Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Successful Email Marketing Tips

One of the most critical factors to succeeding online is building an email list, you hear it time and time again the money is in the list. To a certain extent that is true obviously it has to be a responsive list you could have a list of 100,000 email addresses in your database but if they do not take the desired action or worse don't even open your email then it is a complete waste of time. I have written this article to give you 5 killer ways to succeed in email marketing.

1. Pay For An Autoresponder Service

This is something that is vital to your email marketing success, there are certain times when free has its place in online business but autoresponders are not one. If you want your emails to even reach your subscribers inbox never mind get opened then you must use a reputable paid autoresponder service. Deliverability is a big problem caused by the spam issue this shouldn't be a problem if you have a good autoresponder service they will have built a good relationship with most of the email providers such as yahoo etc to help get your email delivered instead of flagged as spam. A good auto responder service will have a function where you can check your email for spam triggers before you send it out. One last thing before we move on is make sure your subscribers are double opt in which basically means when a visitor signs up to be on your email list a good autoresponder service will give you the option of sending a verification email which the subscriber has to go click on the link to verify they have requested to be on your list.

2. Test Your Subject Line

The first thing your subscriber will see when checking there email is the subject line of the email, what you need to do is make it compelling enough for your subscriber to want to open the email especially if it is a promotional email. The best way to get an indication of whether your email will be opened is to test different subject line. So how do you do this? Well you would send the promotional email to a small section of your full subscriber list for example if you had an email list of 10,000 you could select the first 500 in your database 250 would receive one subject line and 250 would receive a different one then you would check how many opened the email from each group giving you the figure of which worked best. Then you would roll out the most successful subject line to the rest of your list. There are many ways you can do this technique obviously depending on the size of your list you could test as many subject lines as you want or send the test to a higher percentage of your list.

3. Which Format HTML or Text?

This is something that a lot of new internet marketers will not think about but it is very important. When sending email most autoresponder services will give you the option of plain text or html emails now a big point you need to consider is that there are many email clients that only read plain text so when they receive a html email it shows all the html code making your email look totally unprofessional and also unreadable, my advise is send your emails in text format if you want a fancy layout in html you can always direct your subscribers with a link to your blog or html newsletter page.

4. Have you got an Opt in Form?

It absolutely amazes me how many websites I visit that do not have an email opt in form on there site. Remember this if nothing else in this article ALWAYS ALWAYS and another ALWAYS put an email opt in form on every website you create even if you do not have anything to sell at that time you must start building an email lists as soon as possible.

5. Resend To Unopens

Ok this is the final point and something that is rarely talked about in internet marketing when you send out an email especially a promotional email check your unopened stats most quality autoresponder services will have a function that shows you who on your list did not open your email, what you must consider is that even with the best subject there is always a chance your email will slip through the net especially if your subscriber is on many email lists (internet marketing is a prime example) or on holiday etc. You can resend the email to people who did not open your email when you originally sent it out there are so many lost sales because online business owners just thought oh well move onto the next promotion seriously don't make this mistake if they did not open the first time try again even if you only get one sale it was worth doing.

I hope these points have given you ideas of what you can do with email marketing

About the Author

Black Hat Jack is the author of The Theory Of Internet Marketing and publisher of Black Hat Marketing Ezine you can find both at http://www.blackhatjack.com. Black Hat Jack is dedicated to helping people who are serious about creating a successful home based online business.

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