Web Marketing Strategy Update

Email has a come a long way. From the dial-up AOL “You’ve got mail!” days to today’s high-speed, wireless, and mobile accessible email, there’s no denying that email has played an integral part in the advancement of the internet. It didn’t take long for businesses to realize the sheer power that email could hold in marketing their business. After all, email was quick, efficient, and most of all: free.

So began the age of email marketing. But along with that came it’s ugly and uninvited cousin: SPAM. And we’re not talking the canned and mysterious pinkish meat that almost resembles pork.

Spam is every email owner’s nightmare. Spam is what dilutes email marketing from an awesomely effective method of reaching clients and customers, to a taxing game of “Filter -Through-the-Credit-Scams-and-Enhancement-Pill-Emails”.

Luckily, email servers have gotten smarter these days and incorporate spam filters into their service. These filters let in the good emails, and keep the bad ones out. At least. That’s the idea.

Unfortunately, some email filters may be a tad too sensitive. These filters often times land good emails into the junk folder. Below are 5 simple tips to help your emails stay away from the junk folder.

1. Avoid special characters in your subject line.

   There is NOTHING more obnoxious than seeing words surrounded by an explosion of brackets, asterisks, and tildas.

2. Stay away from spam triggering words.

   #1! Free! 100%! Guarantee! Order NOW! Those are just few spam triggering words. When you draft your emails, ask yourself: ‘Do I sound like a sketchy car salesmen?’ or ‘Are my word choices going a little overboard?’ or simply ‘Would I, myself, honestly want to receive an email that sounds like this?’

   Chances are, if you answered “yes” to the first two questions and “no” to the last, you might have yourself a spammy email. Try your best to stay away from sales-y phrases and hot-words.

3. Content/Image ratio is important.

   Be mindful of your images! An email composed entirely of images can likely send you to the junk folder. Make sure that if you do attach images, you have sufficient text to counteract them. More text then images is recommended.

4. Attach a text version of your email.

   Here’s a backend hint for sending emails: have a text version available. Believe it or not, not everyone can access HTML emails. And if they don’t get HTML emails, chances are you’ll land in the spam folder.

   It’s a fact of life. The best way to combat this is to have a readable non-html version available. Don’t discriminate against non-html email recipients, they have feelings too!

5. Only send emails to organically created lists.

   Email lists should be collected and created entirely by your business. Nevermind renting or purchasing those lists -not only will that land you in the junk folder in a heartbeat, but you’ll also be wasting your time and money. Grow your own email list by having people sign-up, subscribe, or opt-in on their own. That way, they’ll expect an email from you, and now automatically mark your message as spam.

There you have it: Five easy ways to avoid the junk folder and get your important email in the inbox, where it belongs. Email marketing by far one of the most successful marketing tools on the market. Don’t be bogged down with junk. Happy emailing!

Rona Cerillo is a mobile text campaign aficionado and marketing specialist for Trumpia, an SMS and multi-channel marketing service provider.

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If you want to make this your best financial year yet, then email marketing should be an integral part of your online business.

Increasingly people are only purchasing from people who they know, like and trust. And the easiest way to build that relationship with your prospects is through the power of an automated email sequence.

While simply using email is enough to increase your sales, like any aspect of marketing it can be improved. Whether you are new to email marketing or a seasoned pro, these 5 email marketing tips that will help you build better relationships with your prospects and increase sales.

1) Sell The Click Not The Product

One of the mistakes that many online business owners make is to try and sell the product within the email. Selling the product is the job of the sales page on your website. The job of the email message is to sell the “click”. You want your reader to click through from your email to your sales page. Trying to sell too early can actually decrease the likelihood that they will buy.

Some of the best ways to increase the likelihood that they will click on your link is to create a sense of scarcity such as only having a limited amount of time to take up the offer. Or you can make the link seem mysterious so that the reader wants to discover more information. Nobody can ignore finding the answer to a secret.

2) Concentrate On Quality Not Quantity

The quality, not the quantity, of your email list will determine its profitability. Don’t be solely focused on increasing the opt ins. Instead, focus your attention on getting the best possible leads to join your email list.

That means being very targeted in how you approach sourcing your leads. A list with 100 people, who are incredibly interested in finding a solution to their problem, will perform much better than a list of 1000 people who are only slightly interested in what you have to say.

3) It’s OK To Email Often

Some businesses owners are scared to email often because that it will increase the amount of unsubscribe. However if you are sending out good quality content you should not be afraid to mail every day. You can even include an offer with your emails. However, you must also include valuable, free information that helps your reader with whatever problems that are facing. Remember, if you lead with value then mailing frequency will not hurt sales.

4) Use An Interesting Subject Line

As the famous copywriter Joe Sugarman once noted, the sole purpose of headline is to get the viewer to read the first line. The same could be said of the subject line of an email. It doesn’t matter how good the offer is or how interesting the email, if the subject line isn’t interesting it won’t matter because nobody will read it. If you want to increase your sales then writing better headlines should be your first step. Writing good email subject lines doesn’t require that you become a creative genius. Simply copy what is already working for other marketers.

