Webenso » Email Marketing

Email Marketing Selling Guideline

Kathy Alice — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:33:10 +0000

Just back from Loral Langemeier’s Alumni conference in San Diego. While not specifically focused on internet marketing, there were several internet marketing sessions there, including a panel that included Geoff Zimpfer from Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft if you are not aware of it, is the uber online customer management system. It’s a CRM (customer relationship management), EMail Marketing and eCommerce system all in one. It’s pricey, but a quite a nice system and surprisingly intuitive. Geoff said something interesting that I wrote down. I think we all can agree that with email marketing it needs to be a balance between providing value and selling. But what’s that balance? Geoff proposes a point system. For each email you send out that delivers value to your audience you get a point. An email that is a sales pitch, you deduct 7 points. So he’s recommending you strike a 7 to 1 balance here. I think he is right that a balance needs to be struck, however I’m not sure I agree with the math. Why would 5 to 1 be less effective? If you deliver great value and it in general is more frequent than the sales pitches, does the 7 to 1 ratio need to be rigorously adhered to? My suspicion is that he based the comment on statistics that Infusionsoft has available to it, so I don’t think we can dismiss the comment lightly. However like with everything, I think there are some nuances at play here. Consider the following factors:

How frequently do you email your list?
How “engaged” is your list? What’s the conversion rate when you do send out a sales pitch?
What sort of niche are you? Are you a small business with a loyal following or an internet marketer that put out an interesting video with an opt in?
What’s the price point of your products?

If email marketing to you is a monthly newsletter, then I don’t think you need to wait seven months to send out an email inviting your clients to come shop your sale. But in this scenario I would think several “sales pitch” emails a month might be too much. If you are an internet marketer that sells make money online products, I would think that a higher sales to value communications might be tolerated. It would be interesting to know whether internet marketers make up a significant portion of Infusionsoft’s database. What do you think the ratio should be?

Another reason not to use the Meta Refresh Tag

Kathy Alice — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:47:43 +0000

What can cause an intermittent problem with ESP (email service provider)? Would you believe use of the Meta Refresh Tag for the sender’s domain? A rather obscure issue that took a little digging to figure out.

I was looking at a problem with a broadcast email in an hosted Autoresponder service for my friend’s website, sometimes we got an error when we saved it, sometimes it didn’t. It was complaining about an “invalid email address”, by “it” I mean the spam checker (probably Spam Assassin) which was activated when we saved the broadcast email. I first thought it didn’t like one of the email addresses on the list, but that wasn’t it. I then looked at the settings for the email list. The email address was valid. And even if it wasn’t, why would it intermittently be a problem?

I finally decided to type in the domain name of the email address (which wasn’t her primary domain) into my browser, just for grins. And noticed that it did a redirect to her primary site with a meta refresh redirect. Meta refreshes are often used to refresh a page to update dynamic content, but can be also the lazy way to do a redirect. And why not? It’s just a simple line of HTML code (see example below). No need to update your webserver with a 301 redirect or muck around with DNS.

meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://www.webenso.com/"

Meta refresh redirects have been abused by spammers, so search engines treat them with a lot of suspicion (or just remove the site from their index), so actually they are not a very good idea. Furthermore, it turns out this meta refresh was causing our email system to choke as eliminating the meta refresh made the error go away. My theory is that the ESP checks to see if the domain is valid, and the meta refresh sometimes happened quickly enough for the ESP to determine a redirect was in play and treat it as an error.

Note: I don’t quite remember all the details, as I was was traveling and didn’t take notes, but I’m pretty sure the underlying error she was seeing was “addressee unknown” (EX_NOUSER error code 67) – although the autoresponder service reported something more english like.

