Five Common Email Marketing Mistakes

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I've posted several email checklists before but I think it's always important to master the basics first before you move on to advanced techniques for you email marketing campaigns. When you have an opt in email list, you have a valuable asset that should be generating you recurring revenue every time you use it. If you abuse it, then you risk the opt out and won't get another chance to sell to someone who was interested in your product.

1. Using Words in Your Subject Lines that Trigger Spam Filters - Your email marketing message is completely worthless if it never gets there. Keep these words out of your email subject lines for better deliverablity.
2. Using Only Images and Little to No Text - Many users block all images in their emails. Some of them have email programs which do this automatically to every email address that hasn't been whitelisted. Don't assume your email list will have the images turned on or even that they'll turn them on to see what you sent. If you do, they may end up looking at a blank emails and you'll always get lower response rates.
3. Designing an email as if it's a website - This should be a simple email marketing campaign. Sure it needs to reflect your company branding but leave out the flash, javascript and any bells and whistles so that the message gets across and the email is rendered.
4. Adding the Wrong Reply Email - Yes, it happens. Sometimes by accident and sometimes even on purpose because people want to try and avoid spam filters. It's a bad idea.
5. Missing Information - Don't leave out the from name and contact information and especially your links back to your landing page.

Contact Orange Email Marketing for a free consultation about email marketing, bulk email software, email lists and online marketing.

Email Marketing Basics That Always Improve Results

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In life, many times the "basics" still work. Saying please and thank you, treating others how you wish to be treated, drink water to be healthy, everything in moderation; so many of these things still apply.

In email marketing, the basics still work also. You need to make your campaigns look better for the boss? Let's go over a few basics that will always improve the results of any campaign.

• Scrub Your List - If you're wasting your time and resources sending to people who have no interest in what you offer, this will save time and increase both response and deliverability. Remove names from your email address list which have bounced three consecutive times.

• Segment Your List - So you've got a nice big list that you own. What if you could break your email list rental down into 6-10 segments which you can now send more customized relevant emails to? Your response rates will go up, guaranteed. You opt-outs will also drop.

• Write Good Subject Lines - Keep them short and sweet and make it clear what is in those email marketing messages. Look over your old campaigns to see what worked before.

• Find the Perfect Frequency - If you send too many emails you're asking for trouble. What is best for you? It depends on your market. Once again, the best thing to do is TEST. It might be once a month, twice a month or once a week. Test the response, track your results and then stick with your schedule.

• Send Emails on the Right Days - What are the right days? We've been seeing good results on Mondays and Tuesdays. Some clients actually see good results on Saturdays. Others on Thursday. Again, test for the best response and then stick to that day.

If you always follow these rules you'll always see the best results. Keep track of your data from your email blast software so you can see what is working and then stick to it. Sure your new campaign may be brilliant and your anxious to send it today, but if your data shows it's better to wait until Monday, then wait, or you're just lowering your success rate.

To learn how you can use OrangeFire Email Marketing Software to manage your email newsletter campaigns, please contact Orange Email Marketing.

Are You Sending Customers to Your Landing Page or to Your Home Page?

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So you've got your email marketing campaign running. If you're really working hard to drive traffic then you may also have a PPC marketing campaign running as well. This is great! You've just laid down the tracks for an email blast of traffic to arrive at your website.

But where do those tracks lead? What will they find when the get there?

It seems simple. You're sending them to your website of course. The majority of email marketing campaigns are sending their clicks to "MyBussines.com", which seems like a good idea but may not actually be the best place to send them. You've spent all this time segmenting your email list, but then you don't segment your traffic! Why not?

You could be segmenting your traffic to different landing pages. If you're like most businesses, you offer more than one product or service. When your client clicks on a specific offer on your email campaign, they're saying "Yes, I want to learn more about this product or buy it right now".

Now what do you do then? Are you responding with "Let me take you to the front door of my store" or are you saying "Let me take you right to the aisle in my store where you will find exactly what you're looking for". BIG DIFFERENCE!

Can you guess which clickthrough is has a better chance of turning into a sale? That's right, the customer who was taken directly to what he was looking for is more likely to buy. It seems simple, and it is, yet so many marketers get this wrong.

When you send them to the home page of your site, you're probably giving them a whole bunch of options to choose from, a series of doors they have to walk through to get what they're looking for. If you want to make the sale, you have to make it as EASY as possible for your visitor to take the intended action.

