Lists – The Online Marketer’s Treasure
Everyone talks about his or her ‘optin’ lists. It’s their treasure. They are always looking for new and innovative ways to build their lists to keep visitors coming to their sites continuously. They offer various things to the prospective customer like free reports, ebooks, software, memberships, services etc. just to get their email address and other identifiable information. It is essential to keep following up with people who might be interested in what you are offering. Only when you have a growing list can you facilitate your users to visit your site. It grabs their attention and takes them to those areas of the site that are of particular value to them.

Why Have A Growing List?
Is it not sufficient to have a few hundred contacts? In online marketing, not every visitor buys from the site he or she is visiting. Sure you may have built a huge database of contacts, but unless each one is a qualified contact, there is no guarantee that they will take any purchase-related action when they visit. Even in the offline world, you usually cannot get a buying decision out of your prospect right away – it takes not less than 5 visits unless they are desperately in need. Again, if you deal with more than one product, different visitors may be interested in different products. That is why you have to get your visitor’s email id and name as they browse through your site. This will let you plan a frequency at which you can remind them and keep them updated about current offers to keep the sales coming in. You must use ethical methods to build your lists. The worst thing in Internet marketing is acquiring a bad reputation, because that will ensure that you can never do business again.

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

Creating an e-mail marketing document: The fundamentals

The most important thing to know is the basics of building a powerful marketing document. It doesn’t matter if you are writing a newsletter or you are writing an occasional sales update… or some other kind of email marketing content. Generally speaking, these are the things you will want to accomplish in every single outgoing marketing document.

Benefits versus Features

There’s an age-old adage in sales: “features tell, benefits sell.”

Features are the things that describe a product. The benefits are the good things that come from using a product. The truth is, people simply don’t buy products based on the features they offer. Instead, people buy products based on the benefit it provides them and on the way that product fulfills their needs.

Think of the last time you bought something. Did you buy it because it had a an inline locking mechanism or because it made your life easier?

Consider this example in which we compare two fictional advertisements for the same product:

XYZ Clocks

Traditionally designed gears turn at various speeds, based on your winding, and those gears turn other gears that ultimately move a second hand, minute hand, and hour hand around the face of a clock. The face of the clock contains 12 numbers. The gears are made out of metal. The clock itself is burnished and the face is white with black numbers.

Pretty boring stuff, isn’t it?!? Compare that to this ad:

XYZ Clocks

Never be late again with this accurate, easy-to-read clock. It’s also easy to maintain.

The second ad is simple and full of benefits. Write ads that are benefit laden and you will sell more products. People never buy something because of a feature. They will always buy something because of the benefit it brings them.

AIDA

AIDA is an acronym used in sales and marketing writing. Standing for “Attention, Interest, Decision, Action,” it provides a powerful technique to help you write great copy each and every time.

Attention. Your email marketing material needs to grab their attention effectively or else they will pass your message by as they scan their already-full inboxes. Typically this needs to occur in the subject line, since that is what people usually see first. Marketers try to use a variety of tricks to get people to read their messages. Some less-than-legitimate attention-getting devices include all caps, plenty of exclamation points, or a subject line that doesn’t seem to actually be from a business, but rather from a friend. Here are three examples:

~ BUY BLUE WIDGETS TODAY
~ Widgets. You want one!!!!!!!!!!!
~ It’s been a while, buddy.

While these methods may have been unique and attention getting long ago, they are now tired and old and often over-used by businesses that are more closely linked with spam. If you want to get someone’s attention today, here are two better approaches: ask a question or give the title of your article.

~ Want to live the good life?
~ 3 reasons why everyone needs a blue widget.

Be sure that your article answers the question asked in the subject line.

Interest. Once you have their attention – likely from the subject line – it’s time to keep it with your message. If you have a newsletter, you’ll want the first few paragraphs of your newsletter article to highlight a problem and then the second last paragraph should show how your product or service solves the problem. We’ll get more into writing newsletters in the next lesson.

Decision. Although you should provide helpful information in your email marketing newsletter or e-zine, there is nothing wrong with asking people to make a decision to buy your product. This should be done in the last paragraph of your message. Although they may have read some high quality, helpful information throughout the article, the last paragraph can bring home the point that they need whatever it is you’re selling.

Action. It used to be that marketers would have to put in a memorable phone number or address into their direct marketing in order to get people to respond. Now, you can simply put the words, “buy it here” (and “here” would be linked to your site) and people can click on it to be taken to your site if they want to purchase it. The Internet has made it so much easier! Even though it’s so easy, people still need to be told what action to take. It reminds them why they’re getting the newsletter in the first place. And, if they save the newsletter, it’s an easy visual reference they can use if they ever decide later to buy the product.

Summary

This lesson seems to be a fairly basic “marketing 101” lesson to remind you that the rules of marketing don’t change for email marketing campaigns. If you create great marketing content that is filled with benefits and uses the AIDA method, you’ll be sure to create strong, highly effective marketing campaigns each and every time. In the next lessons we’ll look at specific ways you can incorporate these principles into your marketing.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave

Getting started

One of the challenges faced by business owners (both online and offline) is the challenge of jumping into something with both feet. That is, aggressively pursuing an idea or action that you’ve just thought of and haven’t weighed through.

