After Tuesday’s post, you should know quite a bit about email marketing lists. But the list isn’t everything; you’re going to need copywriting, an offer, timing (when to send), and formatting.

How do you sort out all of that?  I have a free (yes, free) 10-part course that can help you do just that. It’s called the “Smart Email Marketing Course.”

No tests, no quizzes, and no term papers; just lots of great information that will help you stay out of the spam filter, get more people to open your emails, and boost the number of clicks you get.  Find out more here.

Email me privately for personal help.

Have you ever noticed that some emails get more sales than others? Sometimes you get high open rates, and lots of clicks. Other emails seem to fall flat.

What’s the difference? Can you “train” people to buy more?

Not train exactly, but what you can do is check, test, and measure what you’re sending the people on your list.

List Quality

The first thing to check is the quality of your list. Are you getting lots of bounces (undeliverable emails)? Check with your email service provider to see why.   The best email providers  have high deliverability rates.

Where did the names come from?  Did you buy a list from somebody? Exchange lists?  Is it a rented list?  Or a list you built yourself?  Your own subscribers should be more receptive to your offers, and the data should be “cleaner” (meaning fewer bad addresses).

spam filters

Run your messages through a spam checker before you send them.  You probably know that certain words can trip filters, but so can too many images.  People can’t respond to your email if they don’t get it.

relevance

Is the email (and the offers in it) relevant to your audience?  Are they still interested in what you have to say?  If a large portion of your list is ignoring you, send everyone an email asking them to confirm that they’re still interested.  Cutting your list can be scary, but a smaller, responsive list will earn more (and have a better ROI) than a larger, unfocused one.

Work on your subject lines

Subject lines are like headlines, they’ve got to grab attention.  Test them against each other.   The best subject lines will get more opens and more clicks.

Frequency

How often do you send emails?  Is it more (or less) often than promised?  A barrage of email can turn people off (unless it’s extremely relevant).  Sending fewer emails may get better results.

You’ll get better conversion, and earn more (much easier than trying to grow it).

Email me privately for personal help.

Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

We all hate spam.  But there are some lessons to be learned from the spam folder.

What are spammers good at?

Heart-pounding subject lines

They write subject lines that immediately grab your attention and elevate your pulse rate.   I recently got one purportedly from Paypal.  It said, “Receipt for your payment to Avira.”  I’d made no such payment.

It was a trick to get me to open the email, login, and give the spammer my login info. Which I didn’t do.

Relevant and immediate

It certainly got my attention though. It was relevant (I have a paypal accoount).  It had a cleverly disguised need for action. The idea was to look at it, think payment?! what payment?! and then run and check.

Authority

It looked trustworthy.  The “from” field said “Paypal.” The subject line was in the same format that the real Paypal uses.  People know and trust Paypal.

The truth is, you can learn quite a bit about marketing from a spammer.  Check out these seven marketing ideas from the spam folder.

Email me privately for personal help.