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Spam Is Dead, Long Live Email Marketing!

Written by Matt Sawyer  

Email marketing has a bad reputation, though you should be very clear about the difference between an opt-in list and spam.

Spam is the indiscriminate sending of emails to people who don’t want to receive them and haven’t signed up for them (or have requested to be removed from a list) Spam is illegal in many countries – don’t do it! You may find that you receive a return for little effort, but apart from being illegal it’ll have a negative impact on your company and your brand.

Opt-in email lists on the other hand are a fantastic opportunity for revenue. You have to work at it though, it’s no good sending a daily untargeted email to people, they’ll opt-out much quicker than you can sign them up.

What is an opt-in email?
An opt-in email is when a visitor to your website signs-up to receive more information about your website, products, services and/or related news through a newsletter to their email address. This can be a single time, or regular monthly or weekly emails.

How can I convince people to sign-up?
Sometimes your website will be enough to convince people that they’d like to know more about you. Other times you can do this by offering free goods or services. A popular technique at the moment is to offer free e-books.

Even once you’ve convinced people to sign-up, you still need to convince them to continue to receive the newsletter and ideally to revisit your site and make a purchase.

You need to keep the content of your newsletter interesting, informative, and relevant. Remember that the subscribers to your newsletter came from your website, so they’re highly targeted prospects. The content has to useful to them in order for them to want to read more and visit your site.

Some of my top tips for email marketing success are,

    * Address people by their name, personalise the email so they don’t feel like they’re just part of a long list.
    * Professional email marketing software will enable you to do this and I would encourage you to use it.
    * Avoid spammy sounding sales techniques, lots of $$$ and !!! don’t sell, they get deleted.
    * Encourage signups. Use things such as free gifts and offers to improve the sign-up rates.
    * Timing. When are your readers going to be at their computers? If you’re mailing to the office crowd then the weekend isn’t a great time to send it.
    * Give a call to action. Tell people what they have to do. Visit us here now, or Call me on….
    * Create landing pages for each link from your emails. You’ll find your conversion rates vastly improve.
    * Send newsletters at a certain time, if you’re doing things right people should be waiting for them.
    * Offering an easy unsubscribe option will save a lot of trouble and complaints from your ISP, host and email software provider.
    * Use your email campaign for market research, encourage interactivity, questions and feedback. If you have a forum, link to it.
    * Break up the text, large blocks of content don’t get read, keep paragraphs to a few lines at most.
    * Always include your contact information
    * Don’t buy other people’s lists. Create your own, it’s targeted directly to your site, you can trust the origin of the contacts and you can be sure you’re not spamming them.
    * Instead of selling your list, try cross-marketing. Offer to promote other relevant products in your list in return for them doing the same.
    * Include your band in the subject line. If the recipient knows you and trusts your brand, then you have a higher chance of getting the email opened.

Good luck with email marketing. Remember that it’s not spamming, if done correctly you can place your message in front of a relevant captive audience each time you send a newsletter and the potential returns can be very high.

About the author:
Matt Sawyer has had 9 years experience working in both marketing, internet marketing and SEO across a multitude of industries. He specialises in SEO and online marketing with an emphasis on enabling small to medium sized businesses to compete in an ever changing market. For internet marketing services contact him at ProMarketing.org