Fix Your Broken Marketing » Email Marketing

What Every Email Marketer Should Know

Jodi — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:36:33 +0000

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.

Get more business now. Click here for your free ebook.

Tuesday Travels: Secrets of Email Marketing Lists

Jodi — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:09:36 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

“The money is in the list.”

You’ve probably read that a lot. I know I’ve said it a lot. It means that the list you rent (or build) is the most important part of your marketing. A bad list means bad results (you’ll never make money trying to sell parrot food to cat owners).

Here are some tips on email list building and marketing.

Start Your Email Newsletter Without an Opt-In List- what if you don’t have a list? or you’re just starting out? then what?

How Big Should Your Mailing List Be? – how many people do you need? is bigger always better?

The Truth About Buying Email Lists – there are plenty of lists for sale and for rent; should you use them?

The $100 Marketing Campaign That Packed the Room – you don’t need a big budget (or a big list) to get great results

Get more business now. Click here for your free ebook.

How to Increase Your Email Conversion Rates

Jodi — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:14:18 +0000

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).

Get more business now. Click here for your free ebook.

Tuesday Travels: Do You Know These Email Marketing Secrets?

Jodi — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:59:16 +0000

Getting visitors to your site is great, but if you want them to come back, and if you want them to buy something from you, you’ll need a way to reach them directly.

One great way to do that is with email. Done right, it’s building an asset; done wrong it’s a disaster. Here’s how to do it right.

Email Writing Tips From Spammers

Start Your Email Newsletter Without an Opt-in List

Secrets of Successful Email Newsletters

For more email tips, sign up for my free e-course: Email Marketing the Smart Way

Get more business now. Click here for your free ebook.

Email Writing Tips from Spammers

Jodi — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:56:37 +0000

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.

Get more business now. Click here for your free ebook.