Top 7 Tips For Skyrocketing The Effectiveness Of Your
Email Marketing Efforts

By Jim Turner


Using email to market is one of the biggest advances in the field
of marketing to come along in a long time. I can remember the
experiences of my offline marketing efforts: place an ad in a
magazine, wait four to six weeks (or more) to see your ad, the
prospect either calls you or mails you a response card. Gee, I
can't believe that I used to do that.

Along comes email and electronic newsletters: you place an ad and
in a matter of days it goes to your target market. And "bingo,"
in the click of a mouse, your prospect gets your sales message or
free report via autoresponder. What an advantage this is over
snail mail.

In a matter of days you can determine if you have winner or not
and make adjustments to your offer accordingly. This means more
money faster for you!

As you begin to market online, you will hear a variety of
opinions. Some experts tout "Netiquette", or working within the
culture of the Internet. They will tell you that certain forms of
marketing are wrong, becoming angry about this. Be careful of
following opinions - what they advise against may hold the keys
to your success. That is, if you take care to target your message
slowly, to interested prospects.

No matter what way you market, you must work on building your
email list. It will be your biggest asset online, leading to
more sales and profits - if you do it right.

First contact is a difficult place to establish the proof that
you can solve the problem, even if you define it. You may
identify the problem and hopefully build up the promise of
solving it, but the facts are simple.

It is difficult to get the prospect to part with his money on
first contact. You need to develop trust, credibility, and prove
that you can provide the solution he wants. And you will make
many more sales by mining the real gold of online marketing, the
follow up to your customer. Prove you know what you are talking
about. Keep in touch with them, with their approval; if anyone
objects, why send to them again?

Use your emails to build a relationship; most prospects will not
buy until the third or fourth contact. Finally, if you feel like
apologizing in your email for contacting them, do not bother.
Negative messages will make your efforts worthless for you and
your customers. How can they buy something that you are
apologizing for?

Email marketing is a consistent and cost-effective way to
follow-up with your customers. You need to treat every contact as
a significant lead and follow up via email. Here's how to put
email marketing into profitable action:

(1) Build your email mailing list as your primary business asset.
Separate those new inquiries, your lead list, from your
steady customer list. Finally, keep a detailed remove list of
all those people that don't want your messages.

(2) The goal is to have your customer make first contact, and for
you to follow-up. Respect the wishes of your visitor; don't
market to someone who doesn't want to hear from you. This
could lead to you losing your Internet access and
subsequently hurting your business.

(3) Give them something of real value, a good special report or
newsletter, or ebook to encourage them to contact you. If you
don't give them something, you won't get responses. Most
online businesses fail to give them anything at all.

(4) Use email newsletters and ezines to contact your customers.
Give them enough information but not too much. How do you
figure that out? Ask them and test. Don't forget to include
your ads in these as well.

(5) Don't feel up to writing? Sit down with yourself, someone who
sells the product or service (could be you), and an
interviewer. Sell the interviewer your product or service.
Record it. Transcribe it. Save it as a text only file in a
word processor. Separate the interview into smaller sections.
Email it in parts. You then can email an ongoing, valuable
document that includes advertising, rather than another sales
letter.

(5) Create several follow-up letters. First contact is a free
report or newsletter. Second contact means checking in to see
if they have any questions, and making them a special offer.
Third contact should qualify them to see if they want to
explore working with you. Don't give up with one or two
messages unless they ask you to. Use the intelligent
autoresponders available to do your followups:
www.smartbotpro.net and www.getresponse.com Each has free
multiple followup autoresponders.

(6) Send out surveys or contests; test out questionnaires. Set up
interviews. The real goal is to get them to respond to your
message. This is how you qualify people. Those that respond
are potential customers, but keep emailing those who don't
immediately respond as well.

(7) Explore ways to mix faxing, telemarketing, direct mail, and
email to provide a diverse approach to your customer. Find
the one that works best, but use email and at least one of
the other approaches to truly set you apart from the rest.

Don't miss out on the many opportunities to market your products
and services that email has to offer. Successful application of
sound email marketing tactics can lead to big profits for you.

Jim is the Publisher of WebPROFIT Tips Newsletter and author of
the new manual "Online Moonlighting dotCOM" that shows Internet
marketers how to build multiple streams of profits online while
holding down a full-time job. For more information, visit his Web
site at http://www.webprofitsource.com/ml.htm   or subscribe to his
newsletter at mailto:tips@webprofitsource.com