How I started my email list

Kathy Alice — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:27:26 +0000

The money is in the list. With a list you can build on your relationship with your clients so they are more likely to buy from you and also let them know of exciting products and services. For me, I wanted to keep in touch with my community and build my reputation as a web marketer, so what better way to do that than to create an email list with a monthly newsletter? To get myself into action on this goal, I had an networking event coming up so I decided to hand out postcards with a website URL where a free report was available for download when visitors opted into my email list. To make this happen there was a number of components that I needed to build or configure to work together. The cost was just over $100 (mostly for the postcards). Use this blog post as a guide to build your your own! Step 1: Create Your Offer To encourage people to opt into my list, I wrote a free report called “Five Ways to Make Your Website Googlicious”. Most website owners do not know much about SEO (search engine optimization), so my goal was to open their eyes on how they could make their website more search engine friendly. Step 2: Create the postcard I used VistaPrint for creating the postcard. On their site (Advertising and Marketing –> Postcards), I found a template that I liked and added the text I needed. Your choices of templates are overwhelming but otherwise the process is straightforward. Cost: approx. $90 for 250 double sided glossy postcards Step 3: Squeeze Page For the squeeze page, I bought the domain www.yoursuccessfulwebsite.com and recruited a bored college student to create a squeeze page out of a template we got for $9. I’m not happy with the template code, but it does the job. Since I hosted the site in a subdirectory in a bluehost.com account I already had, I didn’t have to buy additional hosting. Finding Images On the postcard there is a picture of a person looking through a spyglass which aligned nicely with the messaging of the postcard which asked “Can Your Customers Find Your Website?”. To reinforce the messaging and as a memory jogger, I wanted to show a similar image on the website. I found one in istockphoto.com for a few dollars. Image Tweaks for the non Graphically Inclined While everything looked great on a PC, I arrived at the seminar with my Mac laptop and found that that the header of the website was not displaying properly! For the just in time simple or last minute tweaks to images on my Macbook Pro I used Paintbrush which is a free download. Step 4: Autoresponder / Email System Since I wanted a flexible autoresponder for multiple uses, I created an account at aweber. aweber is $19 a month for 500 contacts. If you just want to just email a newsletter to a list, you might consider icontact which is cheaper. Both will generate web form code that you can copy and paste into your squeeze page for your opt-in box. Comments

Based on other freebies on the web and feedback I’ve received, I overdid it on the free report. In its current format, it’s 22 pages long and provides a lot of value. I probably should charge for it, however for now I’m going to keep it as free – you can get it at www.yoursuccessfulwebsite.com
Despite the lure of getting my website done for free, I might try a service like elance next time. Or since I am a do-it-myself type of person, find a better template.
I got lots of positive comments on the postcard. It definitely stood out, both in its size and coloring, compared to the business cards that most were handing out.
However, I did not get tremendous uptake on my free offer, about 7%, it would have been more lucrative to have a packaged service or product to sell and close people on the spot, however since I currently am not selling either, I’m happy with the results so far.
Be prepared to spend some time configuring aweber (or whichever ESP – email service provider you choose). There are multiple steps in opting into a list and you have to think about the experience for your visitor for each step. For example, where should your visitor be sent to after they have typed in their email address and name? What should you say in your welcome message when they join?
This one should be obvious, but I will say it again, test your websites in different browsers and both on a Mac and PC. Not only did the header look different on a Mac, but the opt-in box code from aweber looked different in IE (internet explorer) rather than firefox – requiring another fix.

I hope this overview helps you put together your own email list and opt-in web form. Good Luck!

Will Facebook replace Email Marketing?

Kathy Alice — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 02:06:02 +0000

With the recent announcement that Facebook’s weekly traffic has surpassed google’s, Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with. Well you already knew that, but really, it’s just not going away. The world’s largest walled garden does have a way for you to show your public face. Facebook fan pages have generated a ton of interest from businesses who want to use them for branding and customer engagement. Sometimes companies even partner with fans who have created a page as Coca-Cola recently did with coke lovers Dusty and Michael. With a fan page you can virally get your message out there. When someone becomes a fan of your page, their network knows. With fan pages you can post updates and advertise events. So is the Facebook fan page a replacement for email marketing? One development to watch, is that Facebook plans to issue 400 million email addresses to Facebook users. The email addresses would use your vanity Facebook name as an username, so that you would have a @facebook.com email address. So is email marketing dead? Hard to say. But a system that provides a rich interaction with your clients via both fan page and soon via their email systems, could be very compelling, especially since it is all free!