Maybe the action isn't to buy, maybe you just want an email signup, maybe your want their contact info so you can do a follow up call. Whatever it is you want them to do, send them right to it! Remove all barriers to the desired action. Don't just count on the fact that they'll find it themselves. Don't make them search for it. Don't think that if you just drop them off on the main page, maybe they'll buy something else too. If you lead them to what they want and fulfill they need they want right now, they WILL come back on their own and buy more, or you'll get a chance to do a follow up later. For right now, GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT!

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For more information on email marketing or landing page design, please contact Orange Email Marketing for a free consultation.

Make Money During Recession with Email Marketing

photo by Noah Coffey

How about a big pile of money? YES! I don't want to sound greedy or materialistic (I'm not) but money is a good thing. It provides security to you and your family. And right now a lot of people are feeling really insecure and bad about it.

That's understandable. But as I wrote about yesterday, let's stop being negative and make money instead.

To make money you need to stop being scared and instead take ACTION. You need to set a goal, make a plan and then take action to make it happen.

You are interested in email marketing. That's why you're here. That's great, because there is money to be made in email marketing. I work with clients who are making money through their email marketing campaigns every day, right now, in the middle of a recession.

Companies are spending even more money on email marketing during the recession. Email marketing is targeted, it's affordable, it's trackable and it shows a measurable return on investment, which is why companies are increasing email marketing budgets.

There's money to be made out there. I have a client who works in the travel industry selling discount park sleep fly packages, which are travel specials that give you long term airport parking, a hotel room for the night and a shuttle bus to the airport for less than the price of just parking your car at the airport alone.

Instead of rushing to the airport in the morning, you simply spend the night in a hotel right next to the airport, park your car in the hotel's secure long term parking lot and then take the free shuttle bus to the airport. No stress, no rush and you save money. Can't beat that. He serves major US airports with Chicago O'Hare park and fly, Boston Logan park and fly, Newark park and fly and many more. He's even adding new destinations because of demand and just signed up Laguardia park and fly hotels up for his service.

The point is, he's making MONEY. Actually, he's making MORE money. In January 2009 he set RECORD sales for his business! That's the travel business; you know, one of those "discretionary" expenses that people supposedly cut back on during tough times.

But that's not the case, at least not for him. He's not hunkering down afraid or scaling back plans. He's expanding his business. He's spending more money on search engine marketing, not less. Just like the businesses that thrived during the great depression, instead of scaling back on marketing like his competition, he's taking advantage of their budget cuts to put his business in front of more people. He actually has less competition than he did six months ago!

And he's making record profits in the middle of a recession! Take that, naysayers!

While your competition goes into panic mode, you could be expanding your market. People are still buying products and services. The STRONG businesses with great products, great service and well thought out business plans are going to survive just fine.

Use email marketing to boost your website traffic. Build relationships with existing customers. Build trust with new customers. Make more money even during a recession!

For a free email marketing consultation and full service email marketing - Contact Orange Email Marketing.

Checklist of Email Marketing Data

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Time for another checklist to improve the results of your email marketing campaigns. So far we did a simple email quality control checklist and a email relevancy checklist.

Now lets look at the email marketing data that you have already. You have your email marketing list. You likely already have data collected from marketing campaigns utilizing this list.

What can you ask yourself about this data to better leverage it for future campaigns?

• Which campaigns have performed best?
• Why did it perform best? Was it your list? Was it your offer? Was it your subject line?
• How can you use this information to test results for future improvement?
• Could you better segment your list by gender, zip code, age, repeat and new customers or other factors?
• How could you follow up to your list based on the actions different recipients took? Could the next message be changed for those who clicked, those who purchased and those who didn't?
• How will you measure the success of your next campaign?
• What is your plan of action after your current campaign?

The questions you ask yourself about the data and results you receive after each marketing campaign will help determine the success of your future campaigns. When your results aren't what you hope for, some people just want to move on to another offer or a different list.

Don't keep doing the same thing every time, always study your results and look to see what you can do better.

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For information on full service email marketing, please contact Orange Email Marketing for a free consultation.

