Email Marketing

In the autoresponder section I discuss how you can use autoresponders to pre-schedule and completely automate your email marketing campaigns. I also highlight, in the list building section, the importance of building your own in-house list of subscribers, to send useful information and offers to. In this section I focus on what you should include in the actual email to get the best results.

When you send out mailings, whether it's to your own list or to a list of leads that you have purchased, for example, you obviously want as many people as possible to open and read your email message. Therefore you need to create a compelling heading in the subject box, so people open it when they sift through all the emails in their inbox.

Firstly you should look to personalise each email you send out, which starts with the subject box, so every subject box should include the email recipient's first name. Most autoresponders will take care of this for you. The headline should then include the major benefit of your site, and how it will benefit that particular recipient. For example, say you had a site that sold Spanish language CD's. A good email could have a subject heading such as:

"David, learn how to speak Spanish in 4 weeks"

Try to keep the headline as short as possible, otherwise the subject box will cut off some of your message, and don't mislead the email recipient. This is the domain of spammers, and although you may get more people open your emails, most will soon delete your email when they see that it doesn't relate to the subject heading. It will also damage your reputation and credibility as a serious marketer or retailer.

There are also a few other things you should consider regarding the words you use in the subject line. Many email account providers are increasingly clamping down on spam, and constantly making changes to their spam filters. As a result some of these spam filters are automatically programmed to block, or send to the junk folder, emails which contain certain words in the subject line. These include words such as "free",  "home business", "make money" etc. Therefore if you do include words like these this could seriously impact upon your response rate. My best advice would be to set up free email accounts with the major email providers such as Yahoo and MSN, and do some testing by sending various emails to yourself through different addresses to see which ones get through.

Regarding the content of the email, the ultimate aim is to get people to read the entire message and click on the link at the end of the email. Therefore it shouldn't be too long. It should also be written in short paragraphs of one or two sentences otherwise it will put people off reading it. Each paragraph should lead nicely on to the next, and encourage the reader to keep on reading right through to the end of the message.

A popular approach, if your site is in the form of a sales letter, is to just modify and shorten this sales letter, including relevant headlines and sub-headlines, and send it out as an email. Obviously you don't want to do this if you are sending it to people who are already your subscribers and therefore are already familar with your site, but to new prospects such as purchased leads or joint venture partners' lists.

Your message should begin with Hi "recipient's name" and should contain compelling sales copy, and compel the reader to click on the link at the end for more information or to buy the product. You should not only outline the major benefits of your product or service, but should also list major problems that the reader may have on this subject, and explain how your product can resolve these problems. For example, going back to the Spanish CD example, you could use a sub-heading like:

"Do you struggle to learn new languages?"

You could then go on to explain how your CD's are devided into clear easy to understand sections, and will help even the most basic beginners to start speaking Spanish, for example.

There are two forms your email may take, HTML and plain text. HTML are more graphical and flashy, but often at the expense of good sales copy. HTML emails may be more pleasing to the eye, but you should remember that they will also take longer to fully load, particularly if the reader has a slow internet connection. Indeed unsurprisingly research carried out still suggests that plain text emails get better results than HTML emails.

Finally, as with other forms of marketing, don't forget to keep testing with different headlines and sales copy to find the one that gets the best results.