What kind of success rate are you getting with your email marketing at the moment?

Pretty good or could do better?

Your electronic marketing strategy should be constantly evolving – test, test and test again until you create the optimum format and content strategy for your audience.

Just in case you’re looking for inspiration to inject some new life into your efforts, here are a few tips that might just help you improve your stats.

1. Mobile

More and more people are reading their emails from mobile devices so you must find out how your email looks.

Not only that but you have to make sure the recipient opens it on their phone so think about how you work out whether an email’s worth opening or not. You probably look at the sender’s name first and then the subject line. If it looks interesting you’ll open it, it not it gets consigned to the bin.

A great way of boosting your email’s chances of being opened is to add a line of text above your header – something like this:

Now when your email is received the recipient will see who it’s from, the subject line and the added text which reads Email marketing secrets revealed.

2. Subject line

This is the make or break. It has to be intriguing, promise your reader a great offer or breaking news – something that’s going to benefit them in some way.

But a strong subject line and a weak email body will see their enthusiasm wane and your email deleted. And if they’re disappointed by one they’re unlikely to open any more and may even unsubscribe.

The moral is, make sure you deliver what your subject line offers.

3. Long or short?

Many people argue that long copy always out performs short copy. But when it comes to an email, no one wants to be reading War and Peace.

The beauty of email means you can offer a tempting nugget of information and then add a link that will take the reader to a full article which is a great way of providing loads of information without boring the pants off everyone.

4. What next?

Once you’ve got them to open your email and read it…what next?

If you don’t have a strong call to action asking them to do something you’ve lost a great opportunity.

5. Check, check and re-check

Proofreading your email and checking all the links work before sending is vital.

Sending something out that’s full or errors and broken links won’t do you or your reputation any good. If you can, get someone else to check it for you before hitting send because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

These 5 simple tips will help you give your email marketing a boost in the arm.

Do you have any other tricks you use? Leave a comment and share your success stories (or horror stories).

If you’re an online marketer you need traffic – and a lot of it.

Why?

Because your traffic is your customers and more customers means more money.

How do you actually get more traffic though? And, once you’ve started to get it, how do you convince them to buy from you?

There are various things you can do to encourage more people to your website and make it more visible in the search engine rankings. And no, that doesn’t mean plastering it in bright colours with loads of flashing images.

Here are 4 ways to help boost your traffic. Remember though, gaining more traffic isn’t going to happen over night. It is something that’s going to require commitment on your part.

1. Keywords

This is hardly going to be a surprise as keywords are vital when it comes to online marketing.

You are the person who knows your business best and your market. As such, you should have a fair idea of what they are likely to be searching for when they need your products or services. So by using those keywords, you’ll attract more of your target market.

Of course that doesn’t mean stuffing them in your web copy left right and centre. You must incorporate them sensitively within your SEO website content, articles and blogs. Oh yes, keywords aren’t just for your web copy. Everything you write and publish on the web has the potential to drive traffic so make sure you optimise all your opportunities.

The main thing to remember is to ensure your choice of keywords is correct and relevant to what you do. After all, loads of traffic is all well and good but not very useful if they are not looking for what you offer.

2. Adding video

Have you noticed how many companies are now using video marketing?

More and more people are watching videos online so it makes sense to give them what they want by adding one to your website or setting up your own YouTube channel (which can be linked to your website).

What should your video be on?

Well, you can make short videos that showcase your products, act as interactive ‘how to’ guides, case studies and even video testimonials. The possibilities are endless.

3. Picture galleries

When you walk into a physical shop you have the advantage of being able to see what you’re going to buy, you can touch it and even try it out.

But online marketing doesn’t allow you to do that – well, other than see it.

No one likes to buy something without seeing it first so make sure your website offers high quality images of your products (coupled with detailed descriptions) so they know exactly what they’ll be getting.

4. Regular contact with customers

Keeping in touch with your customers will open up sales opportunities and allow you to add value by giving advice and tips.

Whether you do that through newsletters or email marketing it gives you the ability to maintain regular contact with your customers and prospective customers.

These 4 ideas are simple to instigate but very effective and can make a huge difference to your traffic.

Your website needs traffic if it’s going to be effective. If you’ve invested heavily in your online presence it makes sense to ensure people see it.

But it not only has to attract visitors, it also has to convert them into buying customers. You can read more about conversion here.

Regular communication with  your customers is a great way to keep them informed and to keep your name firmly etched in their minds.

One of the most effective ways of doing this is through email marketing. 

New subscribers will eagerly await your first email to land in their inbox. They will probably continue to welcome them until, one day, the honeymoon period is over.

You will begin to realise your emails aren’t being opened as often (or at all); your messages are now unloved, unopened and unwanted.