Jumping in with both feet is okay to do on something that doesn’t require a lot of time or expense or commitment. However, email marketing is not something you want to jump into.

Email marketing may not cost a lot – even a paid subscription to a month email marketing service provider doesn’t cost a lot and is quite valuable – but there is a time commitment as well as an energy commitment that you have to be willing to make before you can expect to enjoy success. And if you can’t make those commitments, then email marketing may not be right for you… right now.

Go/No Go

NASA scientists use something called a “go/no-go” check before launching a space shuttle. They go through a series of checklists and if there is something wrong in the checklist, they say “no-go” and the rocket ship stays on earth. If everything in the checklist is fine, they willingly launch the ship.

You need to do your own go/no-go system to make sure that you’re ready to commit to an email marketing campaign.

1. Estimate how many names you have on your database right now.
2. Estimate the amount of time it will take you to write a newsletter. Don’t worry so much about the design of the newsletter, since you can find templates to help you and once you have it designed you won’t have to worry about it, but writing the newsletter requires commitment and dedication on your part… and since most people aren’t interested in writing large amounts of text, it may be difficult for you.
3. Estimate the total amount of time in a year that you will end up spending on your email marketing campaign. For example, if you estimate (in step 2) that it will take you one hour to write a newsletter, and you want to send out a newsletter every month, then multiply that hour by 12 to get your total annual time estimate.
4. Estimate how much money it will cost you to manage your email marketing system. Factor in the value of your time (because you could spend it doing other things) and factor in any monthly costs associated with any email marketing system you want to use. You should have a total annual cost of managing your email marketing system.
5. Estimate how much profit you earn on an average sale.
6. Estimate how many MORE sales you need to make in order to earn your first dollar of profit with this increased expense. (To do this, simply divide the number in step 4 by the number in step 5). For example, if your email marketing campaign is going to cost you $1000, and the profit you earn from each sale is $10, you’re going to have to make an extra 100 sales in order to earn an additional profit.

This exercise is NOT meant to scare you away from email marketing. It is a highly effective way of doing business. However, you need to be realistic in terms of the cost associated with your business. Before completely scrapping the entire system, try to decide if there is a way to do it more profitably. For example, instead of writing the newsletters yourself, can you find a writer who can do it for you more cheaply? There are writers at www.guru.com who bid on projects and you might be able to find one who costs you less than if you wrote the articles yourself. And if you find a system that is free, there’s even less work for you to do! As well, if you decide to use an occasional marketing campaign – more like a sales update – you don’t have to commit much time to it.

If you want, start small and work your way up to a larger, more dedicated plan.

Publishing plan

Once you have decided on the email marketing campaign that will be most cost-effective for you, it’s time to develop a publishing plan. This sounds more complicated than it really is.

Magazine publishers call it a publishing schedule but it’s just a list of important dates and topics for you to make sure you stay on track.

Although an occasional sales update may not require a publishing plan, the more popular (and more effective) newsletter should.

Your publishing plan should include a list of the topics that you want to write about, any sales that may correspond with the topics or calendar dates, and the dates that are important to you.

Here’s an example of a newsletter that is intended to go out on the 21st of each month for a cleaning company:

As you can see, they have included the month, the article topic, as well as dates they need the article complete, the date they want to have the newsletter assembled and edited, and dates to have the newsletter sent out.

Now it’s your turn: Write down all the topics you can think of when it comes to things you think your audience might be interested in reading about. If you want just one article per newsletter (some have more but one is a great place to start) select 12 and assign months to them… as some are more appropriate at some times of the year than others.

Make notes as you go since these ideas may help you write the articles more quickly when it comes time to write them.

Summary

Getting started is about counting the cost and being prepared. It’s not glamorous work but developing this foundation will help to ensure that you are more successful. Sometimes these regular jobs can become a grind and a burden so having a plan in place can help you to overcome that feeling.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave

Before I get into any specifics, watch this short video that details some interesting facts about Social Media that you may not know:

Lets recap some of the facts in the video:

How many years do you think it will take for you to reach 50 million users?
Radio- 38 years
TV- 13 years
Internet- 4 years
iPod- 3 years

Fact: Facebook alone has added well over 100 million users in less than 9 months
Fact: 80% of companies are using LinkedIn to primarily find their employees
Fact: Mashable announced Twitter’s numbers will double by the end of 2009 to 12.1 million users, and gap up another 50 percent in 2010 to bring the service to a total audience of roughly 18 million registered users.

If these statistics don’t make you wake up and smell the Media Revolution then you are going to lose the Social Media battle.

How about this scenario: You have an upset customer (it could happen) and this person happens to have a Twitter following of 25,000 followers and 1500 Facebook friends. They talk about there bad experience and now 26,500 people instantly know about the experience that person had. I hope you realize that statistics show that if a person has a Fantastic experience they tell 5 people. If the same person has a bad experience they tell everyone they meet!

Social Media if used strategically by a Business can fix the issue before it gets out of hand. I actually had someone saying bad things about me when I had an exit pop installed on one of my sites and when I seen how many people didn’t like it, I apologized publicly and disabled the exit pop. After about two days everything was cool.

