Email marketing campaigns can increase your profits by 30% (or more). Save time, money, and advertising costs; build customer relationships and increase your subscriber list automatically; track and monitor online responses in real-time and increase your return on investment.

You can set your campaign on automatic pilot by using automatic responders, and be anywhere in the world
Offline businesses can run email marketing campaigns and increase profits by up to 30%, even without a website

To help you run a successful email marketing campaign, you will find valuable information and Tips:

Definition of Email Marketing Campaigns
Consider the buying process
For an existing subscriber list
New Business Start ups without a Subscriber List
More about Email Marketing
How to manage a campaign
Defining Objectives
Determining criteria for measuring success
Steps for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Content and copywriting
We Once Ate Spam
Sequential Designer Emails for Automatic Responders
Timing is very Important
Testing, Tracking and Conversion

The good news is – we can do it all for you.

We offer a complete range of services in design, presentations, direct email content and copywriting, article and ezine creation, research and ad placement, sequential designer emails for automatic responders, personalisation scripts, database and everything you need for email marketing.

You can choose to contact us, use our Self Service Project Cart, or ask for a free quotation (no obligation) and we’ll advise you on the best solution to meet your business needs. We research your target market and create an email marketing campaign that fits your company image and will achieve the best results for you.

Definition of Email Marketing Campaigns

Email Marketing Campaigns are a coordinated sequence of individual email messages delivered at intervals and with an overall objective in mind. A campaign allows each new message to build on previous success.

In our article, Some Email Marketing Campaign Definitions, you will find more definitions and relevant terms used for email marketing campaigns, such as readability, landing page, headers, and blocking.

Consider the buying process

Remember it can take up to seven communications to persuade your subscribers to take further action.

Whenever a customer makes a buying decision, that decision represents the culmination of a process. It may take place almost instantaneously or stretch out over a long period of time, but it's a process, not an event.

There are three mindsets of customers: those who know exactly what they want; those who know but need convincing; and those who are interested but need to learn more before they decide what they want.

At each stage of your campaign, it is wise to consider these three mindsets, and ensure your content allows for each stage of the sales process. Once you close a sale, that individual should be taken off the campaign mailing list.

For an existing subscriber list

The people who have already purchased something from you, joined your list for a freebie, or newsletter give you easy opportunities to sell to them many more times, providing it is in their area of interest. This is your email campaign target.

New Business Start ups without a Subscriber List

If you don’t have a mailing list yet, or have a list and want to increase your subscriber base, there are some ways you can achieve this:

Build Your Own List
By far the best way is to build up your own subscriber list. Use Direct Opt-in Email on your website by offering free information via a double opt-in process. This s the most legitimate and beneficial way to acquire targeted subscribers who are interested in your products and services.

Seek Endorsement
You can seek endorsement from a large list owner to recommend visiting your website. This might be a reciprocal arrangement, joint venture, paid advertising method, such as Ezine promotion, banner exchange, or similar type of endorsement.

Use Internet Marketing Techniques
Our Internet/Website Marketing Services page describes many ways you can legitimately acquire new customers and subscribers. These include search engine ranking with search engine and directory submissions, reciprocal linking campaigns, pay per click and banner advertising, press releases and publicity, affiliate programs, and much more.

Rent a List
You can rent email lists from a broker, but be extremely careful if you take this route. Many of these so-called ‘safe lists’ can be harvested from the internet, are not permission-based, and can be responsible for much of the ‘spam’ which is clogging the internet.

More about Email Marketing

Our email marketing page provides an overview of what email marketing entails with links to additional pages on related subjects. These sections include:-

Build a Legitimate List using Direct Opt-in Email
If you already have an existing mailing list
Offering ‘bait’ to increase your mailing list
Newsletters/Ezines
Personalised Email Marketing
Content and Direct Response Copywriting
Email Style, Design and Presentation
Multimedia
Automate your Email Marketing
Targeting your Customers
Sequential Designer Emails for Automatic Responders
Understanding the Rules and Technology

How to manage a Campaign

We recommend these guidelines to approach an email marketing campaign:

Define objectives:
Determine criteria for measuring success:
Select highly reliable email list management software or list hosting service
Confirm member subscriptions with a double opt-in process.
Enable list members to subscribe and unsubscribe from the list very easily
Insert hotlinks or other dynamic elements into each email message so that customers can take action
Watch membership activity carefully. In particular, look for connections between unsubscribes and mailing frequency; sending direct marketing messages too frequently can cause a decline in membership.