What do you do?

Panic?

Send flowers?

It’s time to take action.

Fighting email marketing list fatigue

1. Frequency

Are you still sending the same number of emails? When your subscribers opted-in, you would have made it clear how often they would hear from you. If you’re sending more it could be time to scale back a bit.

2. Stale content

Are you starting to cover the same old stuff?

Perhaps the layout and content is becoming too predictable? If so it’s time to inject some life into them.

3. Incoming!

Bombarding your customers with news and new offers will get wearing. If you have new products to announce stagger your emails so they don’t receive 4 or 5 from you within one month.

4. Subject line

These are never easy to write and although you may have been buzzing with great ideas initially there’s a chance they’re becoming mundane and ineffective. 

People will only open an email if the subject line catches their attention so perhaps it’s time to have a rethink about your subject line approach (or call in a copywriter to help you generate fresh and appealing content).

5. No one’s home

Email addresses change so if one of your recipients hasn’t engaged with your mailings (i.e. they haven’t opened it) for 6 months or more, send out a ‘reengagement’ email. This would be an email that asks them to take an action if they want to remain on your list.

If you don’t hear anything it’s safe to say that either:

• The email address is no longer active, or
• They no longer want to receive your emails

So it may be time to remove them from your list.

6. Spam

Spam filters may be stopping your emails getting through so make sure you test them.

To make sure your email marketing continues to be successful, regular list maintenance is essential to ensure that:

• Your readers are happy with their content
• All email addresses are active
• You are avoiding spam triggers
• Your subject lines are being effective

Email marketing is an excellent way to your message out to potentially thousands of people instantly and relatively cheaply.

But if you don’t do it right your emails will simply be deleted and remain unopened. So successful email marketing doesn’t start when you begin to compose your email copy, it starts when you begin to devise your strategy.

You do have a strategy – right?

Step 1 – Back to basics

At this point in the process you’ve made the decision to start an email marketing campaign. Great, so what’s next?

Well, before you start writing there are a few things you need to think about.

• What’s your offer?—not just the product you’re selling but also the emotional aspect your product – think about how it will make your readers feel?
• Who are you selling to?—who’s going to buy your product? What’s important to them?
• The timing of your offer—are there any trends in the market you can tie into?
• What do you want your reader to do?—your call to action; do you want them to email, call, complete online order form…

Step 2 – Your content

The first decision is do you write it yourself or do you bring in a professional copywriter. Remember it is essential that the email is about what you can do for them rather than being about your company.

But more than just what your email says, you must also think about how it will look. It must look inviting if you want the recipient to take the time to read it. And we’re talking here not just about the design but also layout, font, images etc.

If you want your email to have a big impact you have to look at the whole package, including:

• Font – a sans-serif font such as Arial or Verdana is easier to read than some of the other fonts available. It’s a small detail but it will have a bearing on whether your message is read or deleted. 
• Read aloud – this one is true for all content creation. The best way to ensure your message is clear, unambiguous and engaging is to read it aloud. This will highlight whether the rhythm is wrong, whether there are any repetitions or if it sounds stilted. 
• Pruning – most people toss in unnecessary words when writing. There’s nothing wrong with that but it does mean reading through and pruning is essential to tighten your copy. 
• Rhetoric – extra power can be injected into your email by using rhetorical techniques. The incorporation of three part list add punch and rhythm – remember Tony Blair’s      “…education education, education”?
• Moving forwards – every word has to count in your email so make sure your reader is carried through the text by using words such as ‘remember’, ‘but’, ‘consider’, ‘for example’.
• Variety – solid text is very unattractive so make sure you vary your paragraph lengths (but keeping them short), add sub headings, bulleted lists and sentence fragments to keep your reader on their toes. 
• Benefits – all marketing copy should be heavily benefits led and email marketing is no different. But make sure it is the benefits you talk about (i.e. what it will mean/do for your customer) and not just the features. 
• Second person – creating rapport is essential if you want your email to resonate with the reader. Writing it in the second person (i.e. you and your) will help make an emotional connection needed to get the reader on your side and to take action.
• Keep it short – no one wants to waste their time reading a mammoth email. Keep your communication short. If you want to impart a lot of information use your email to link out to another web page (which will also encourage people to visit your website) so if they want to read more they can.

Because we write emails every day many people are fooled into believing email marketing is simple. All they have to do is through a few paragraphs together and Bob’s your uncle.  But it’s rarely that straight forward.

You have to remember that although the recipient has opted in to receive your emails, they will receive hundreds a day. That’s a very crowded inbox that your email has to survive. By creating a strong subject line to encourage your reader to open your email and killer content, you will maximise your email’s chances of survival.

Give these tips and try and see how you get on.