My point is to NOT take Social Media lightly, It is here to stay!

You are Amazing!

–Dave

This movie was recommended to me when I was going through my customer service training and I use it all the time. You wouldn’t believe what a difference it makes just to acknowledge how wonderful someone is or to praise them for the amazing work that they do.

Treat everyone with the respect that they deserve and your Business will Skyrocket!

You are Awesome!

–Dave

What you need (and need to know) in order to get started

Getting started in email marketing is fairly easy. You can probably do it with the systems you have right now.

Then, once you build up your database of recipients and you become busier, you may want to move the process over to a more complex system to help you.

But let’s start at the simplest system first and then we’ll look at an advanced system to help you build your email marketing empire every step of the way.

Basic

You can actually start with the systems you already have in place right now. You can very easily place an email capture line on your website… if you use a system like www.godaddy.com, you can add one simply by clicking a button or two.

Or, if you are an offline business – like a restaurant or a car dealership – and you want to build your email marketing campaign, you can simply ask customers to leave their email address with you.

As you collect these emails, you can put them into a group. In fact, your email system probably has the capability to do that already. (For example, with Yahoo.com, you can add all of your email addresses to a list then select which ones you want to appear in their own group, then you can label that group). Every time you get an email address, add it to that group. Then, when it comes time to send out your message (whether it’s a regular message like a newsletter or a periodic message like the sales update) you insert the group name into your BCC: line.

A BCC line means “Blind Carbon Copy” and it means that all of the people who receive the message do not have the email addresses of the others… thus you keep your prospect list private.

If you want to send out a regular message, like a newsletter or e-zine, you can pre-write the document and even pre-write the email. Put your prospect message group in the BCC: line then schedule the mail-out for the date that you want it. If you don’t expect a lot of changes to your message group, then you can schedule it fairly far out (a few months even). However, if someone requests to be taken off your list, it could be a lot of work so you may not want to schedule too far out.

In this way, you’ve been able to create a fairly easy system right from your desktop or online email system.

Advanced

It’s true that the basic system doesn’t cost money. For some businesses that might be an appropriate place to start if you are building your email marketing campaign on a limited budget in your early days.

However, as you enjoy an increase in success, you should really consider implementing an increase in your email marketing campaign. After all, the system described above may work for a few dozen or a few hundred names, but some businesses have thousands upon thousands of subscribers to their newsletter and it’s going to get more and more difficult to manage as time goes on.

Enter an email marketing system.

Good email marketing systems are usually designed to help you do three things:

1. design your message
2. manage your contacts
3. track your reports

When you’re looking for an email marketing system, make sure it does all three.

Design your message. Good email marketing systems will give you templates for either (or both) html or text-based messages. That way, you can start with something that’s already well-designed, input your own content, and tweak it slightly to match the look and feel you want.

Manage your contacts. By managing your contacts, your email marketing system takes a lot of the work off of your hands. You’re able to import lists, for example (if you get a big influx of names or you buy a list of email addresses, you’re able to import them easily). You should also be able to manage emails that bounce back to you. As well, good email marketing systems should be able to perform automatic unsubscribe functions so that someone can unsubscribe to an email if they want to. (Again, compare this to the basic system of using your own email address… people would send you an unsubscribe request and then you’d have to manually remove it from the list. You should also be able to add headers, footers, and signatures to your emails.

Track your reports. This is a powerful function of the email marketing system. It allows you to see your message views, whether or not they click on any of the links in the message, as well as the history of the subscriber.

You get what you pay for, they say. If you have a small list and can manage it on your own, you can use the free and basic email marketing system available with the creative use of your own email address.

For more money – from a few dollars to several hundred dollars a month, you can get a powerful email marketing system.

There are many good ones out there. Check out the free demos of my 2 favorites to see what I use.

Here are my personal favorites:

www.aweber.com
www.1ShoppingCart.com

If you want to see more, simply Google “email marketing” or “autoresponder” and visit some of the results.

Summary

Email marketing systems are good to have to help build your business. If you are just getting started, consider using an email marketing system that is free… and you probably already own it: your email address. It’s appropriate for smaller batches of emails when you’re first getting your name out there. But for a few dollars (to a few hundred dollars) a month, you can build a powerful email marketing campaign with a feature-rich email marketing system designed to help you (My favorite is Aweber). Check them out, find your top three favorites, and give them a try.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave

One of the biggest problems I see newsletter and ezine publishers having online is that they write about subjects no one in their market is interested in. They just write about whatever they think people want to know about without doing any of the research, which is a huge no no.

Another problem is, publishers who have a market well defined don’t then write the content in their newsletters that interests their readers. There is no use having an ezine on coin collecting and running articles on stamp collecting just because you couldn’t be bothered finding the right content for your ezine.

This is easily overcome. Just send out an email asking your readers what they want to read. Tell them to reply to your email with suggestions on what they want to see in their inbox. Another thing you can do is to sign up for other ezines in your market and see what they are writing about.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave

My Grandson is the first boy in the family so he is a PaPa’s boy. I love spending my weekends with him.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave