Three Steps to Effective Email Marketing

If you're new to email marketing, you're probably searching for a strategy for converting prospects to customers via email. There are three important steps to follow if you want to build your email list while increasing your online sales.

Maintain a Clean List

You may have heard online marketers bragging about their huge email lists. They're quick to tell you they have hundreds of thousands of people receiving their messages every week.

But how many of the people they're sending those messages to actually open them and visit their websites? For that matter, how many of the email addresses on their lists are even current or deliverable?

In our experience, there are still some online marketers who focus on the size, rather than the quality, of their email lists. They may be sending out hundreds of thousands of messages every month, but a large percentage of those are undeliverable.

That's a shame, because great tools are available that allow email recipients to update their information easily. Email handling applications offer this feature as well as a simple way for subscribers to unsubscribe.

Requiring people who wish to receive your messages to opt-in is also one of the best ways to ensure a clean list. This feature keeps your list realistic and your deliverability percentage high.

In addition, your email application (or email marketing specialists) should report statistics on deliverability so you can investigate potential issues with specific Internet service providers.

The final thing you should know about keeping your list clean is that, by sending too many messages in a short time, you run the risk of being ignored. Stay in touch regularly with your list, by all means, but overwhelming their inboxes isn't necessarily the way to more sales.

Write Concise, Powerful Copy

Think of the marketing messages you've received by email in the past twenty-four hours. What made you open the ones you decided to read? The first ones you opened were probably from companies whose products you enjoy buying (trust has already been established).

If they were from unknown firms, you may have opened their messages out of curiosity. That interest was probably sparked by an enticing subject line. That's crucial in email marketing: Getting Their Attention Quickly.

Does that mean writing something dishonest or misleading? Absolutely not! All that will guarantee is that when you contact them again, your message will get marked as "Spam".

What you're aiming for is a quick, interesting snapshot of what's inside. Which subject line is more interesting, "Pots on Sale" or "Cut Your Cooking Time in Half!"?

Short subject lines that capture the imagination are an essential. If you aren't comfortable with copywriting, find an Internet marketing service to help you with your targeted email marketing campaigns.

The next absolute must, once your message has been opened, is that the reader learns quickly what you want them to know. If they have to read twenty paragraphs to find what you're selling, there's not much chance they'll click through to your website.

Current statistics on online marketing say that people spend eight seconds deciding whether to read an email or webpage. That means if your first two paragraphs aren't interesting, goodbye reader!

Decide what you want your readers to know, and then outline the absolute essentials. Have your copywriter or marketing service create concise, powerful copy for your email messages. If you want to gain customers (and sales!) through email marketing, this is one place where less is more.

Automate Sales, Delivery and Follow-Up

While these three areas don't have to do precisely with email messages, they have a lot to do with whether your new customer opens your next one.

If you've ever purchased something online after opening an email, only to have problems receiving the product, you understand what this means. Few things can turn a customer off instantly more than a messy sales and delivery process.

A strong email marketing campaign should always be built around a strong sales system. The best way to guarantee customer satisfaction is to automate your sales, delivery and follow-up. The best systems include email messages that tell the customer what to expect next.

Let's start with an example of what not to do: A sales training company develops a great set of audio downloads. They create an autoresponder series that contacts their email list every two days for two weeks.

Here's where things go wrong; orders begin to flood into their website, but the process for downloading the audios is clumsy. A thank you page with a download link is supposed to appear as soon as the order is completed.

Unfortunately, not all browsers allow the pop-up page, and they didn't create a follow-up email with a download link. In fact, their customers aren't sure of anything except that their credit cards were charged. Many customers are unable to download the product and the complaints start rolling in.

Wouldn't it have been easier if they'd followed up a great email marketing campaign with an equally good sales process? Again, most customers who experience problems with a sale won't bother to open your messages again. What's the take-away? Create and test your sales process before you ever send the first email.

Following these three basic rules for successful email marketing will go a long way to building your online presence. Take care of your list, keep your copy clean and automate your sales process. That's the road to great online sales.

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