Do you use any other techniques when composing your emails? If so leave a comment and share them with us. 

Your list is one of the most vital parts of your email marketing campaign.It doesn’t matter how great your offer or sales message is, if you don’t send it to the right people, it won’t work.

The quick option is to buy in a list but how can you be sure it is the right audience for your offer? Surely the best way to optimise your campaign’s chances is to use a home-grown list that you’ve developed over time from an interested audience.

So how do you get started?

Well it won’t be a quick process. Building your own quality list will take time. It will involve gathering email addresses from customers which means you have to maximise your opportunities to capture them.

You could:

• Have a sign-up box on every page of your website so your visitors can’t miss it
• Provide a free giveaway that’s of value to capture their email address
• Include a sing-up link in your email signature
• Promote your newsletter on your print materials too. Once  they’ve signed up for your newsletter you have their details to send other offer to as well
• If you use direct mail, send an offer that will drive them to a landing page that requires an email address to access the deal
• Promote your giveaways through social media (such as Facebook or Twitter) to widen your audience
• If you work regularly with other companies see if they would be willing to promote your newsletter within theirs

These ideas are easy to implement and in time will lead to the creation of a high quality in-house marketing list to which you can make offers and provide news and advice to constantly strengthen your customer relationships.

As I mentioned earlier, it will take time to grow your list but it is worth it as the results from your marketing campaigns will be much better than if you simply bought in a list.

Give it a go and see how it works for you.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter

If you a business owner today the likelihood is that you dabble in email marketing, or at least have started to think about it.

Email has opened up a new and effective way of keeping in touch with your customers quickly and relatively cheaply.

You can use the emails to give great information, keep them up to date with industry news as well as new products, services and offers.

It only takes a few seconds to communicate with thousands of people.

Because email marketing is a hot topic, I have written numerous posts about it, such as:

How to build your email marketing list

Email marketing – Welcome

How to be an email spammer

How to become the King or Queen of email marketing

Consistent  email marketing

10 words that will make people open your email

Email marketing – When’s the best time to send?

Boost your email open rate

But in this post I want to look at one of the most frequently asked questions…

How often should I email my customers?

It depends…

Your ideal frequency is going to be determined by your business type – what’s right for your neighbour isn’t necessarily going to be right for you.

Take a good hard look at your business. The optimum frequency of your emails will depend largely on:

• What you are offering your customers
• Who your customers are
• What you have to say

People tend to send email son either a quarterly, monthly, bi-monthly (i.e. once every two months), twice monthly, weekly and sometimes daily (or multiple times per day) frequency.

To help you out, here is a short guide to email frequency:

Quarterly

This is great if you don’t have a lot to say. Your products and services probably don’t change that much and you rarely have offers to make.

The main problem with quarterly is it’s not regular enough to make an impression on your readers. By leaving so much time between communications you run the risk the recipient forgetting who you are.

Monthly

Monthly is quite common as it’s regular contact without being intrusive. The content can be a mixture of information, offers, news and views. This type of information exchange is a great way to build and strengthen relationships with your customers.

As a copywriter I send out a monthly newsletter. It provides hints and tips on copywriting, marketing and social media – its all free information that I am giving away and I never sell through it. By the way, if you want to get on the mailing list visit my website and sign up.

Twice a month

This is a compromise if you want to make contact more than monthly but don’t have enough to say for a weekly newsletter. One of the main benefits of twice monthly is that you can use one newsletter to give information whilst the next could be an offer on one of your products. 

Weekly

These are often used by stores looking to sell. Their weekly emails let them communicate offers and new lines quickly and easily to their customers. Plus being retail outlets it won’t come as a surprise to the recipient that they are being sold something.

Keeping up with your chosen frequency is important because your readers will soon get to expect your next issue. If you have to miss one make sure you  tell them to keep them informed.

Email marketing (whether it’s to sell or to offer a regular newsletter) is a great way to keep your company name ‘out there’.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter

Businesses everywhere are beginning to appreciate the benefits of email marketing.

It is a form of marketing that can be done cheaply and on a massive scale. It’s never been so easy to get your message out to your market place.

But not only is it fast, its results are also measurable.

With today’s sophisticated software you can track who opens your emails, what links they click on within the email, what they do once they’ve made that click. This kind of transparency helps you hone your email marketing, constantly improving it to make sure it’s giving your customers what they want.

Testing the effectiveness of your email marketing

As a copywriter I work with a number of clients on their email marketing campaigns. One of the hardest things to get right is the subject line. That is the one thing that will determine whether your email is opened—if they won’t open it, you can’t sell them anything or build a relationship with them.

