HowToAdvertise.net

E-mail marketing is a tricky subject with so many people abusing it these days, but it’s becoming such a vital part of business that it can’t be ignored. Here are ten tips that I personally use in my e-mail marketing campaigns that have measurably improved their success:

1. Avoid HTML style e-mails and attachments whenever possible. Nothing gets a better response for me than a short, to the point, plain-text message.
2. Be personable. Approach your audience like you would a new friend. People respond best when they’re treated with respect and kindness.
3. Don’t send messages to anyone who doesn’t want to receive them. Providing an easy way to unsubscribe from your recurring mailer will save you a lot of heartache and angry customers.
4. Avoid doubletalk and corporate speak – these are major turnoffs for readers. Most people don’t read their own company memos, let alone random press releases from a stranger.
5. Don’t write too much. Your audience’s time is valuable and you should respect it. If you can’t make your point in five to ten sentences, take it back to the drawing board and try again.
6. Automate responses. If you have a way for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, why not send them an automated response? Why not two or four? With the right email program, you can schedule a full sales cycle of introduction, explanation of services, special offer and a follow up and have it run completely unattended!
7. Include a specific call to action. After you make your case or present your offer, don’t forget to ask for the sale! Something as simple as “visit our website now for 15% off this product” can mean the difference between success or failure.
8. Avoid unnecessary punctuation and capitalization. YOU DON’T WANT TO END UP IN THE READER’S JUNK MAILBOX!!!
9. Provide something of value to your audience. Give them a reason to stay on your mailing list other than “buy my product.” Offer helpful advice, discounts, or something of value that they will look forward to.
10. Personalize your emails whenever possible. I found that an email that starts out with “Dear firstname,” will be on average 15-30% more effective than a generic message.
11. Back up your emails with a web site. There’s nothing worse than getting your customer fired up from an email without having an outlet to learn more. Always direct your customer back to your web site for more information or to close an immediate sale! (Yes, I know this is #11 in my ten point list, but it was too important to leave out.)

I recently received a newsletter from one of my professional contacts that’s not in the online marketing business. He had chosen an html format newsletter instead of using plain text. I’ve posted the results below so you can get an idea how his carefully crafted marketing message (the one that represents his business) looked to me.

If you’re doing an online newsletter html can work for you, but you have to be careful. Use in-line CSS and a limited number of images to reduce the annoying X’s. Here’s an example from one of my own sites to show you what I mean.

Personally though, I highly recommend using plain text instead of html. It’s less eye catching, but it’s also less likely to get caught in a spam filter or ignored as an advertisement. For myself, I’ll read anything pertinent and interesting to me – whether it’s written in html or not, and I give my audience the same consideration.

If you’ve ever wondered whether that all important email you sent got to where it was intended, look no further!

The good people at Danifer Web Services (a web publishing firm based out of Dallas, Texas) have released DeliveryConfirm.com, an online read receipt utility, to alert you when your messages have been read. DeliveryConfirm is a simple online utility that you can use to create and send email, and get a notification when it has been read.

The trick is that instead of sending the whole message, you send just a brief summary and DeliveryConfirm includes a special link and password. In order for your recipient to read the whole message and get any attachments, they have to follow the link and use the password. As soon as they do, you get an alert telling you that your message has been accessed.

It’s a surprisingly simple utility with a wide range of uses. Although it was developed for the freight forwarding industry, I could see it as an effective solution for any business that needs to know whether their emails are getting to the right place.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you check it out today.

The latest in our series on Web 2.0 projects includes SignatureConfirm.com. It’s an online signature utility designed to allow individual the ability to draft and send their own agreements and contracts via email where they can be digitally signed.

The concept is not new, and you’ve probably accepted the terms of service or agreed to a company’s conditions online before when signing up for a new service. The aim of SignatureConfirm it seems is to allow individuals the same convenience and utility when they might not otherwise be able to incorporate it into their own website.

At the very least, this concept eliminates the need for an individual to create a contract, fax or email it as a .pdf, have the signing part review it, and wait for them to sign and send it back.

With SignatureConfirm, the online signature process is a fast as an email response.

How it Works.

This part is pretty straightforward (which I like). The site isn’t trying to be a one stop solution for everything, but rather seems to focus on doing one thing and doing it well. This is an approach that I really appreciate in my online applications!

1. Sign up for a free account,
2. Type in or cut and paste the language of the contract you want signed,
3. Send via email to the recipient,
4. They get an encrypted URL and password that they can use to access the agreement (they don’t have to sign up for an account which is nice),
5. They can view the agreement as you typed it and can choose to digitally sign it.
6. Both parties receive confirmation emails during each step of the process and both the signed and unsigned contracts are available for download in .pdf format.

All in all, a good solution if you’re needing to collect online signatures and I can think of dozens of smaller and individual companies that could use it to streamline their contracts process.

As part of my new question and answer series, here are some of the questions my customers have been sending:

Question
How long does it take for my new website to get some traffic?

Answer
You probably won’t see much return on the things you post for at least a month. That’s why we want to get things up sooner rather than later so we can see the traffic as soon as possible.

Question
After looking at my Webalizer statistics, it looks like I’m getting a lot more traffic than I thought. Is this accurate?

Answer
These statistics include a lot of automated search traffic. This comes from the search engines like Google and Yahoo! scanning the site to determine what to return in their search results. A good rule of thumb is to assume that anywhere between one-third and two-thirds of your traffic is automated rather than human eyes on the screen.