Email Marketing is still one of the most cost effective marketing solutions available today!
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Best practices in email marketing go beyond advertising, respect the customer, and speak in a familiar one-on-one style. Email is "the most personal advertising medium in history," says Seth Godin, whose book Permission Marketing set the rules that transformed email marketing into what it is today. "If your email isn't personal, it's broken."
In response to the impersonal abuses of spam, email marketing became personal following the 2003 adoption of the CAN-SPAM Act. The act essentially defined spam as marketing messages sent without permission and set penalties not only for spammers, but also for companies whose products were advertised in the spam. You need to have permission from your customer and you need to allow them the ability to unsubscribe or opt-out of your mailings.
Here are five of the "Best Practices" for email marketing
1. Get Permission
"Email is one of the most powerful form of communications now everyone uses it in business-to-business marketing and everyone you want to reach has access to email. But of all media, it is the one where it's most critical that you have explicit permission."
Without permission you not only risk losing customer goodwill and inviting CAN-SPAM penalties, you could end up blacklisted by ISPs that refuse all mail coming from your domain if spamming complaints have been lodged against you.
Permission is not difficult to obtain. Offer something of value such as a coupon or promise of special discounts, a whitepaper or informational newsletter in exchange for the customer agreeing to receive your messages. Sign-up can be done on a Web site or on paper forms distributed at trade shows and conventions and by traditional mail, resellers, and affiliated organizations in a business network.
2. Build a Targeted Mailing List
"The very best way to get permission is to have your best customers and your biggest fans ask their friends to sign up,"
You should always include a Subscribe Link in your mailing so new readers have a means of signing up when their friends forward it to them. You can also incorporate "Squeeze Pages" into your web site to increase your results but more on that later.
Where do you start if you don't have a mailing list or need to grow one quickly, subscribe to one or more sites that give you the opportunity to create your opt-in list in an easier and quicker way. After subscribing to these sites you can refer these sites to other users. The more new users that register on your behalf the greater your mailing list will be.
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The sites selected below provide free services and also give you the opportunity to upgrade to their paid services for bigger mailing lists and more benefits. As an added benefit you can get paid for having new users registering to their paid services on your behalf.
ListDotCom
ListDotCom claims that it can help you get 100,000 members to your opt-in list in under 30 days. The basic service is free and you can upgrade to their paid service for more benefits. For every new user that registers on your behalf you will get paid $15.99 per month to your PayPal account and this also applies to the free members.
Click HERE to join ListDotCom
The List Machine
The List Machine uses what it calls the world’s fastest list builder by using an exclusive front and back matrix which can help you get 150,000 members to your opt-in list in under 30 days. Only paid members get paid for having new users registering to their service.
Click HERE to join The List Machine
YourBIGList.com
YourBIGList.com does not offer paid memberships and so you cannot get paid for referring new members. But if it helps you create your own list then who cares about commission.
Click HERE to join YourBIGList.com
3. Adopt a Strategy of Persistence
It takes time to build customer relationships. Today it's easily approaching 20 imprints before it makes an impression. If you aren't touching your clients in some way at least once a month, they will find somebody else to do business with.
"After the customer has registered for future emails, downloaded your whitepaper, or entered your sweepstakes, there often is nothing to enhance that relationship. Companies need to think about what should happen next," says Jeanniey Mullen, partner and director of email marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide.
Ogilvy's research shows the first three emails are the most critical. Mullen advises there should be an introductory message in which customers accept an invitation and give permission for future communications, followed by a second that sets up customers' expectations by explaining future benefits (discounts, coupons, or high-value informational newsletters). The third should begin to deliver on their expectations by sending the promised newsletter, whitepaper, or discount offering.
4. Let Readers Drive Design
There's no such thing as guaranteed delivery in the email business however it still has a higher response rate then snail mail. Design is especially important, because filters often block logos, graphics, and Flash animation, they can determine whether or not a customer or prospect even sees your message. Filters are getting extremely thorough in what they're filtering out and if you're not careful, those filters can filter out legitimate email.
We recommend using flat text with hyperlinks to your Web site. Remember the goal is to get them to go to your web site and you can put all of the graphics in the world on your Web site. Once they click through to your Web site you're better able to capture their identity and their information for future follow up. It also doesn't hurt to have a good spam checker program as well. Many of the listed email marketing companies listed here have built in spam checking programs.
Many of these companies also offer both plain and rich text email editions, giving customers the option of registering for the html edition on their Web sites. In those editions, design becomes especially important. But Ogilvy has found that email requires something different from traditional creative marketing design: Its studies have shown that users are most likely to respond to images and copy to the left of an image.
"We have seen increases up to 75 percent in response rates by moving the call to action button up next to an image instead of below the image, or by literally changing a link to a button so it stands out more prominently in the text," Mullen says.
5. Best Practices--Know what you want
The most important element in any kind of successful email marketing is understanding and defining what your realistic strategy should be to ensure your success.
Using 3rd party services such as the ones on the right (or free ones) have advantages and disadvantage:
We don't recommend the free services based on the disadvantages as indicated below.
The advantages (whether commercial or free) are:
- Hands-free - you don't have to manage the list itself. Things like bounced mail, subscriptions and unsubscribes are handled by them. Some of the services will also archive the old issues of your newsletters automatically.
- Confirmation of subscription - all the mailing list hosting services request you to confirm the list or send your subscribers an email requiring them to confirm before they are added to the list. Although you may think this is a hassle that may cost you some subscribers (such as those that can't be bothered to reply to the confirmation request), it is actually useful because it will help prevent cases where a person's email is used to subscribe to a list without his/her permission. At least, you won't be accused of spamming anyone.
- Publicity - A not-so-obvious advantage comes from the publicity the third party service may give to your list. Some mailing list hosts, most notably the free ones, display a list of ezines or newsletters people can subscribe to on their website.
- No additional software needed - you do not need Smartlist, Majordomo, Listserv, or CGI access. All you need is to sign up.
- Free templates, coaching, spam checkers and auto-reponders are usually part of their service but check each one as their benefits vary.
- Cost - The commercial mailing list hosts are somewhat like web hosts, charging either a monthly/yearly fee or charging according to the number of messages you send, bandwidth you use, number of subscribers, etc. however if you are starting small with fewer than 1,000 users they are very low cost and once you grow to a much larger size then you could always bring it in-house.
- Advertising - If you use a free mailing list hosting provider, your subscribers may be subject to third party advertising. They often automatically inject an advertisement into your newsletter or ezine each time an issue is sent out. This advertisement is understandable of course, since the service has to recover its costs some how.
- Control - You do not have total control of your list when you rely on a third party mailing list host. This is especially the case with the free mailing list hosting providers.
- Reliability - You are dependent on the reliability of your mailing list host, however this issues has been significantly reduced over the years.
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