Creating magnetic subject lines isn’t easy, it’s futile to pretend otherwise. They can take a lot of time to develop. You not only have to think about who you are sending it to (and what will trigger them to open it) but also the words you use, as you don’t want them tripping any spam filters. In a previous article I looked at 10 Words That Will Make People Open Your Email – these are powerful words that will help you boost your open rate.

That’s all well and good but the only real way to work out how effective your subject line is, is to test it.

Many people will split test by sending one group of recipients an email with one subject line and a different group another subject line to see which one has the most successful open rate.

But there is another way – have you ever considered using social media to test your subject lines?

This is something that I’d never thought of until I’d read BlueSkyFactory’s blog and in particular their post on How to use social media to boost email marketing open rate. Christopher Penn tells us how he used Twitter to help work out how effective a subject line is.

Do your Twitter followers resemble the demographics of your email marketing list? If so why not try it out, it could give your email marketing quite a lift. If you decide to give it a go please come back and let us know how you got on—it would be interesting to hear your feedback.

If you get it right, email marketing can be one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses today.

Yes everyone’s doing it but that doesn’t mean it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

If you want it to work you must give each email a lot of serious thought otherwise it will simply end up being deleted.

Every email must count and convert. That may sound simple enough but in practice it can get complicated.

To help you out, here’s my top 3 tips to boost your email marketing conversion rates:

1. Tell them what they need to know

You’d be amazed at how many businesses that don’t. Just as with website copy, many companies insist on using their emails as a way of telling their customer how great they are at what they do.

That’s not what they want to hear. They want to know what you can do for them.

Also don’t try and cram everything into one email. No one wants to read War and Peace in their inbox. If you want to showcase new products or a new service, tease them with a taster in the email and then link out to your website so they can get more information.

2. Don’t confuse – just one action

Every piece of marketing must have a call to action. But make sure you keep it simple.

If your email is filled with multiple actions sending your reader here, there and everywhere, they’ll end up completely confused. So keep it simple.

3. Build credibility

Your emails are a perfect way to reinforce your credibility as a company. Include your latest testimonials and use them as case studies so illustrate how you’ve helped your customers.

If your email marketing is done well it can be very effective. They are a superb way of getting your sales message in front of your customers quickly. Just make sure your message is clear.

If you engage in email marketing you’ll know how difficult it can be to get someone to read your email.

For your email to survive it has to have a strong, clear and concise subject line to make the recipient curious enough to open it.

So all you have to do is come up subject lines that won’t get junked or deleted—simple!

Winning subject lines

To make sure email subject line draws the recipient’s attention and gets your email opened make sure you:

• Keep it short (no more than 60 characters, including spaces)
• Personalise it
• Identify your company
• Tell them what your email is about
• Give them a benefit as an enticement

Salesy is bad

If you make your subject line too salesy you will turn your recipient off immediately. No one likes being sold to so if you make it obvious that’s what you’re up to the barriers will go up.

The other hurdle you have to get over is the spam filter. Certain words will trip spam filters and there are certain words you’d often use in headlines that should be avoided in email subject lines. Such as:

• You—indicated the email is from a stranger and unsolicited
• Exclamation marks
• Capital letters—all capitals will not work, so don’t do it
• Buzz words—things like free, sale, only, urgent, information, limited-time, opportunity (use them in the email body but steer clear of them in the subject line)

This advice should help your email marketing go a bit smoother.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter

Email marketing is cheap, quick and effective. Plus as most sent today are in HTML you have the added benefit of the hyperlink.

This allows your reader to click directly through to your website or landing page for more information or to buy or sign up to your offer.

But if you want that to happen your email must be interesting and relevant to your recipients otherwise it will just be transferred to the deleted folder. So make sure it’s appealing by following these simple suggestions:

1. Friendly

Just as if you were writing a letter, use a salutation preferably personalised. This personal touch is the best way to start a relationship. And don’t forget the ending—always be professional.

2. Aesthetics

Take a quite look at your email. Is it one solid wall of text or have you broken it up into short paragraphs with headings, sub headings and bulleted lists? This spacious layout lets your reader see at a glance what your email is about.

3. Call to action

Don’t be fooled into thinking you can leave your call to action until the end of your email. By placing a link to your sales page several times throughout the email, your reader can act as soon as they’ve made their buying decision.

4. Short

Long copy does work in certain situations, but not in an email. Just use the email as a taster of what they can  expect and then get them to click through to your website or landing page to get more information.

5. Benefits

As with any form of copywriting make sure you show your product or services’ benefits. Make sure they are shown as such and not just a list of features.

6. Opt-out

Even though you don’t want to lose anyone, make sure you include an opt-out in all your email communications.

Of course, you don’t have to sell in every email you send. Mix them up with some giving information or tips. By giving away free information like this you will strengthen your relationship with your readers.