GetResponse vs. AWeber – initial thoughts

Kathy Alice — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:32:41 +0000

A month ago I googled for GetResponse and AWeber product reviews. As the two top leading Autoresponders in the industry, I found that they both had fans and overall pretty decent reviews. The differentiation that initially jumped out at me, is that AWeber had slightly better deliverability stats and GetResponse was slightly cheaper. For 500 contacts, GetResponse will charge you $18 a month, AWeber $19. Both offer unlimited lists and autoresponders, detailed statistics and several types of opt in forms. One thing that GetResponse offers that AWeber does not is surveys. Users gave AWeber higher marks for it’s reports. Other than that they appeared to be comparable. However there is nothing like comparing the two for yourself. Recently, I got the chance to simultaneously spend time with both and compare them side by side. Here’s my impressions of the initial use of both products. AWeber is more intuitive. For the initial user, AWeber has a handy wizard that steps you through the initial creation of your list, customizing the initial emails and generating the web form. In GetResponse, where lists are called campaigns, the setup was a little less intuitive, there isn’t that handy step by step wizard. For example, I had a lot of trouble locating the confirmation email (what is sent to your contacts to confirm they want to be on your list) to customize it. I wouldn’t have thought that it would be located under “languages”. Both have a variety of choices of confirmation email message subjects that allow limited customization. AWeber allows further customization of the subject with manual review. GetResponse does not. Both allow customization of the template, which is good. I recently worked with another autoresponder that did not, which seemed unnecessarily limiting (with imports I consider being able to personalize the confirmation email an important way to remind the contact how you know them). Regarding the always controversial topic of enforcing double opt-in (or confirmation), both allow you to turn off confirmation if you know where to look. GetResponse, in this cases, is a a little more intuitive and flexible (you can find this under contact settings), you can selectively turn it off for just email subscriptions for example. However in my account turning it off for import subscribers was greyed out, I guess they have had too much trouble with purchased lists. With AWeber the User Interface (menu option: “Confirmed opt-in”) infers you can only turn it off for Web Form Opt-Ins, however I did not confirm this. Overall both AWeber and GetResponse are decent products and you can’t go significantly wrong with either one.

Don’t spam your list

Kathy Alice — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:58:38 +0000

Like many of you, I belong to a few business networking and education groups. They are a valuable source of potential leads, joint venture partnerships and even great ideas. So imagine my disappointment when one of the group’s members started spamming us with emails that was marketing speakers and websites with obvious affiliate links.

His facebook friend request? That got the “ignore” click. His emails? The delete button. His potential to provide a service to me? Nonexistent. As a marketer he should really know better. With just a little education and use of the right tools, you can avoid following in his footsteps. As soon as you start using email to talk about your business and your services and products you need to avoid the “spammer” trap.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

In 2003, President Bush signed into law the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. I think it is helpful to know what CAN-SPAM stands for: “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing”. The key is “Non-Solicited”. Just like you may not like uninvited salesman at your front door selling you vacuum cleaners, un-solicited marketing by email has the same taint to it …. and it’s illegal to boot. While covering the CAN-SPAM Act in it’s entirety is beyond the scope of this article, here are the two things you need to know.

You must give the receiver of your email a way to tell you they don’t want any more emails from you. This is calling “opting out” and usually done by providing an “unsubscribe” link.
You must honor the removal request within 10 days according the Act(but really it needs to happen a lot sooner than that).

Many privacy activists felt the CAN-SPAM Act was ineffectual and didn’t go far enough. Some went so far to call it the “I can spam Act”. For these reasons the ESPs (more on what that is in a moment) that legitimate businesses use set a higher standard. The removals happen quickly, usually within 24 hours. And many businesses take advantage of the “double opt-in” feature and send invitations for you join their list before even one marketing email is sent. That perfect client you met at last week’s business event may need a reminder to remember you, and an invitation to continue the conversation by joining your list is a graceful way to keep you in the forefront of their mind.

What are ESPs?

ESPs are email service providers. There are a number of excellent ones on the market, and for a monthly fee they will store your contact list, send the emails for you, help you build in your opt-in box or link, and handle all the details of email marketing, such as complying with the CAN-SPAM Act by: 1) automatically generating the unsubscribe link in each email you send through their tools and then 2) doing the right thing when someone clicks on it. Some of the ESPs even enforce the “double opt-in” feature, where any existing list of contacts you upload into their system will be sent an email asking permission to be placed in their system. While it can be painful to lose those contacts that don’t respond, your resulting list will be of higher quality. If you remember one thing from this article, it is that you want to do Permission based email marketing. You always want to have a user’s permission before sending them an email. If that business network member had gone through a few extra steps to have an unsubscribe link in his email, I would have thought so much higher of him. And maybe I would have even clicked on one of his links, earning him a commission.

