Your website

What does your website have to do with email marketing? On one hand, nothing at all: you’re sending out emails to people and they are meant to respond to those emails with action… website.

But on the other hand, your website has EVERYTHING to do with email marketing. For once your audience arrives there… what do they do?

If your website is not well-constructed to deliver your customers to the buy-now button, then it will not make as many sales as it could. You want to change that. Here’s how:

The first thing you have to do is change your thinking when it comes to a website:

It wasn’t that long ago that every business was putting up these new things called “web sites” on this new fangled “Internet.” Little regard was given to what constituted a good website or a bad one; at the time, a true mark of being a cutting edge company was having a URL on your business card. (And in those days, the URLs were all big, awkward, and unmemorable: http://www.thewidgetcompany.com/mainpage/index/02/316. It’s unwieldy!)

Since then, times have changed and now businesses can simply mark: thewidgetcompany.com on their marketing material.

During those early days, though, people didn’t know what to put on websites. They posted anything and everything they could get their hands on: from office bios to hours of operation to marketing materials to technical manuals. Some useful, some useless.

Over time, as the Internet became a bigger and bigger deal, people gained an understanding for what was meant to go on a website and what kind of purpose a website provides.

Your website is meant to act like a filter.

Think of a path. At the start of the page, you direct the prospects. At the end of the path is the purchase you intend them to make. Along the way, some people leave the path and go their own way, choosing not to make the purchase you want them to make (maybe it’s just not the right time for them). But others will leave the path accidentally, perhaps confused by a path that crosses it. Your goal is make that path you WANT them to take.

To do that, you have to clearly mark your path and you have to reduce the amount of different paths they can take.

One method of success is to select the step you most want them to take and put that front and center on your main page.

Compare these two typical menus found on the side of many businesses:

The first one is one of the most common lists of menus. Everything seems to be almost randomly placed and it’s difficult to tell what you want.

Compare that menu with this one. What do you notice?

It becomes very clear what action you want people to take. You can still leave some of the other items on your menu, but a slight re-organization and by highlighting the most important step in the process, you can help to guide the actions of your prospect.

Some businesses do this very well: They simply offer one action on the first page: a brief bit of text telling you about the business.

Then they offer a single “next” button at the bottom of the page. When a prospect clicks on it, there’s more information about them… and another “next” button. As the client pushes each “next” button, they are taken through the process until the next button to press doesn’t say “next” but rather “buy now.”

Reducing choice will increase your customers.

Why do people put lots of options on their site? Because some businesses feel that by simply blasting all of the information they need to give to a client all at once, they will earn business. Unfortunately, information overload drives people away.

There’s nothing wrong with having links on your site, but (like the example menu above) make sure you make it very clear what action you want your prospects to take next.

We’ve called your website a path… but it is also a funnel: it’s a sales funnel that pours prospects in the top (through your email marketing) and should turn them into customers coming out the bottom. However, if you make the process too confusing or obscure (or provide too many options) you’ll reduce the hole through which you want your customers to come.

Summary

Businesses who use email marketing have one more job: that is to make sure their website effectively sells. One of the ways to do that is to create a website that clearly states to your customer what it is you want them to do. In this way, you’ll start the process of creating an effective funnel that will drive more business to your door.

You are Awesome!
~~Dave

Dealing with the challenges

Each type of marketer has their own batch of challenges:

Direct marketers will also see a low return ratio and will always struggle with having their documents tossed in the trash with the rest of the junk mail.

Television marketers are challenged by the remote control, or pre-recorded programs that circumvent the “captured audience” aspect that commercials once offered.

Print-based marketers in magazines and newspapers will always face the challenge of trying to keep someone from turning the page too quickly.

As an email marketer, you will have challenges to.

Five challenges you will face include…

1. False email addresses
2. Undeliverable emails
3. Accusations of Spam
4. No response
5. Unsubscription dissatisfaction

Let’s look at each one and develop a solution now to proactively avoid it from happening.

False email address

At times, for a joke or some other malicious reason, someone will provide someone else’s email in your email capture line. The more popular your products or service – and the less professional an audience it is intended for – the more likely this will happen.

