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

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