Here is a little trick. Create a new email account and sign up for some of the email newsletters of the best marketers in your industry. Every couple of days check your inbox and scan through the email subject lines. See which subject lines make you want to read the email. Then make a note of this subject line and change it slightly for your own email marketing. By using this method you will be using only the most effective subject lines (get more email marketing optimization tips from Pure Leverage reviews).

5) Include a P.S.

Studies have show that end of an email is the second most viewed part of an email. Many people will skim over the content with their eyes naturally falling on the end of the email. Others will skip right to the end, after reading your opening paragraph. This is why it is key that you include a P.S. at the end of your email. By including a sales offer in your P.S. you will increase sales without having to do a lot of work.

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I don’t consider myself a natural salesman, but I am a people person by nature. I enjoy contradicting societal norms that tell me that I need to puff myself up in order to be cool or popular.

I like who I am, and I have learned that I form deeper, longer-lasting relationships when I just lay it all out there and act like myself instead of some guy from a movie.

In the new age of Internet marketing that dawned this year, selling SEO requires less flashy technique and more of a relationship built on trust. Email solicitations do not build relationships.

@Gmail? Are You Kidding Me?

Yesterday, I received this email…

Hello Sir/Madam,

I am a Marketing Manager and would like to take few minutes of your valuable time for introducing our affordable SEO services.

Our assured monthly task and responsibilities will definitely give a boom to your online business.

Our packages for 15 keywords are mentioned below:

1. Keywords Analysis & Research

[...yada, yada, yada...]

24. Monthly Full Detailed SEO Work Report in Excel

We send weekly report to each of our clients so that they can have regular updates on their website. We truly care you and so ensure to work regularly on the website elegantly. We use white hat SEO techniques for each website to give new boom to your online business.

We are available for your services here so please do let us know in case you are interested.

Thanks & Regards,

Marketing Manager

Now, this isn’t necessarily a great case study because this nameless “Marketing Manager” obviously isn’t from the United States and doesn’t realize that he is soliciting his SEO services to an SEO company, but I see these emails all the time sent through my clients’ websites from people who seem to be competent SEO who can speak and write in fluent English.

As much as we’re all interested in “new boom”, effective SEO sales starts with building a relationship based on credibility and trust. If you’re trying to sell your expertise as an SEO professional, poney of up the dough for a domain name with email hosting and a nice-looking website. Your email address and website are going to act as reinforcements to show you’re legit. If you use a templated website, be sure to fully customize it. Don’t cut corners. Once you’ve done all that, throw out any notion of using mass email marketing to sell your services.

I talked with my client, Rod Strickland, about what kind of email solicitations he gets and what he thinks of them. “I’m thinking, this is probably someone who is in China, being paid a very low wage, and they’re just surfing the Internet, finding websites to reply on,” he said. “We have the security code on there, so I know it’s not a robot. It’s got to be a live person doing it, and it’s just shocking to think that they’re spending so much time to find just a random site and type it in there and send it. It’s such a waste of time.”

Rod is a dentist. He’s well-educated, tech-savvy, and highly intelligent. He’s even an inventor and has been published. He’s also willing to invest in something if he knows it’s going to give him a return, but it’s a waste of time to spam Rod’s site because he’s already very well ranked on Google for the terms that he cares about. That doesn’t stop some people from just spamming away with the same sloppy sales message.

I asked Rod if he’d ever followed up on an email solicitation, and he said, “No, never. Unless it’s CE that I’m aware of, I’m always wary of anything unsolicited. I hit the DELETE button ten times more on my keyboard than any other button.”

Do You Want A Spam Client?

This is just Rod’s take on the spam messages that he DOES receive. I’m sure there are tons of messages that he is blissfully unaware of in his Spam folder, but even if your unsolicited email happens to get through to a prospective client’s inbox, chances are that it just isn’t going to be read. So why bother?

Rod had a theory, “I suppose there’s some unsophisticated people with businesses on the web that fall for it. It’s obviously working for people to pay someone to do that, but for us, we can see right through it.”

Are clients who “fall for” an unsolicited spam email going to make for good clients? They’re obviously not very savvy, which means that it’s going to be an uphill battle for you to:

• educate the client on what you’re proposing to do for them.
• convince them that they probably need a new website.
• help them to see the value in what you’re doing if they’re not seeing immediate results.
• retain the client when they get the next spam email.

What Valuable Clients Value

As Rod puts it, SEO today from a client’s perspective is very “airy fairy”. What used to seem like voodoo to prospective clients before, now looks like voodoo performed by someone who forgets their name every 5 minutes. They don’t feel like they can trust anyone who claims to know what they’re doing.