How do you solve it? There are two ways… both are widely used online by email marketing companies:

The first way (and probably the way that is the easiest) is to send an initial “subscription confirmation” email to the subscriber’s email address and typically they require a mandatory response to confirm subscription. The email confirmation might say something like: “Your email address was recently provided in a request for a subscription to our newsletter. If you still want to receive the newsletter, click here to confirm your subscription. Otherwise, disregard this message and we won’t send anything else.

The other way (that is more of a deterrent… but arguably just as effective) is to threaten to report any email abuse to the IP address of the poster.

Generally, the first method makes you sound friendlier.

Undeliverable email

Undeliverable emails (“Bounce”) is a problem. There are a variety of reasons why emails may be undeliverable:

1. The owner has changed email addresses
2. The mailbox is full
3. There is a temporary internet problem
4. The email address is wrong

Little can be done about the first issue… it’s a fact in our day of free email addresses that you can get and discard in moments. Hopefully you’ll have had an opportunity to impact people before they change email addresses and fail to notify you.

A full mailbox and temporary internet problems (which are beyond the scope of this e-course) can turn away new email but many email marketing service providers will try to re-send bounced emails for a short period of time to try and get the message in. A repeated bounce may mean automatic removal from the list. Check with your email marketing service provider to discover their bounce policy.

Wrong email addresses are either keyed in wrong by employees who write them down for your customers or if a customer writes them in wrong in the email capture line. If you have people writing down their email addresses to give to your employees to type in, you should save the document that contains the original written email as it may be referenced later in the case of a bounce. Of prospects who incorrectly insert their own email address into the capture line, little can be done.

Accusations of Spam

Sometimes people might forget that they subscribed to your message and rather than unsubscribing, they may identify your message as spam to their email service provider. The only solution to this is to keep good records that indicate the date and time they signed up and every message they received over the course of your campaign that ALSO includes an unsubscribe button. If your web host contacts you to pass on the spam accusation, these factors will help you to defend yourself thoroughly.

No responses

On a less-technical level, no response is a real problem in ANY marketing effort. Every marketer would love to improve the response of their campaign. One way to you can do this is with A/B split marketing in which you create 2 messages and send one to half of your list and the other to the other half of your list. Then measure the response rate and go with the better version and do it again with a new message.

Also, you can help to eliminate a lack of responses by…

• Using the AIDA method
• Making sure that you highlight the benefits, not features
• Make your newsletter less sales-like and more helpful

Unsubscription dissatisfaction

One real problem in email marketing that gets little attention is the problem of unsubscription dissatisfaction. Prospects can take a moment to sign up and they will usually get their first email in moments of signing up. But there are many email marketing subscriptions that – when a prospect tries to unsubscribe – the message says “we received your message and are unsubscribing you. Please note that it may take up to 90 days to remove your name from our list and in that time you may receive more newsletters.”

This is utter nonsense and every prospect knows it. We live in a day of instantaneous response and leaving their name on a list for 90 more days (or 45 or 30) will only anger them. Instead, when they unsubscribe, send them one more email that says “thank you for having subscribed in the past. We’re sorry to see you go. This is the last email you’ll get from us. If you ever want to subscribe again, Visit our website at: http://learntotwitter.com.

Summary

Every marketer has challenges to overcome in order for his or her message to be heard loud and clear by the audience. We’ve looked at 5 common challenges and provided solutions to overcome those challenges. But there is one more challenge – probably the biggest – that you will face. We’ll turn our attention to that in the next lesson.

You are Awesome!
~~Dave

Building your readership

Like collecting baseball cards, email marketing gurus collect email addresses and bragging between peers tends towards a comparison of number: 10,000 email address… 11,000… 12,000… each person trying to outdo the other with a greater figure of warm leads.

So how do you get the very first one? Where do you start?

Getting started

The first place you should look is to your current list of customers. It costs less to keep a customer than it does to win a new one and yet e-business owners seem to forget that they have a database of happy customers and spend extraordinary amounts of money on advertising to win new ones.

