Email Marketing

What you should know about email messaging

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003: This is the Federal law enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. This law became effective on January 1, 2004. The government revised the law in 2008 to add additional items that were not covered in the original. Law applies to any entity that sent commercial messages. All religious, national security and political messages are exempt from the law. Law set rules for commercial email, set requirements for commercial messages, establish recipient right to stop emails and establish penalties. Here is what the law requires:

• Header information on your message should be accurate. Use correct “TO”, “FROM” and “SUBJECT” information.
• Clearly state that the message is an advertisement.
• Give your location.
• Show how to opt out and honor all requests for opts out.
• Monitor your site traffic.

Each separate violation of the law is subject to penalties. A penalty of up to $16,000 can be imposed and more than one person including the company can be held liable for the violation.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued separate rules based on the act. An example is any sexually oriented messages do require a warning, “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT”, at the beginning of such material.

Effective email marketing techniques

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of direct marking, especially for online businesses. Here are some tips on how to successfully carry out an email marketing campaign.

Get permission

Have customers sign in to avoid CAN-SPAM penalties. Sign in can be done on the website. If there are complaints of spam generating from your site you risk being blacklisted by the ISP’s.

Decide on the customer base you are targeting

Once this is decided on you can create an e mail to target the group. Include a subscriber link in the emails you send so that people who are not signed in and reading it can subscribe. Encourage your existing clients to sign up their friends.
Be persistent

Make sure you stay in touch with your clients at least once a month in order to build up a relationship. The first email should be an introductory one where the customer sings up and gives permission for further communication, the second email should explain the benefits such as discounts, coupon’s and information you will make available and from the third letter you should deliver.

Design the email

Use flat text with links to your website as graphics, animations and logos can be blocked.

Why We Secretly Hate Your Emails (And What You Can Do About It)

Ok, I admit it…I’ve been a militant emailer for years. Whether it was requiring updates from employees, discussing strategy with partners, ordering from vendors, etc. I considered my emails as THE way to communicate and get things done, especially when working remotely. I’d get frustrated when emails were ignored or not comprehended and couldn’t understand why other professionals would take them so lightly. Yes, I’d read Tim Ferriss’s 4HWW and knew that some people were trying to cut back on their email consumption, limiting their time responding/sending emails, etc…but they shouldn’t do that to ME, I thought. What I didn’t realize before starting AdSenseFlippers.com was that some people loathed getting emails from me and their poor response rate was a secret rebellion in protest. Others have been writing about this as well, including such well-known bloggers as Seth Godin and Chris Anderson giving us email checklists and setting out to create an email charter

Read the rest here: 
Why We Secretly Hate Your Emails (And What You Can Do About It)

Send a Better Message to Your Opt-In List

Selling products online requires many talents. The power of persuasion is one of them. What you tell your potential customers should, at least, make them want to check out the product themselves. Rather than take some review and write a promo message based on that, try to give it a personal touch.

Buy the product that you are reviewing. Experience it for yourself so that you can give an accurate description of what it is like. You will be able to tell your followers of the good and bad points from a firsthand perspective, which will be appreciated by them. Even though you will have to spend some money and time initially, the money you earn later through the volume of sales will make it negligible.

If you are good at negotiating, then you may be able get the product free. Talk about a joint venture with the person who created the product. Explain to them about your opt-in list and they will definitely be interested in getting their product promoted. All you have to do is to work out the percentage that you will get from each sale and carry on from there.

While you are testing the product, try to record the process on video. By sending the video or a link to the video on your mailer, you will not only gain credibility but you will also help the people on your opt-in list.

As you can see, by taking a few simple steps you can improve the power of the message you are sending out. By sending a compelling message you will increase the lure to buy. When that lure proves to be irresistible, your sales figures will improve drastically.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing Management

It is a common misconception that the days of email marketing campaigns are over. However, reality is that email marketing is bigger than ever and if done right you can easily reap the benefits. So here are 7 things that you should never do when creating and managing your email marketing campaigns.

1. Failing test your design in multiple email clients – There are many email clients available from open source applications to enterprise solutions. Therefore in order to make maximum use of your emails, you should test them in as many of these applications as possible.

2. Failing to spam check your email content – most email servers today are equipped with the capability of spam checking the emails they receive. Most messages with a high number of images or HTML content tend to rate higher towards being spam. So always check your content before sending it out.

3. Putting hurdles in the way of unsubscribing – it is a legal requirement to allow your recipients to opt out of receiving your emails and it must be an easy process. However, if you are worried about losing readership you could give your recipients options like subscribing to a lesser frequent newsletter, change the email address to receive your emails or offer them the ability to add your blog or newsfeed as an RSS feed.

