and plenty of list subscribers that feel their heart jump a little whenever a blog post or special message lands in their inbox from a particular company. Today we look at why business email marketing is definitely NOT an outdated Internet marketing technique … and why it should actually be at the centre of your social media strategy.

Email marketing is more intimate
The least intimate interactions of all on the net are those on social networking sites like Facebook. Status updates are generalized, messages can be viewed by anyone, etc. Microblogging is necessarily a little more personal, and if you have a personal or company-based blog, this gets more personal still as it allows for individual comments and responses, and offer mostly opinion-based, individually toned content. However, email content can be fully targeted, customized to suit the receiver, and can start a dialogue if you let the user know where to direct replies.

Email marketing doesn’t depend on third-party sites
When you set up a Facebook page, you’re depending on Facebook to maintain a secure site, offer options that allow your company to act in a way consistent with your corporate value, etc. You’re also expecting that the site won’t find an arbitrary reason to take down your content (as often happens with YouTube), and won’t change their terms of service in a way that doesn’t suit you. Business email marketing depends on nothing except having a valid email address.

Business email marketing is more exclusive
If you save your best deals and price offers for your business email marketing, people will soon come to value those little segments of their inbox highly! Business email marketing offers the opportunity to give your communications real value, beyond being another ad that people have to endure.

The subscription form is an often-neglected part of email marketing, yet is actually one of the most important factors in building a good first impression and a successful email relationship with your subscribers. In other words, it’s a cornerstone of Internet marketing. It is easy to lose a sense of human-to-human contact on the web – the companies that manage to maintain it are the ones that inevitably succeed where others do not. Today we check out some email marketing tips for the most important part of the entire process … that first meeting, the subscription form!

Start slow
Human relationships always progress slowly. You would never reveal your deepest secrets to the girl that sits next to you at work, or let your boss use your PIN to grab you some cash form the ATM when he goes out of the office. Similarly, know when to stop asking questions on your email marketing subscription form.

But not too slow!
This, though, is the great marketer’s dilemma:

The more you know about someone, the easier it is to deliver value to them

So if you know nothing about your subscribers apart from their email address, you’ll have no choice but to send out generic emails, which naturally deliver little value to the majority of subscribers … and may even cause some to unsubscribe before you get to the juicy stuff that they prefer. Then you won’t get the chance to put more advanced email marketing tips into effect.

So, what sort of information is it appropriate to ask on a subscription form?

* Name: This will often give you some information about their cultural background and sex. Make these tentative entries in your database for this subscriber.
* Zip code: Much faster than City and State – just as much information for you
* What do you prefer to receive emails about? List options such as general company news, specials and promotions, competitions, expert columns, etc. List different subject areas if appropriate to your site.

For an initial meeting, this is probably enough!

Aside from remembering your basic manners (pleases and thank yous!), and keeping your branding consistent across the subscription form, this will be one of the most useful email marketing tips for your entire campaign.

We’ve all experienced buyer’s remorse when we’re on the consumer end of the purchase equation. At the business end, though, we hate to think of people being remorseful about buying our product … and we often tend to make excuses about it. “They didn’t pay attention to the product specs”, or “There’s just no pleasing some people”. Subscribing to email advertising lists can also create a form of ‘subscriber’s remorse’. Today we look at how to get past the excuses, and make people glad that they connected with you again! This will help enormously with your website promotion.

Be consistent
Make sure that every piece of communication with your email advertising subscribers is consistent. Pay attention to your:

* Logo placement
* Color schemes
* General branding
* The tone used in your copywriting

Being inconsistent builds mistrust in your subscribers. People will feel like they didn’t really get what they signed up for, and will often simply unsubscribe.

Set up some expectations
Either on your sign up page or in your welcome email, let people know what they can expect. People are looking for a specific service when they sign up to an email list … surprises are good for Christmas, but not necessarily valuable on the web!

Most importantly, set up some expectations in your subscribers’ minds about how they’ll benefit by staying subscribed to your email list. If you’ll be sending out special member-only promotions, let them know (and try to give them some indication of the frequency). If you are going to teach them special techniques that can’t be learned elsewhere on the web, let them know. If they will get hilarious content delivered direct to their inbox, let them know, and if it’s going to be bone dry and completely corporatized stuff, then let them know as well. Though you might want to think of a nicer way to word that last one…!

Have some manners
Many of us are trying to find our way around manners on the web; they are completely different to the type that our parents taught us, after all. It doesn’t matter if you type with your elbows on the table, but there are still some courtesies you need to remember in your email advertising!

* Thank your subscribers for signing up
* Give them what you promised them as soon as possible – if there was a report to be downloaded or a freebie to be had, don’t make them wait
* Offer your contact information so people can contact you with any concerns … sending no-reply emails with no web address and no contact point is the height of online rudeness.

Email advertising is a fairly new field for many businesses – remember these basics and you should be able to keep your subscribers long enough to get a little better at this tricky discipline!

We all know what an ‘inactive’ email marketing recipient is … usually because we are one ourselves, on one or more lists. Personally, I’m subscribed to around 10 or 15 email lists, mostly because I wanted to access some content which required that I sign up. However, for the most part, I don’t really open these emails any more. Yet every now and then something in one of these email marketing messages catches my eye … and I’m sure the same is true for you! Today we break down exactly what aspects of the message help return these inactive, ‘prodigal’ email marketing recipients back to the land of your web site promotion.

1. Identify who is ‘inactive’
You’ll need to get down and dirty with your email marketing analytics function – find out which recipients haven’t opened any of your last ten emails, or perhaps have opened one message but not clicked.

2. Segment these recipients
Try to find some common factors in these inactive recipients. Are they all female? Did they all sign up for a specific report on a topic that you no longer cover? Do they all come from a city where you have no physical stores?

3. Ask them why they don’t read their emails!
This is the only smart way to get data about what people think of your email marketing … anything else is nothing more than educated guesses. You can either try sending the survey out via email (with a REALLY catchy subject line!), or phoning the recipients, if you have that data.

4. Listen, and change
Listen to why people don’t read their emails. Never get defensive or make a single excuse … just listen. Then analyze what you can cost-effectively change to re-engage these people.

5. Test the results
Put those analytics that you used in step 1 back to work again. Find out whether your changes were enough to re-engage people. Try a couple of different strategies, including incentives and bonuses.

6. Adjust your techniques
Make adjustments again based on your test results. The most important thing to remember when you are assessing the effectiveness of an email marketing system, is that every single step counts. From the way you sign up your subscribers, to the design of your messages, the bonuses they include and the subject line that introduces them.

If you want to retain email marketing subscribers, you need to offer value. Find out how to create a million dollars worth of value to people, and you will become a millionaire!