Gather all of your customer’s emails into one folder and start with them. Send out a special message – perhaps a sale of some kind.

If the product you sell is a one-time purchase and doesn’t lend itself well to repeat purchases from the same customer, send out a referral coupon: if they refer someone to you and that person buys, they will get some kind of discount or money back. Or use the “makes a great gift” idea and talk about how your product could be purchased for someone else.

Either way, you’re doing a few things by sending out this message:

• You’re going to start the process of sending out messages… which is something you’ll have to decide to do if you want to proceed.
• You’re unconsciously announcing to your happy clients that you want to do more business with them.
• You’re testing the waters to get an idea about what a repeat purchase promotion could do for your business.
• You’re testing their email addresses, since people change addresses… they may have changed since they bought from you. (Delete the address if it bounces back to you… but don’t delete your customer. See if there is a land address for them and add them to a direct marketing mailout.
• You’re testing to see the response from your customers on receiving something from you. Some niches are more responsive than others at receiving email marketing. People who spend a lot of time in their email may not mind a short message from you periodically but they won’t want to spend too much time reading and deleting messages that don’t apply.

Once you have sent out a test email, it’s time to start collecting email addresses and putting them into a file.

How do you do that?

Collecting email addresses

One of the easiest ways is simply to put an email capture line on your website.

If you create your own websites, you can easily put an email capture line in… even if you create your website in Microsoft Word. Right click on the menu bar and select from the list “web tools” and a menu of website features will come up that you can insert into your webpage.

Alternatively, if you use templates to do that, you may be able to add it in with your design and hosting service provider. www.godaddy.com, for example, gives you the ability to do that by simply clicking a couple buttons.

You may also consider getting email addresses through a promotion. For example, offer a referral bonus to people who recommend some friends to you who buy.

Each newsletter should also include a link that says “email this to a friend.” Although you won’t collect their email address by doing that, you may find that people who receive the email from a friend might be more inclined to contact you or even subscribe.

Another way to collect email addresses is to build and advertise a site that focuses entirely on collecting email addresses.

Suppose you own a consulting business. Your website advertises your services and has plenty of information about your business. You want to build up your business with email marketing but you can’t seem to get people to come to your site.

One way to do that would be to build another site – and “landing page” – where people arrive and are exposed to JUST a one-page advertisement that focuses on the benefits of your service. Then, at the bottom of the page is an email capture line. The caption might read “subscribe to an newsletter for more information on improving sales” (if that’s what your consultancy is about).

That way, rather than arriving on your company’s site and being overwhelmed with content that may not have anything to do with what they are looking for, the landing page clearly and easily describes what they can get and gives them an easy to get it.

How do you get people to that landing page? Advertising it is much easier than advertising your site. And when people arrive at it, they are presented with a single, clear message rather than to the many mixed messages your site might give them. (You may sell only one thing, but your FAQs, your different delivery methods, your product descriptions and sample downloads all are messages that can confuse a prospect).

This method of sales is very popular and works well for the sale of ebooks through providers like clickbank.com and it can work for your business, too.

Summary

You probably have already mastered your sales cycle, along with your niche and marketing ideas. Now, as you branch into email marketing, it’s time to master another aspect of e-business. Rather than selling your services, sell your prospects on the idea of subscribing to a free newsletter that they’re interested in. It’s a great way to get in their faces on a regular basis to tell them about your products or services. And it all starts by capturing their interest and their email address.

You are Awesome!
~~Dave

Creating an e-mail marketing document

We have looked at the content of the document in lesson 5 and the format the document in lesson 6. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the bigger picture.

Creating a series

A lot of care should be put into creating a series, even if you plan on sending out only occasional updates.

A series of email marketing messages should be intentional and well-defined; not haphazard.

As you decide on the content, you will have already started the consideration of how regular you want your marketing campaign to be. Obviously we’re not defining the occasional sales message here, but the more intentional and regular messages of newsletters and e-zines.

• Motley Fool, the investment advice organization, sends out newsletters fairly frequently… sometimes a few a day. If this is the route you want to take, be aware that it could take a lot of your time and effort which may potentially take away from other aspects of your business. However, you’ll be able to create shorter “bite sized” messages and you’ll always be at the top of your audience’s mind. Flylady.com is another organization that sends out several messages each day.