4. Neglecting to maintain a list of invalid addresses – you should always know how many addresses are invalid and cleanup your lists often in order to ensure that everyone on your lists receives your emails.

5. Becoming complacent – Email newsletters should be sent out often and in regular intervals. Sometimes you may not have been able to create fresh new content due to several reasons. However you should make it a point to stick to a schedule, if not recipients will lose interest

6. Content that is not relevant to what the user signed up for – this is a big turn off for the recipients. They will lose interest and unsubscribe quickly if you send content that they are not interested in.

7. Emailing users without their permission – this will guarantee that the recipient will either unsubscribe or report you as spam. Therefore keep in mind to email only users who wish to receive your emails.

3 Most Important Email Marketing Statistics

Are you using email marketing to reach more customers? If you are here are three most important statistics that you need to look at on each of your campaigns.

1. Open Rate – this is the number of people who opened the email you sent. Most email marketing programs will provide you with this statistic as a number or a percentage of the emails that you sent. One thing to remember is that this number is not extremely accurate. It should be considered as a guideline and for comparison between campaigns. The reasons are that the tracking is most often done using a small script embedded in your email message. Anyone who has turned off scripts or is opening your email offline would not be included. It is also important to note that opening the email does not mean reading the email.

2. Click Through Rate (CTR) – This is probably the most important statistic of any email campaign. The CTR of your email campaign indicates how many people clicked a particular link in your email. This means they opened it and read it and clicked the link to arrive at your website. This is also a great measurement tool to evaluate different call-to-action methods you employ. The higher the CTR the more effective your call-to-action is.

3. Conversion Rate – This is the number of people who clicked the link on your email, came to your website and purchased the product or service. The conversion rate is generally a low number and anything above 2% is considered a good conversion rate. This is a great way to evaluate the success of your email campaign. However, if your email and visitor tracking systems are not integrated you will have to calculate this on your own. The best way to do this is to include a unique identifier in the links on your email and then track how many visitors who came to that link purchased your product or service.

These are the 3 most important elements of your email marketing program. Most email marketing tools will provide you with lots more information, but with a basic understanding of these three statistics you will be able to compare the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Understanding Email Marketing Plans

Email marketing is a recent technique and for most marketers email marketing means spam. On the contrary, if done right, email marketing can be an extremely useful tool for the Internet marketer, spreading the word about his organization, telling people about promotions and keeping people informed about new things that are happening with his company.

Sending out mass emails to thousands or hundreds of thousands of recipients is great way to get started. There are many legitimate websites that offer email marketing services for a small fee. These tools allow use to create email lists, create the emails and send it out to specific list. Under spam rules these tools append a small un-subscribe link below your email. Users who un-subscribe cannot be added to the list ever again. Thus protecting the user and you. Enewsletters are also becoming popular amongst Internet marketers. Enewsletters are used to inform, more often a group who have opted to receive these emails about up-coming events, new products or promotions. If you are serious about starting an Enews campaign, you may also want to think about hiring a professional graphics artist and a professional writer. If you are on a very tight budget you may skip the graphics artist but having a professional writer is a must. No one wants to read copy that does not flow or isn’t grammatically correct. If you are going to enter the field of email marketing, make sure you keep it professional and send out your emails mainly to customers who are interested in your business. This will keep the number of people who report your email as spam to a minimum.

Building Your Own Email Lists

Email marketing is one of the fastest ways to get your information out to potential buyers. Whether it is for a promotional product or service, email is the way to go. When you decide to start a newsletter, ezine or other business publication, the very first step is to build a list of people who may be interested in what you have to offer.

You can add an opt-in form on your blog or website for your readers to sign up to receive your newsletter or ezine. A simple opt-in form will contain a place for the persons name and their email address. Every time someone sign up on your site, you have names and email addresses of potential customers to begin building your own email lists with. This list will continue to grow as more and more people sign up.

What steps to take when building your own email lists?

Put an opt-in form on your website or blog.
Save the names and email addresses of each person in a text file and name the file. Use this as your list when ready to publish your newsletter. When sending out your publication, use the names and addresses on the list as a recipient for a mass mailing.

By building your own email lists you have a captive audience just waiting to hear everything you have to say. And the best of all is that:

1. You know that the person is interested in your offer.
2. You know you have their permission to send them information about your product. (No Spam issues).
3. And if you give your customers a good value for their money they will most likely buy from you again.