Keep Your Email Messages Relevant

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Previously I gave you a simple checklist for your email campaigns to make sure your messages work correctly. That covers very simple way to insure your email list recipients receive and error free professional looking message. Now lets do another list to make sure your messages are relevant.

The people who receive your email marketing messages are going to much happier if they receive something they actually WANT. No surprise there but people still mess this one up. Just recycling a campaign you've already used in print or direct mailing isn't going to cut it. These questions will require more work then spell checking and copying and pasting.

Questions to ask to make sure your email message is relevant:

• What is your business goal for the campaign?
• How will your email marketing campaign compliment your other marketing efforts?
• What aspects of your previous campaigns was successful?
• What aspects of previous campaigns were not successful?
• Can you summarize the value of your message to customers in one sentence?
• Is there a clear Call To Action?
• How will you measure this campaigns success?
• What will you do after the campaign is over to build on your success?

Ask yourself and your team these questions in order to keep your campaigns relevant. Know your goals, know how to measure success and work your campaign into your overall marketing strategy. Consider what came before and what you will do in the future and you will ensure the best results.

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Contact Orange Email Marketing for information on pricing for email marketing campaigns.

Companies Love Email Marketing During Recession

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Even as the economic climate has a lot of people watching their budgets carefully, email marketing remains at the top of many marketers lists as a favorite method of ad spend.

The reason is simple: Email Marketing continues to show a consistent return on investment.

When times are tough and budgets need to get cut, the last thing you want to do is cut spending on marketing campaigns that continue to show a positive return on investment for every dollar spent. It's low cost, targeted and measurable effective. That's not the type of thing anyone needs to be cutting their budget on.

Companies are still seeing results from their in house email lists. Your in-house email lists are interested customers who are interested in what you have to offer and have signed up to learn more and receive the benefits your products and services have to offer.

29% of marketers are planning on increasing their spend on email list rentals. These are email lists put together by outside companies and segmented by demographics so they can be rented to other companies. This reverses a trend of recent years where budgets for rented lists have shrunk. The recession though is causing people to reexamine list rentals and to realize that used correctly they still generate a good ROI and can boost your sales in tough times.

Contact Orange Email Marketing for a free consultation about our email list rentals, bulk email broadcasting and email marketing software.

Email Marketing Subject Lines - Keep it Short and Sweet

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Email Subject Lines! I could talk a lot about their importance in email marketing because they're the most important part of your campaigns. Your email message and offer is extremely important but many recipients will never make it that far if you don't have a good email subject line. Today we'll discuss the optimum length of your subject line.

In the general sense, shorter subject lines are associated with better open rates for your email marketing campaigns. This is a widely excepted general rule and with some testing, you will see the shorter subject lines will usually beat longer subject lines.

Too long of a subject line is worthless because it will end up cut off and unseen by the recipient. The display length will vary depending on the email program being used but you will be limited to somewhere between 45 - 75 characters.

Take advantage of that limited space. Your message has got to be short and sweet, convey the intended message and most importantly, entice that buy email list recipient to open it.

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For full service email marketing solutions, contact Orange Email Marketing for a free consultation.

Define Your Email Objectives

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So let's talk about defining your Email Marketing Objectives. What do you want to achieve from your email marketing campaign?

You probably want to make more money. You want to build your business. Those are general "wants" but what we want to define are the objectives. Your objectives should be easy to understand and also to measure.

Breakdown of the Most Common Email Marketing Objectives:

Market Research - You can collect data, demographics and the needs of your customers by conducting research through your email marketing lists. You could test the market potential of a new product before you've invested a lot of resources in it.

Brand Awareness - Trying to get people to pay attention to your company, build new relationships or offering your previous contacts something new.

Prospecting - Just like in traditional outside sales, your trying to reach and entice new customers and start the sales process with them.

Cross-Selling and Up-Selling - Existing clients that you may be able to offer additional products and services to.

Customer Management - You've already made the sale now you want to maintain and build a relationship.

Customer Retention - Keep them as a happy, satisfied customer. Maintain their loyalty and offer special rewards to keep them coming back.

Sales Promotions - Limited time special offers for your lists. A special price to entice them to buy now.

You will notice that many of these are interconnected. They also go beyond just a simple promotion. We're talking about using email marketing as a long term strategy, not a one time thing to make the sale. Your email lists can keep providing you value again and again.

Contact Orange Email Marketing for a free email marketing consultation.