Self Employed Success

There are three email newsletters I read faithfully, every single time they enter my Inbox. I subscribe to over 20 newsletters, but only three are never-miss-reading newsletters.

Would you say email newsletters are dead because I don’t read 17 immediately, or would you say it’s very much alive because of the three I read right away? (Look at the bottom of this post for the three I love.)

There’s been lots of talk among my clients and students these days, speculating on the possible demise of the email newsletter as a powerful internet marketing tool. Funny thing: I remember having this discussion back in 2005 with my internet marketing colleagues, yet email marketing is still alive and well five years later.

Sending out weekly or monthly updates to your list has grown in popularity and importance as a marketing tool ever since the public Internet began. But now people are overwhelmed with the amount of email they’re getting, so what are you to do?

There are lots of pros and cons to using email newsletters and email marketing:

Pros

1. People can get to know you through your newsletters. Not just what services or products you offer, but how you think and feel about the topics you write on.
2. If you’re sending out HTML emails, you control the look and feel of your email newsletter, and can establish a solid brand and image in people’s minds
3. You can track to see who opened the email and how many people clicked on the links in the email. Statistics are a crucial measure of the success of email marketing.
4. You can customize your message to segments of your list. For example, if a group of students took an introductory-level class with me, I can offer them the advanced-level class. Or if people have expressed an interest in a specific topic, I can send just those people a new article I’ve written on that topic.
5. Never overlook the fact that most people are time-constrained and appreciate convenience. With the overwhelming number of places on the internet to search for information, having ONE source they can rely on is a blessing.

Cons

1. There are many ways to get in front of your target audience with your content and news now: social media sites, your own blog, article bank sites like www.ezinearticles.com, YouTube, etc. Your newsletter is just one of a mix.
2. Too much email, too much junk. People are inundated and often will ignore things in their Inbox that they can’t take care of right away or that have a lower priority. And don’t forget those nasty filters that whisk away your email before your reader even sees it!
3. If you don’t write regularly, people are apt to forget about you. Or worse, think you’re inconsistent and therefore unreliable. Ewwww.

Strategy

I still believe your mailing list is the hub of your internet marketing strategy. It’s the only place where people have raised their hands and said, “I want to hear from you.” (Tools like Feedburner allow people to subscribe to your blog and get updates via email, so your blog becomes your email newsletter…how simple!) But you need a strategy for your email marketing.

Here are some tips:

• Above all else, offer value. When you write an article for your email newsletter (or your blog, or your Facebook Notes area), make sure you’re giving good information. (Read your past five newsletters…did you serve your audience well?)
• Sixty-day rule. Remember that your subscribers are most responsive in the first 60 days of signing up for your list. Stay in contact with those folks more often than your once-a-month newsletter.
• Loyalty counts. Reward long-time subscribers with special freebies or discounts.
• One of many tools. Ask yourself, “What are ALL the different ways I can communicate with my audience and share my articles, advice, offers, and news?”
• One of many lists. Think of your email list as just one list of many. Your Facebook friends are a list, your Twitter followers are a list, and your blog subscribers are a list.
• Combine with human contact. Don’t just have an email list and think that’s enough for people to get to know you and trust you. Offer free teleclasses. Be available via Facebook or Twitter for ongoing conversations. Give live speeches both locally and nationally. Get out there and be seen – everywhere.

Email newsletters aren’t dead. They are a strategic component of your internet marketing plan. But having an integrated internet marketing strategy, mixed with some real-life connection to your audience, is what will bring success.

Oh, the three email newsletters I read faithfully?

Alan Weiss – http://www.summitconsulting.com/
Pamela Wilson – http://www.bigbrandsystem.com/
Nancy Marmolejo – http://vivavisibilityblog.com/

Not only do they use their email broadcasts to strengthen their brand image, but I love the way they think and write, too.

According to MarketingSherpa research at their latest Email Summit, “Inbox Clutter” isn’t the real reason people unsubscribe from your mailings. The top two real reasons people unsubscribe from your ezine or mailing list is:

1. Emails weren’t relevant to me.
2. Received too many emails from the sender.

MarketingSherpa goes on to say, “The top two answers both speak to the importance of the individual relationship between emailer and recipient. They identify relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender’s email.”

