E-Biz Booster Blog

If you are a running a small business, marketing is often an integral component to bringing awareness to your operation, products, and services. While there are various types of marketing strategies that small businesses can employ, e-mail marketing is often looked over in favor of more traditional methods like poster or mail advertising, sign & billboard, and buying television and radio space. But why do you need e-mail marketing?

E-mail marketing offers a larger reach in audience at a low cost to small businesses. E-mail marketing also provides small businesses with the ability to communicate instantly with potential customers and clients, while simultaneously driving traffic to the business website. Information received through e-mail can also help businesses understand the needs and desires of prospective customers without having to employ expensive research, trial and error, and learning from long term mistakes.

While there are many great advantages to e-mail marketing (↑), there are a few things business owners should know before fully embracing this type of marketing.

Don’t become a spammer – First and foremost, do not send out constant e-mail blasts to your customer mailing list or spam networks that might potentially attract new clients. Unless there is a good reason for your business to communicate with customers on a weekly basis, anything more than a couple of e-mail blasts each month is probably too much. No customer likes receiving a large amount of junk mail, and if you inundate them with ads, promotions, and other communication, they will ignore you at best or choose a competitor at worst.

Distinguish yourself – Consumers sign up for e-mail lists and marketing promotion updates all the time. Some consumers will spend the first part of their morning deleting 20-30 spam e-mails and other promotions they simply do not have the time or care for. Part of this has to do with the content in the subject line (the first thing a customer will generally read before opening an e-mail), while other consumers are simply tired of receiving the same old, lame product promotions that seem too good to be true (and generally are) before reading the fine print. Savvy e-mail marketers will know who their audience and target markets are, approach them accordingly, and distinguish themselves from other companies (even those who are not competitors) that also send out constant, bulky e-mail ads.

Get Legit – Make sure that when you send out advertising and promotions they are sent from your site’s domain name. Sending e-mails to prospective clients from a Gmail or Yahoo! Mail account looks unprofessional, so sending mail out from a legitimate e-mail domain account will enhance your credibility. Correspondence sent from credit domains will be noticed by prospective customers and will statistically increase your chances for making a sale.

Know your marketing – When marketing via e-mail, it is important that you stay consistent with your other marketing campaigns. Further, it wise to have a firm grasp of who you are targeting and what they require. Having solid experience in marketing will benefit you here, but for those who are new to such an endeavor should read up and get as much research under their belt as possible. Watching the behavior of your competitors can be beneficial, and noticing the types of e-mail marketing you receive as a consumer can help you learn what to do (and what not to do).

Be easy on your customers – If you make it easy to subscribe, you will significantly enhance the amount of people that will sign up for e-mail notifications and announcements. Posting a subtle hyperlink on your website, blog, or Facebook page will allow customers a quick and easy medium to subscribe for your e-mail notifications.

Edit – There’s not much to say here; be grammatically correct, succinct, and precise with what you want to say to customers.

Share – Any e-mail you send out to a prospective customer is shareable, but making content on your website sharable is a great, indirect e-mail marketing strategy. By making content e-mail-able, customers will do the e-mail marketing for you. If you create a page or post a blog that is newsworthy or of which becomes highly acclaimed, visitors to your site can e-mail each other the content. This not only promotes your website, product, or service, but helps increase your traffic as well.

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Angie Picardo is a staff writer for NerdWallet. Her mission is to help consumers stay financially savvy, and save some money with the best online savings accounts. (↑)

Welcome to the 28th edition of email marketing tips on February, 9th, 2013.

After having put to sleep for more than two years, it’s time to wake up the carnival, again. I also have done some housekeeping:

All obsolete tips, broken links, etc. in the legacy editions 1 through 27 have been taken care of and are deleted now. Only evergreen, good tips from reputable sources have survived this procedure.

Interestingly it was mostly copywriters’ tips which had to be removed. Most of them just have disappeared from the web or their sites have got in too bad a shape that I don’t want to link to them anymore.

The good news is that we had some well known experts contributing here in the past.

You’ll find expert advise in those past editions from authorities like:

• Bob Bly (↑) - copywriting, USA East-coast
  
  
• John Carlton (↑) - copywriting, USA West-coast
  
  
• Patrick Schwerdtfeger (↑) - authority on self-employment, USA
  
  
• Mark Brownlow (↑) - email marketing, Austria
  
  
• Terry Dean (↑) - internet marketing, coaching, USA
  
  
• Michel Fortin (↑) - copywriting, business building, USA, Canada
  
  
• …and many more.

Since I started this carnival in 2008 the Web and the relevance of blogcarnival.com have changed. However, let’s see how it goes in 2013.

Here are the tips of the day.

tools and strategy

The next two tips are quite interesting because they are quite opposite to each other. At first Ioan shows us how to use your blog to send out emails for free. Then Mike suggests to re-purpose your ezine content on your blog.

Ioan Draniciar presents How to Use Your Blog to Create a Free Viral List Building System (↑) posted at Lazy Cash Making Formula (↑), saying, “If you follow my blog closely, you’ll notice a pattern. I post an article on my blog every time I learn something of real value from internet marketers I respect and follow. We all have to learn from someone and it should be from somebody who’s an authority in our niche. Brad Gosse is an awesome internet marketer, a straight shooter, honest and someone I can really trust.