Defining Objectives

Your Email Campaign might be to achieve any of the following objectives:-

To provide discounted offers for members only, with limited time deadlines.
To introduce a new product or service
To tell customers about website updates and other announcements
To introduce new articles of interest
To offer a second, different newsletter or tips focusing on a related, but special subject.
To advertise in someone else’s newsletter or ezine with a link to your website.
To seek endorsement for your products or services from relevant ezine owners and return the compliment.
To provide regular updates and reminders to your affiliates to maintain their interest in promoting your products and services.

Tip: Set your objectives and focus on achieving them.

Determining criteria for measuring success

Measuring the success of an email marketing campaign will depend on your objectives. You may want to acquire new customers by focussing on encouraging action, or encourage loyalty and repeat purchases from existing customers.

Your objective might be to sell a new product from your website, but the measure of success for your email campaign could be the percentage of subscribers who link from your email to the website then make a purchase, or how many link up, don’t make a purchase but look around for other items of interest, and so on.

First, determine the criteria by which you will measure the effectiveness of your email campaign, then collect and evaluate the statistics. Whatever action or non-action your recipients take, will tell you something about your sales process and identify areas that need improvement. It’s a matter of separating response from results.

Tip: Success is measured by the criteria you set

Steps for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Email a ‘targeted’ list of people who will be interested in your offer
Personalize each and every email
Write subject lines and headlines that emphasize WIIFM (What’s in it for me) benefits you are offering your customers.
Summarize the benefits in the first paragraph
Test your email on a small percentage of your opt-in list
Make it Easy to Read, using the right techniques
Give them a choice of Text emails or HTML
Be sure your email is easy to reply to
Develop a Signature File (Sig file)

Content and copywriting

The main influence on the success of any email campaign is the power of your message. Focus your campaign, make your message unique and be prepared to give it time.

Message types for email campaigns

A message that drives action (buy now)
Buy-now messages are immediate, direct response-type messages by nature. To move from here to building lifetime customers, your messages should be like building blocks. Increase the relevancy of the message; increase the frequency of its repetition, or both.

A message that builds relationships (builds identity or "brand"). Build-identity messages are aimed at meeting deeper, more long-term goals. Branding is accomplished only when you have a relevant message that is repeated with enough frequency to become stored in the mind of the recipient.

Tip: For the best results, have a mix of buy now and long-term, brand-building messages into your email campaign.

Creating well written and professional quality messages in your emails requires content and copywriting skills, which address your prospect's emotional needs and communicate how the product or service will improve his/her quality of life or make him/her feel better. WIIFM (What’s in it for me) benefits are more effective in driving action.

Effective content is engaging, useful, informative, educational, professional and entertaining; building these factors into your email campaign will help you achieve your objectives.

Tip: A poorly written email will destroy your credibility

Size Matters

Shorter messages are usually the best, but if you need long messages or you are using an article, don’t forget to cater for the skim readers, using highlights, bullets or other pointers to determine the essence of the email.

Tip: Always consider the reader’s attention span

Presentation and Readability

However good your messages, they will need to conform to email etiquette standards for presentation and readability. All the copy, graphics, images, the use of capitals and white space are all very important.

Generally, HTML email performs better than plain text, so design two versions for your email campaign. If your subscribers have switched off HTML email for fear of a worm or virus infecting their computers, their email software will default to the text only version.

Tip: Send out both HTML and Plain Text versions of your email together.

Sign your Email

Lastly, remember to add your electronic signature file (sig file) at the end of the message, identifying the sender, company name, contact information and include a call-to-action with a link to your website.

Tip: Develop a Signature file to generate new business and provide free advertising.

We Once Ate Spam

Many years ago, Spam was a tinned food containing a meat product you could eat hot or cold. Nowadays, it is the food of unethical nuisances (spammers) trying to create havoc on the internet.

The ‘spammers’ use a ‘robot’ or ‘spider’ software program that "harvests" email addresses from web sites. It cruises the internet, going from website to website, grabbing anything with a "@" symbol in it, and saving that information in a database. These spam spiders can harvest Hundreds of thousands of email addresses a day, which are then used by the spammers’ to send out their messages.

