How To Succeed With Email Marketing

By Desmond Mantor © 2005

In recent years, email marketing has received some bad press with many considering all efforts to be little more than "spam." To stop the delivery of marketing emails, firewalls have been erected and filters set in place.

However, it must be said that email marketing is one of the cheapest methods of marketing any business online. Not only is email marketing incredibly cost-effective, the market is absolutely huge since there are nearly a billion people connected to the Internet and millions more users are being added every month.

For anyone who has a valid product or service to offer, but with limited funds to set aside for advertising, email marketing is probably the best option for a growing business. Now, here are a few tips which will help you reach that vast audience using email marketing.

Personalize your greeting. People do not appreciate being thought of as just some number or email address out there in cyberspace. They are savvy enough to recognize that an email without a personalized greeting has simply been generated by software and are far more likely to dump it in the trash bin than a message that actually uses their name.

While it does take more time, you will likely see a far better response rate if you personalize the subject lines. Also, avoid using gimmicks like $$$ in the subject heading or an excessive amount of exclamation marks.

To be successful, the email must contain a very clear call to action. There is little point in stimulating reader interest and then not telling them how to proceed in using your product or service.

Most successful email marketers will use links to direct the reader to a web site where they may sign-up for further information or to actually receive the product or service being advertised.

Ultimately, there must be a clear route for people to take once they have decided to purchase. It doesn't matter if this is a web link or a telephone number, the principle is the same.

It would be fair to say that the most important email marketing tip is to test, test and test again. Don't just create one email and consider it your very best effort.

Write 2 or even 3 different versions of the very same offer. Then, try sending them to a section of your subscribers, maybe around a 100 emails each. You may wish to test 3 variables. These could be, the subject line, the link placement and the ad copy itself.

Go ahead and make one change at a time. First try the link placement variables and see which is most effective. Then try 3 different subject line versions, and so on. Now this does take time and effort but it will be worth it since your end result will be a finely tuned email that has been proved to generate the results that need.

E-mail marketing may have a bad reputation, but this does not mean it is ineffective. If this was so, we would be seeing fewer and fewer commercial emails flying into our inboxes. In fact, the opposite is the case, email marketing is growing. So as long as you remember to personalize, experiment and include a clear call to action, then your subscriber list will bring you the profits that you are looking for.

About the Author:

Desmond Mantor is the Marketing Manager for Have Traffic - a company specializing in producing highly targeted website traffic for commercial websites. Visit http://www.havetraffic.com for information about their revolutionary web site promotion service.