“It’s very difficult to see that something someone is doing works, or is it just a random event that we happen to be first in Google?” Rod says, “It’s difficult to know the ongoing work that’s put in. We could pay you X number of dollars to work on our website, and then ‘Boom’, we’re at the top of the first page for all these different searches and then a year from now, [what was] all the work that I believe you have to do throughout the year to maintain that result, or did you set it up one time and it’s done, and we’re continuing to pay month after month after month, you know?”

Clients who are willing to pay top dollar for quality SEO work want to know what it is that they’re paying for, and they want to have a relationship with the person who’s doing that work. Clients want to know what you’ve done via some type of report, but if they don’t trust you, even those reports aren’t going to save you if the phone doesn’t start ringing in the first month that you start working for them.

Relationship Building SEO Sales Tactics

The bottom line is that not everyone is cut out to be a salesperson, and mass email solicitation is a sales crutch that just isn’t worth employing. We are told by marketing gurus that UX is to key to conversions, and we tell our clients that social media is key to building a relationship with a target audience, so why aren’t we focusing our sales efforts to improve the experience and relationship that our target audience has with us and our businesses? Here are some techniques that may be harder to implement than a spam email campaign, but are likely to yield more responses from quality clients:

• Get published (online or offline) in industry publications for the niches where you see the most opportunity
• Score speaking engagements to speak to industry groups in these niches
• Focus on building relationships with your current clients that go beyond a basic vendor/client relationship. Go above and beyond for your clients if you expect to get referrals from them. The first step to this is more regular, proactive communication with your clients.
• Be the expert whenever a client asks a question, do everything you can to answer their question in an authoritative way or at least to point them in the right direction. As Rand Fishkin pointed out in a SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday not too long ago, if you’re asking yourself whether or not this is really part of SEO, it’s time to look at your goals and motives.
• Get involved in networking groups and industry organizations in your niche.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds really hard,” or, “I’m not really a people person,” then it’s probably time to look at who can do these things on your behalf. If you’re a one-man show, and you’re an SEO wiz, but you hate dealing with customers, it may be time to look at partnering with someone who can do a better job at relationship-building than you can.

The SEO world is constantly changing whether you like it or not. In the Darwinian evolutionary sense, if you can’t grow your business through relationship building, you’re probably not the fittest, and you’re probably not going to survive. Are you going to adapt or die?

Jonathan Fashbaugh is the president of Pro Impressions Marketing Group, an agency specializing in online marketing for dentists. He’s written for numerous industry publications and been interviewed by the Academy of General Dentistry’s AGD Impact magazine for his marketing expertise.

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One of the nice things about online marketing is you can get nearly instant feedback about what you’re doing. This is also true for email marketing. Let’s look at the metrics that you should focus on to analyze how well your email marketing is performing so you can refine your efforts for greater success:

Delivery Rate

Although this metric isn’t super detailed, it’s the best way to ensure there isn’t a technical problem or glitch with your email marketing setup. As long as the majority of emails you send are being delivered, you’ll know that everything’s good with your server and all your other configuration details.

When you’re looking at your delivery rate, you may also notice a metric known as bounce rate. It simply refers to the percentage of emails that aren’t successfully delivered to an inbox. Hard bounces are permanent errors, indicating that the email address isn’t valid and should be deleted. Soft bounces indicate a transient error, such as full inbox.

Growth

It’s very useful to not only know if your list is growing, but also how quickly and by how much. The reason this metric can be useful in guiding your email marketing is because it can help you pinpoint what works best for bringing new subscribers for your list.

For example, if you notice a week where your growth rate is especially high, you’re going to want to look at what type of content you published on your blog that week. If you realize that the type or focus of what you published was different than normal, it’s probably an indication that you should continue doing more content in the same vein.

Unsubscribe Rate:

It’s inevitable that people will leave your list. Interests and priorities change, so you should expect to see a low, but relatively steady number of unsubscribes. Of course it can also be the case that some people are not satisfied with or even dislike the content you email them. And it’s usually the latter that leads to the sudden spikes of unsubscribes that you need to keep an eye out for, so that you can track what caused offense and avoid repeating the same mistake again.

Click-throughs

The reason this metric is absolutely crucial is it let’s you know how many people actually looked at the email you sent. You can craft an incredible email, but if very few people open it, the results the email generates are going to be minimal. This truth is why learning how to write effective subject lines is so important. While there is a fair amount of art to writing killer subject lines, by using click-through data, you can get feedback on what you’re trying instead of feeling like you’re stumbling around blindly.

Shares

One of the big benefits of email is it not only allows you to connect with potential and existing customers, but it also makes it easy for those people to share with others. If you send an email that someone feels will be useful for a friend or family member, they can forward it with just two clicks of their mouse.

What’s helpful about looking at how much of this type of activity is being done is it will give you insight into what types of emails are most appealing. Since what people want can vary by industry, getting this feedback can put you on the right track. For example, one business may discover that emails with special discounts get the most traction, while another business may find that they get the most traction from email content that’s focused on educating and informing.

Craig Klein is the President of online CRM and email marketing company www.SalesNexus.com, which is headquartered in Houston Texas. Circle Craig on Google+ to learn more.

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