• Many email marketing campaigns send out messages once per week or once per month. Depending on your product and your audience, one might be more appropriate than another. If your audience is at the computer more often, they might want a single, shorter message each week. If they have less time but still crave helpful information, once a month might be more appropriate.

Would you ever do anything less frequently than once a month? That depends on who you are and what you do. Generally speaking, the larger the purchase you offer, the less frequently you have to send your message. For example, a car dealership should advertise more frequently than a realtor. An appliance dealer should advertise more frequently than a car dealership. A computer retailer should advertise more frequently than an appliance dealer. And so on.

Also, your message can determine what you send out. If you send out The Authoritative Buyer’s Guide to Stocks, you can probably get away with putting it out every quarter. More frequently would lower the worth of your message. Less frequently might make people forget who you are and confuse your occasional message with the spam in their inbox.

Ideally, you will probably want to create a mix of messages to send out. Here is an example for a car dealership:

• Weekly: highlight the 3 best deals on your lot plus money-saving car maintenance tips.
• Monthly: highlight the 3 most popular cars that month plus a coupon for an oil change and a free car detailing.
• Quarterly: Offer tips for traveling during that season along with a coupon for a seasonal check-up.

Here is an example from a financial company:

• Weekly: talk about some market movers and shakers and highlight one stock that seems to be doing well.
• Monthly: Highlight the top-moving stocks for that month.
• Quarterly: offer an authoritative buyer’s guide to stocks that could do well this quarter.

Here is an example from a company that provides online business consultation services:

• Weekly: highlight one customer with whom you’re doing business.
• Monthly: Analyze and industry that your clients use for vendors or customers.
• Quarterly: create a “state of the industry” document that talks about the industry in which your clients work.

As you can see, just from these examples, there are many exciting things you can do with your email marketing campaign and a campaign that mixes two or more frequencies can provide a variety of added-value services to clients.

Ultimately, you want to find content that they will find useful. That way, they’ll read the content and link its authoritative voice to you. And when they need the product or service that you offer, they will naturally turn to the authority on the matter… you. By providing a variety of messages at a variety of frequencies, you’ll be more likely able to stay at the top of their mind and enjoy “stickiness” which is a marketing term referring to how often someone views and returns to your message. Notice how the weekly, monthly, and quarterly messages in the above 3 examples are generally things that people might be interested in saving and going back to time and time again.

Creating coherence

You have decided on your frequency (and counted the cost, which you should have done in a previous lesson… just make sure the numbers are still the same if you’ve increased the frequency).

Now it’s time to assemble your message. In a previous lesson you started to put together a document that outlined the topics you wanted to cover in a year. If you want to publish weekly, make sure you have 52 ideas. If you want to publish monthly, make sure you have 12 ideas.

Some people feel that they should be fine starting with 30 or 35 ideas instead of 52, figuring that the other 17 to 22 ideas will come in time. Although you may want to do this, you are really taking a chance on it. The reason is that business often gets in the way of our best laid plans and before you know it, you’ve used up all of your planned ideas and now you’re faced with 4 or 5 months without any ideas to start you off. You will quickly fall behind. (We’re not trying to be negative here… just realistic from years of experience!)

Upon hearing our suggestion, some people may say that their industry is so news-sensitive that it doesn’t make sense to have the full list of ideas. This may be true, but Murphy’s Law suggests that those last 4 or 5 months will be “slow news months” and you’ll continue to struggle.

The best practice when developing a schedule is to come up with the full list of ideas. Then, if news does strike, you can always move one of the ideas to next year. However, if news doesn’t happen, you will have something to talk about.

In addition to creating a list, take note of the day it will fall on. Sometimes you may have to (or want to) adjust your message according to that day. If you are sending out messages on the 1st of every month, you can gear your message to New Years, and each new fiscal quarter. But don’t look JUST to the day… look around at days that are close by: In the US, Independence Day falls on July 4th and that may be on your audience’s mind during your July 1st newsletter… so mentioning it in your letter may make your newsletters seem timely. Also, be wary of who your audience is: if you are marketing to Canadians, for example, wishing them a happy Independence Day on July 4th isn’t appropriate. Instead, wish them happy Canada Day on July 1st.