How to increase Your Opt-in Lists Sales Conversion Rate

Guest Author — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:48:16 +0000

You might know by now building your own email list is very important to the success of your online business. The most common strategy is making visitors to sign up your mailing list is offering them some free report or eBook or free software. Otherwise you can offer them some free email lessons. Using some of the available website traffic software in the market you can make compelling opt-in page. Here we will discuss how we can send the email lessons in an alternate way and more efficently sell your product. What you should do is upload the lessons in your website or blog. Send the list a brief introduction of the lesson and the link to your web page. At the end of each lesson briefly explain a product which is related to that particular topic and give your affiliate link and ask them to click. Here you can offer them your special bonus. But make sure you are not overselling to them. If your list feels that you are trying to sell them, next time they won’t click on your link. So more lessons and less marketing. Once they are your loyal readers and they know you are promoting quality products, and you give better bonuses, they will look for you whenever they heard of a new product launch. Another advantage of this method is you will have regular visitors to your site and blog. Once they used to your site, they don’t feel you are hard selling, even if you are doing that. This method will increase content in your blog or site also. You know that search engines will like that. So you are getting some advantage in SEO point of view also. Once you mix with your targeted keywords in your Lesson heading as well as in contents, it will give you magical effect on search engine ranking. Many super internet marketers are doing this method effectively. You check yourself how many emails you are getting every day with a brief introduction or news which will raise your full attention to click the link to read full story. That is the proof of the effectiveness of this strategy. The success of this method depends on how effectively you write your emails. You should write in such a way that, the reader gets your attention to click the website link. The subject of the mail can be even negative, eg., ‘Don’t make this mistake!’ , something like that. And in the content you can explain the problem and a very brief solution and invite to read full story at your site. When they are fully linked to the problem, there is a more chance that they buy the product which will solve their problem. So the sales conversion also will be high for this method. This method can be used for your other product lauch. This is a practical solution for marketers who complain their list don’t buy. To use this strategy you first need a list. You can start making list by article writing or some paid method and start capturing their details using some list building software available in the market. You should always give importance to this, since this will make your business a success in long term. Wishing you success in your online business Promotion. Read how to get website traffic.

Email Marketing Campaigns, And Strategy

Guest Author — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:30:55 +0000

4 Ways To Get Your Opt In Subscribers To Trust You Quickly While the rest of the world have developed many barriers and protections to keep their e-mail accounts spam-free, there are also those that subscribe to mails that promotes their products, services and their site. email marketing software, This is mainly because these subscribes wants to know more about what these sites are offering and can be beneficial for them. They expect to get be kept posted on what they are interested in and what are new in the market or field they have chosen. Businesses would be so lucky to have these kinds of customers; the basic element needed to get these types of people is trust. When your customers trust you they will reward you with their loyalty. Many internet users have gone to great lengths in protecting their email accounts from spam mail. Some free-mail internet providers and internet service providers offer spam protection while there are also some internet based companies that screen your mails for you. More email marketing solution,. With an opt-in mail list, the mails you send containing your promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and marketingintegrated marketing, media will go through. Your intended recipient will be able to read and view what you have sent making it a successful transfer of information. To be able to be allowed to do so, you will need permission from your recipient, to get this permission; you need to be able to get their trust. With the great lack of disregard for privacy in the internet, getting the trust of an internet user you don’t personally know is a big achievement. To build a good opt-in list you need people to trust you, for a faster and quicker build up, you need to get your opt-in subscribers to trust you quickly. The faster you build your opt-in list the faster word about your site and company gets to be spread. The bigger the scope of your opt-in list the more traffic you get spelling more profits. Its easy math if you thin about it. Getting the numbers is not that simple though, or maybe it is? ? Getting the trust of your clientele shouldn’t be so hard especially if you do have a legitimate business. Getting your customers trust should be based upon your expertise. People rely on other people who know what they are talking about. Garner all the knowledge and information about your business. Ell, frankly if you decide to go into a business most probably you have an interest in it. Like how many basketball payers become coaches, you don’t really venture into something you don’t have any interest in. More web copywriting,. ? Show your clients that you know what you are talking about. Provide them with helpful hints and guidelines that pertain to what you are selling. Talk about how to install a roof if you’re into hardware products or provide articles on insurance settlements if you’re a settlement lawyer. You don’t have to be a big corporation to make use of an opt-in list. If your customers see you as someone who knows what he is doing and saying, they will trust you quickly. ? Be true to your customers, if you want to hype up your products and services, provide guarantees. The more satisfied customers you get, the bigger probability there is that they will recommend you. Generally, people will trust someone they know, when that someone recommends you then you’re a shoo-in. They will go to your site and check it for themselves and be given a chance to experience what the other shave experienced from you, so make sure to be consistent in the service you provide. ? Another tip in getting a customer to trust you quickly is to provide them an escape hatch. Show them that you are not there to trap them. Keep a clean list that would enable them to unsubscribe anytime they want. Elaborate your web form by providing informationemail marketing, on how to unsubscribe from the list. Guarantee them that they can let go of the service when ever they want to. Many are wary that they may be stuck for life and would have to abandon their email accounts when they get pestered with spam. Remember that when you get the trust of your clients don’t lose that trust. Because if you do anything with their email More email marketing campaign, addresses like sell them or give them out, you will lose many members of your list as ell as potential members. The true quickest way to gain the trust of your subscribers is when you are recommended by someone they trust.