Here’s a chart from MarketingSherpa outlining their results:

How can you know whether your emails are relevant to your recipient, or whether you are sending emails too often?  Ask. Do a survey and ask them what topics they’d like to hear more about, and how often they’d like to receive mailings from you.

Wow, you are going to kill me, but I have to say it:

It doesn’t matter how good your website is, if people don’t come back often. Your website gets them interested; your ongoing relationship with them gets them to buy.

The real key to e-commerce is building a mailing list of people who are interested in the topics you write, speak and teach about. On a good day, you might get 10 percent of your website visitors to buy. But what about the other 90 percent? Are you just going to ignore them and their needs?

The internet is a distracting place and a visitor may only come to your website once. A mailing list member can be told about new articles, new offerings and new resources on your site each month, thereby increasing your traffic and your sales.

I’m not talking about creating huge lists of people who will remove themselves as soon as they get your freebie. What’s the point in that? I’m talking about a sustainable list of people who like the products and services you offer, who have an ongoing relationship with you, and are likely to purchase from you again and again.

I can think of 20 or 30 different things you can do to grow your mailing list. Let’s look at the 10 techniques I like to use.

Of course, email marketing isn’t new; we’ve been doing it for over 10 years now. But according to some of the latest research into email marketing, over 70 percent of email marketers say the impact of it is increasing, not decreasing.

Anyone who uses email marketing techniques can tell you, getting through spam filters is part of the battle. While text-only emails received the poorest return-on-investment numbers, some ISPs are now blocking HTML emails and only allowing text emails to get through (notably BellSouth).

It’s a quandary: produce newsletters that will get through filters, or produce newsletters that get results? I wish I could tell you otherwise, but truly, there are no easy answers to this question. However, here are some tips that might help you to think differently about your campaigns:

• Instead of a full newsletter or a long email, consider the “postcard” format for an email; email postcards received 75% higher click rates.
• Higher ROI tweaks include testing your email campaign with an A/B split, altering your subject line, having a specific landing page for your campaign (instead of merely sending them to your normal home page); and re-sending the same email message two weeks after sending the first one (especially if your email software can send it to only those people who did not open the first email)
• Consider putting your call to action in your subject line (register for the class, sign up for the discount coupon, call for a free quote)
• While 65 percent of emails now come with suppressed images, a large majority of users will manually turn those images on. This means that you should include images in your email campaigns.
• According to MarketingSherpa.com survey results, once-a-month mailings actually have less impact than shorter, weekly mailings.
• Consider segmenting your email mailing campaigns between customers and prospects, tailoring the message to them based on whether they’ve purchased from you before or not.

See Part 1 of this article series here:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/articles/whats-new-seo.htm

See Part 2 of this article series here:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/articles/whats-new-email-marketing.htm

I’ve noticed a trend lately: a lot of sign-ups to my mailing list from the same IP address. So I did a little research and lo-and-behold, it’s a “zombie” computer automatically signing up for ezines in order to steal the return address when you send the “thanks for signing up” autoresponder. (Those little stinkers!)

So, what do you do?

• First, check to see if your ezine software captures the IP (internet protocol) address of people when they sign up. I use Professional Cart Solutions (a variant of 1shoppingcart.com), and they DO capture IP addresses of each person who signs up.
• Next, check for repeat IP addresses. I notice that these sign-ups are always in the “waiting for optin” list under the Manage Clients tab, because they have no intention of opting-in. It’s easy to find them: look for email addresses that don’t match the name they signed up under. For instance, the name is “Mary Jones” but the email address says georgesmith@xxxxxx.com. The email addresses are almost always from hotmail.com, gmail.com, mail.com, or yahoo.com because these are free email services.
• When you find repeat IP addresses, type the IP address into Google and do some research. For example, this IP address comes up a lot on my wait-list: 203.113.13.3. When I type it into Google, I find that it’s a zombie computer and Wikipedia has blocked it
• Finally, I go back to my mailing system, and look for the place where I can block specific IP addresses from either ordering from me or from signing up for my mailing lists. In the case of Professional Cart Solutions/1shoppingcart, it’s under the Orders tab.

Voila! Now that zombie can’t sign up for my mailing list anymore!

It takes a little due diligence to keep your list clean, but it’s well worth it. And if your mailing list system won’t let you ban IP addresses, consider switching to a new one.