To ensure your email messages reach your legitimate customers, you must conform to current ISP (Internet Service Providers) spam filters and other obstacles which prevent delivery.

The Wrong Words can have Disastrous Results

There are words and phrases which should be avoided such ‘free’, ‘time-limited offer’, etc, which will be identified as ‘spam’ by ISPs and spam filters, preventing your email from being delivered (even to a legitimate double opt-in mailing list) and probably blacklisting you, your company and your website, with disastrous consequences

Tip: Keep up to date with all ISP spam policies, rules and guidelines.

Sequential Designer Emails for Automatic Responders

Successful internet marketers confirm that it can take up to seven communications to persuade your subscribers to buy your products and services.

The key is to develop a sequence of interconnected emails with a logical flow and united presentation. This approach will develop your subscribers’ confidence and trust in you, and keep them eager and on the lookout for more of what you have to offer.

Give them good information which convinces them you are the best resource to supply what they want, when they want, and give them value for money.

You can have your own customized 'designer' email content that won't be bounced by ISP spam filters. Our services offer email content, format and style for Sequential Designer Emails for Automatic Responders.

Timing is very Important

Your goal is to give your customers the right message and send it when they are likely to take the time to read it. Timing can be incorporated into a campaign, and increase your return on investment (ROI).

If you have not ventured into email marketing yet, consider your target market and the most likely time or days of the week they might spend some quality time reading your emails. For instance:-

B2B (Business to Business) or rich media campaigns are going to work better during office hours, but a Monday morning may not be the best time, with your email amongst many that have accumulated over the weekend. Your email must also stand out so that it doesn’t get dumped with the rest of the ‘spam’ in the recipient’s inbox.

B2C (Business to Consumer) campaigns are going to work best when your messages arrive after office hours and at weekends. Subjects might be vacations, hobbies, domestic purchases, health products and many other type of product or service which involves leisure-time decisions.

Tip: Be consistent: If you mail regularly, stick to your schedule as your subscribers will be expecting a communication.

If you already have a good response and conversion rate, you should be able to run an effective email campaign.

Timing factors to consider

Time of day opt-in from website
Time of day purchases happen
The time of day the mailing goes out
The day of the week
Seasonal (vacation or school)
Routine or irregular scheduling.
Geographical segmentation
Appropriate interval between emails in a campaign

If your email technology can't pinpoint these actions take a wild guess, and test a small proportion of your subscriber list.

Tip: Gather relevant customer data or extrapolate from existing information, and time your campaign mailings accordingly.

Testing, Tracking and Conversion

Before you launch your email marketing campaign, test that everything is working correctly, and then only launch your campaign on a small number to track the responses and ascertain the conversion rate. If it works for a proportion, release it to all your selected subscribers.

Our article Email Testing, Tracking and Conversion includes information and definitions about cell testing, click through rates, costs and conversion rates, percentages of bounce-back, percentage of emails opened and subscriber removals.

Tip: Test, track and calculate your conversion rate on a small percentage of your opt-in list before launching your campaign.

Rent a List

Rental Lists (or Acquisition lists) are a list of prospects or a targeted group of recipients who have opted-in to receive information about certain subjects. Using permission-based rental lists, marketers can send e-mail messages to audiences targeted by interest category, profession, demographic information and more.

There are genuine third part email lists available to rent, and many more so-called ‘safe lists’ available on the internet. Thoroughly check the authenticity and opt-in method used for any lists, or email addresses exchange you might be offered. Whilst it may be very tempting, you could be labelled as a ‘spammer’ by people receiving emails they have not asked for.

If you don’t have a mailing list of your own, or can’t wait until this builds up into sufficient numbers for your email campaign, renting a legitimate list could be an option to consider.

These can also be very expensive. You can rent a list (one-time use) of anything from 500 to 100,000 names, at a CPM (Cost per thousand) which will vary according to the list owners.

Tip: Build your own double opt-in email list via your own website ‘subscribe’ button, advertisements, endorsements, articles and other methods with a link to your website so that visitors can choose whether to subscribe or not.

The good news is – we can do it all for you.

Back