I picked up this little gold nugget of information from Brad and added a little twist of my own to it in order to make it more effective. This method can help you tremendously when it comes to getting repeat visitors to your site.”

John’s comment: Indeed, you can put an email signup form from Feedburner on your site. However, you are very limited with this approach. But, hey, it’ free and it might get you started.

(On the other hand the author uses email marketing services from getresponse.com on his site. I wonder why?

Mike Munter presents Move Your Newsletter Content To Your Blog And Reach A Wider Audience (↑) posted at Mike Munter, Marketing Consultant (↑), saying, “Use this tip to get more web traffic and increase sales.”

John’s comment: Personally I am not a fan of pretty, content rich ezines but there are certainly plenty of use cases for them. Saying that, I find it a good idea to put those ezines online for public viewing and indexing by search engines. Thanks also for the descriptive screen shots, Mike.

Nishadha presents Market Your Startup with Emails: 6 Effective Ways with Examples (↑) posted at Creately Blog | Diagramming Articles and How to Draw Diagram Tips (↑), saying, “How a start-up can use email marketing.”

John’s comment: Good examples and guidelines for a brand building type of newsletter. Also with pretty screen shots. Nishada lists and explains six important features of such a newsletter. Miss one and you diminish your ROI.

editor’s pick

Mark Brownlow, The permission gamble: can you send more email safely? (↑) posted at No man is an iland (↑), saying, “”

John’s comment: The article I have picked here is from 2010 but still relevant. After a short discussion Mark calls out 6 way you could send more emails to your subscribers without too much risk of annoying them.

Zach Bulygo, How to Keep Email Marketing Manageable (↑) posted at KISSmetrics - Tips, Tricks and Resources for Analytics, Marketing and Testing (↑), saying, “It could be argued that email marketing is a better and more effective form of marketing. Unlike TV, print, and internet ads, email marketing is opt-in, so people are willing and want to read your email messages. Unfortunately, many companies get overwhelmed and abandon their email marketing efforts. How can you set up an email marketing initiative that is relatively easy to undertake and maintain? Well, cover the basics first.”

John’s comment: Zach provides three ways for getting the creative juices flowing. And he discusses them in context of recent real world examples and shows why they work.

That concludes this edition of email marketing tips. Past posts and future hosts can be found on my email marketing tips blog carnival home page.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: If you like this edition, check out the previous email marketing tips - edition 27, too.

Technorati tags: email marketing tips, blog carnival

Email marketing is more important than ever. It's a very cost effective means to stay connected with your customers and prospects. And you do not only want to stay connected, you want to build a relationship with your members.

While social media platforms like twitter and facebook allow you to be present as a business, as a marketer, they very often change the rules, … You don't want to be at their mercy. Build your email list. Start now and continue to grow it.

Email Marketing Tips - Blog Carnival

→ Submit your email marketing related blog post to the next edition in March 2013.



The Archive

• Email Marketing Tips - Edition 28, Feb 9, 2013
  Includes: (*) Use Your Blog to Power Your Email, (*) Power Your Blog from Your Ezine, (*) Email Marketing for Startups, (*) The Permission Gamble, (*) Keep Email Marketing Simple
  
  
• Email Marketing Tips - Edition 27, Oct 27, 2010
  Includes: (*) Behavioural Targeting, (*) Sharing via Email vs. Social Media, (*) Tips to Improve Your ROI, and more …
  
  
• Email Marketing Tips - Edition 26, Oct 14, 2010
  Includes: (*) False idols: 4 beliefs that can hurt your email marketing, (*) Keyword Research for Email Marketing, (*) 12 Email Marketing Tips For Small Business, (*) 7 Books About Email Marketing, and more …
  
  
• Email Marketing Tips - Edition 25, Sep 30, 2010
  Includes: (*) Email Deliverability; (*) Email Marketing Jargon Explained; (*) Top 3 Sales Copy Mistakes; (*) 8-step E-mail marketing refresher, and more …
  
  
• Email Marketing Tips - Edition 24, Jul 24, 2010
  Includes: (*) Getting to Know E-Mail Recipients; (*) Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide; (*) Aweber Tutorial; and more …

→ Continue reading:

I came across two interesting articles on internet Retailer (↑) in my email inbox today . I thought I’ll share them with you. Let’s start with the not so good news.

New Email Laws in Canada in 2012

Canadian law makers create FISA -- Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act -- which will be in effect in 2012.

As long as you want to reach Canadian consumers or by Email you will need to adhere to this new law.

The law will apply if:

• You want to reach Canadian consumers
• You are using equipment (e.g. servers) inside Canadian borders.

It doesn’t matter where you are located or where you are sending your commercial emails from.

Most important implication: Opt-in first is a strict requirement!

You’ll need the permission from consumers before you may send commercial email to them. The usual opt-out method which many US-based businesses use today will be prohibited.

Read the full article: A new hurdle for e-mail (↑).

As usual the law will affect regular businesses only. Spammers don’t care.