Summary

In this lesson we talked about some of the frequency considerations you will need to think about when you’re developing your email marketing campaign. As well, you learned how you should build an entire year’s worth of campaign messages and appropriately organize them according to the seasons.

Watch for the next lesson…

You are Amazing!
-Dave

Creating an e-mail marketing document

The first consideration you want to make is in what format you will be sending it:

• Text
• Html
• Link-based
• PDF

Undoubtedly there are others, but these are the most common.

Text-based email marketing documents are one of the simplest to create. You simply type something into a document-creator like Notepad… or directly into your email content window. Text-based messages were very popular for a long time because most people used a dial-up system to access the internet and text-based messages were small files and could be loaded to the screen quickly. They are still popular, but are falling off, as people prefer something a little more visually appealing. You should consider, however, offering a text-based message as well, in case someone prefers that method. If you want to think of an offline comparison, you might think of a newspaper article: colorless but filled with information.

Here is an example, including the text and an embedded advertisement and link:

It’s almost time for spring gardening!

We’ve developed a comprehensive list of things you want to do to prepare your garden bed for planting. And later, you’ll discover the 3 tips that can help you determine which ones are weeds and which ones are plants you want to KEEP in your garden. And if you check out our website, we’ve provided a regional analysis of fertilizers so you can get the right fertilizer for your area of the country.

But first, a word from our sponsor:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DISCOUNT TULIPS. It’s time to get those tulips in the ground. We sell the cheapest tulips. Credit cards accepted. Click here.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

How do you prepare your garden bed just after spring thaw? We outline the 6 steps you need to take to ensure that your garden

HTML-based email marketing documents are much less text-filled. They are more highly designed. They can use color, pictures, moving images, hyperlinks animation, and sound to convey the message. Many email marketing service providers (like the ones we covered a couple lessons back) offer html templates to help you build your message. You can also use Microsoft Word to build one, too, since later versions of the program will convert your documents to html for you. If you want to think of an offline comparison, you might think of a brochure: it combines text and images to convey the message.

Link-based. Although technically this email marketing type can be either a text-based or html based message, we have included it here under its own heading because it plays a different role than a text-based or html-based document. Text and html documents may contain links, but a links-based document has far less content within the document itself and far more links pointing someone elsewhere. If you are looking for an offline comparison, you might think of a menu: it describes an item and allows you to select that item.

We’ve included an example of a text-based linked message.

Spending too much time under the hood?

If you’re a mechanic, you get paid per job… rarely per hour. So you need tools that can do the job fast.

Make faster oil changes with this package of products.

Change a tire more quickly with this new tool.

Remove spark plugs AND clean them with this unusual device.

PDF document. This email marketing document sends little in the way of content within the document itself but rather sends an attachment – most commonly in PDF, although it could be in other formats – and the PDF document is meant to be downloaded and viewed at the audience’s leisure. The PDF document can be more like a catalogue or a newsletter or some other type of document that your audience might be inclined to save and refer back to again and again.

We haven’t included a PDF example simply because it can take so many forms.

How do you decide which one to choose? Choose the one that works best for your products and audience. Here are some thoughts to get you started

~ If you have an audience that doesn’t have a lot of time to read, don’t bother with a wordy document; consider a short text or html document or link-based document.

~ If you have a product that really needs to be seen in action to be appreciated, consider a linked based document that can take them to a page with an animation of your product in action.

~ If you have a product that looks good and there are plenty of great visual of people enjoying it, consider an html document or PDF file.

~ If you have a message that is very helpful to people and can be referred to over and over, consider a PDF file.

Summary

Your message can take on different forms (including more than one from the above list) depending on who your audience is and what kind of message they’d be most responsive to. Feel free to create a few different versions of your newsletter and ask around for opinions on which one is more effective.

Remember to take action…

You are Awesome!
–Dave