The One Big Chance: The inbox Goes Mobile

It is a trend that people are connected to the Net and to their email inbox more often and on multiple places. You don’t need to wait till it’s raining and people stay at home at their desktop computer. They take their email everywhere, anytime.

That’s an opportunity, isn’t it.

But you need to be prepared for it. Do your commercial emails display nicely on those mobile devices with the tiny screens? If not, change that.

Thanks to the fact that most if not all social media and networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and G+ as the latest star, connect to your email inbox to some extent. I.e. even the young generation knows what email is. It does not main that they like to consume email but email has one big advantage over the walls on Facebook or the Twitter and Google Plus streams.

It’s an archive, one can sort and use filters. It’s much easier to find a specific message in email than on social media


Read the full article: With consumers communicating on the move, e-mail must go mobile, … (↑)


Hope you like the tips. Let me know.

Yours
John W. Furst

Email marketing is supposedly dead. I love it when I hear people say this, because it usually comes from one of the people that pound their list everyday with a the “latest greatest offer” for that day.

Email marketing should be dead for those folks because it gets old really quick. Think about it, if this is the latest greatest offer, does that mean that yesterday’s offer now stinks. And what about tomorrow’s offer? Etc. etc.

But, if you are taking really good care of your list community your emails will be welcomed. Here are a few ways to increase the open rate of your emails with strategic use of the PS.

Many people will scan down to the PS in an email, just like they do in a sales letter. So why not make yours powerful for pulling in prospects and profits.

For each tip, be sure to include in the PS the link you want your reader to click. (I know that sounds so obvious, but you should see what I see sometimes…

7 Universal Laws for the Email PS

The Law of the Recap - Since many people scan to the PS of an email for the bottom line, this is a good place to review what you have said in your email. Here’s a template: This is what I have for you, this is what it will do for you, this is what I want you to do next…

The Law of Scarcity - Remind your reader that their is a limit to what is offered in the email. For example: only 200 lines available for the call, just 17 slots left, only selling 20 more packages, etc.

The Law of Urgency - Best used when you want someone to act quickly. For example: Offer ends at midnight tonight, last chance to register, register before all the lines fill up, etc.

The Law of Colombo - Some of you will remember the great character Lieutenant Columbo, the detective in the rumpled overcoat, played by Peter Falk. He had a way of waiting until someone thought the conversation was over before driving home a point with “Just one more thing…” So an example for our purposes would be: “And, of by the way…”

The Law of Humor - You are allowed to have fun with this, ya know? Sometimes just to do something different, and spread a little good will, I’ll stick a short clean joke. Just Google “short clean jokes” to find ones you can use.

The Law of Oops - Related to the Law of Columbo, this is when you start your PS off with “Oh, I almost forgot…” and then add in something that will get them to click on the link you want.

The Law of Blank - This is a bit silly, but it’s fun and spreads goodwill. Since folks will almost always look at the PS, every now and then I’ll type in after the PS - “This PS left intentionally blank.” It’s funny because now it is no longer blank. I got this idea from the phone company that used to print that on a previously blank sheet of paper in the bill. I am not making this up.

And so now here’s a way to get many more great tips and tools on a regular basis, on my blog at http://JeffHerring.com

You’ll find leading edge tips and tools for Article Marketing, Content Creation, Traffic Generation, List Building, Online Visibility, Info Product Creation and so much more…

From Jeff Herring - The Article Marketing Guy.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeff_Herring

Image source: “Revtank Outtakes” Copyright ©2010 by Mish Sukharev - Some rights reserved - CC-BY - modified by John W. Furst.

Despite all of the new ways to promote yourself and your products on the internet, email marketing still remains an essential part of any online marketing campaign. A newsletter is a great way to promote yourself, and your products. Let’s take a look at what you should do with your newsletter to ensure that your subscribers will keep reading it.

Entertaining, and Informative

Your newsletter should be both entertaining and informative. Obviously, you’re going to want to send out sales information to your subscribers, but if that’s all you send out, your subscribers will stop reading your newsletter very quickly.

It’s a good idea to send out entertaining and informative content in each email. If you find something interesting that’s related to your niche, pass it along to your subscribers. Entertaining videos, funny comics, and interesting news stories all make great content for your newsletter.

Of course, send out some promotional information too, just make sure to add additional value for your subscribers with entertaining and informative content.

Clear and Concise

If you want your subscribers to keep reading your newsletter, you have to keep it clear and concise. Don’t make your readers sift through a wall of text to find the interesting, or useful information in each email.

The harder they have to work at finding the useful information in your email, the less likely they will be to read the next email you send out. Stick to short paragraphs and bulleted lists. Be sure that your content is clear, and easy to read, and your subscribers will be more likely to keep reading your newsletter.

Sales Copy

If you’re sending out a strictly promotional email, be sure to include all of the necessary information for your readers. If you’re telling them about a sale, make sure you mention any exceptions tot he sale in the email.

Use bulleted lists to give your readers all of the details about your sale. The easier your sales copy is to follow the more likely your readers will be to absorb, and react to it.

Email marketing can be tough, but if you keep these tips in mind, you’ll have a successful newsletter.

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