Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 17 of October , 2007 at 9:15 am Leave a comment
It’s a difficult question to answer. Should you design your own email campaigns? Newsletters, brochures, etc.
There is a lot to think about when you decide whether to design your own emails or use a template. First, you should consider whether you have the skills. At the very least, you’ll need to know html and it would be a good idea to learn a few other coding skills as well - CSS, php, and perhaps even asp. If you don’t have the skills to do it yourself and you want custom email design then you’ll have to hire someone to do it for you. That could get expensive.
The most basic email designs are not too hard to create. You can have a fabulous design in an hour or two. But if you start getting complicated with your email designs, using Flash and other multimedia concepts, then you’re talking about some real money. You might hire someone to work with you in-house or you can hire a company to design your emails for you. Either way, it could get costly.
Besides the cost of email design, there might be other issues you should consider as well - will you stick to the same design in every email or get creative and use a different design for specific purposes? For instance, you might have a different design for your Christmas email campaigns and another for your Easter campaigns. Again, if you are using freelancers to design these email campaigns then you could run into some expenses.
So should you design your own email marketing campaigns? It’s up to you. But you should give it careful consideration.
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Category: Email Design
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 16 of October , 2007 at 11:24 am Comments (4)
There is a question that is asked a lot: “Should I have a blog or a newsletter?” Actually, I think you should have both. There are several strategies that you can use to increase both your newsletter subscriptions and your blog subscriptions. Here are a few ideas:
- Use your newsletter to promote your blog
- Include a newsletter opt-in form on your blog
- Someone within your newsletter, have a link to your blog with a catchy title
- Make your newsletter a blog promotional tool by making each story a blog post summary that links to the corresponding blog post; used this way, your newsletter is an extension of your blog
- From time to time, post one of your newsletter articles to your blog
Using a newsletter to promote your business is one of the time-tested tools of online marketing. Newsletter marketing is all about permissions. Get their permission, send them an e-mail. It works. It isn’t dead.
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Category: Email Newsletters
Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 15 of October , 2007 at 9:03 am Leave a comment
There’s no limit to what you can include in your email marketing. If you have an e-zine, here are just a few ideas you might use for developing content:
- List new products or services
- Offer tips on how to improve on something
- Give your readers a list of local places that support what you do
- Provide product or book reviews
- Entertain your readers with a video related to your topic
- Conduct a survey or poll
- Write an article about some aspect of your service that may not be well known
There are a ton of ways to get creative with your email content. Provide some graphics, write great articles, and you’ll develop a loyal readership.
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Category: Email Content
Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, 14 of October , 2007 at 6:57 am Leave a comment
One of the best ways to use email marketing is to promote an affiliate program you are a member of. There are several ways, however, that you can do this.
One of the best ways you can promote your affiliate programs is with your email newsletter. And there is more than one way to promote them through your newsletter. In fact, your options are nearly endless.
Consider all the email marketing strategies you can use to promote your affiliate marketing:
- Contextual links within your email newsletter
- Banner ads within your newsletter
- Write a review and publish it in your newsletter
- Put up a web page on your website specifically about the affiliate program you want to promote and drive traffic to that web page with your newsletter
- Send out e-mail blasts between newsletter issues that talk about your affiliate and nothing else
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to promote an affiliate with your newsletter. So get started promoting today!
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Category: Email Marketing
Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 13 of October , 2007 at 8:20 am Leave a comment
Continuing from the previous two posts about the CAN-SPAM Act, Section 6 of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 explicitly makes it unlawful for any business to violate the spam laws even if they are not themselves actively using e-mail marketing to promote their businesses.
The act explicitly states:
(a) IN GENERAL- It is unlawful for a person to promote, or allow the promotion of, that person’s trade or business, or goods, products, property, or services sold, offered for sale, leased or offered for lease, or otherwise made available through that trade or business, in a commercial electronic mail message the transmission of which is in violation of section 5(a)(1) if that person–
(1) knows, or should have known in the ordinary course of that person’s trade or business, that the goods, products, property, or services sold, offered for sale, leased or offered for lease, or otherwise made available through that trade or business were being promoted in such a message;
(2) received or expected to receive an economic benefit from such promotion; and
(3) took no reasonable action–
(A) to prevent the transmission; or
(B) to detect the transmission and report it to the Commission.
In other words, if you knew of the e-mail transmissions promoting your business and expected to profit from that without taking reasonable actions to stop the e-mail transmissions, then you are guilty of spam. This law is in place to stop people from hiring third parties to do their dirty work. Just because someone else is doing it for you - it could even be a sister or brother doing it for free - then that doesn’t mean you aren’t liable. It’s your business; you are responsible.
Bottom line: Don’t authorize spam for your business at all. Period.
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Category: Not Spam
Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 12 of October , 2007 at 8:06 am Comments (1)
Yesterday, we discussed Section 4 of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Today, I want to discuss Section 5. Some of the prohibitions included in the Act are:
- Misleading or false information in an e-mail header
- Deceptive subject headings
- Absence of return address or comparable mechanism
- Transmission of commercial e-mail after being rejected
- Non-inclusion of opt-out process, identifying information, and physical address
Of course, just looking at these points out of context lends nothing to the discussion on e-mail spam. A little elaboration is necessary. Below is a short explanation of each bullet point. For a fuller treatment on the prohibitions in e-mail spam, see the Act in its entirety here.
The Prohibitions On E-mail Spam Outlined
Header - Every commercial e-mail header must contain truthful information. You can’t mislead people by telling them your e-mail is about one thing and make it be about something else.
Subject headings - Same applies. Do not deceive.
Return address - You must include a return e-mail address or hyperlink to a website within your e-mail and it must be conspicuously visible.
Rejections - If someone says they don’t want to receive further communications from you then you can’t send them more e-mails.
Opt-out - Within your e-mail you must include a way for people to opt-out of your e-mail transmissions. You must also conspicuously let people know that your e-mail is an advertisement or solicitation. You must also include a valid physical address of the person sending the e-mail.
This is by no means a comprehensive treatment of e-mail spam, but it does give you an idea of how you should treat your e-mail marketing campaigns and to let you know what you can and cannot do. I highly encourage you to read the CAN-SPAM Act on your own to get a better understanding of these issues.
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Category: Not Spam
Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 11 of October , 2007 at 8:55 am Comments (1)
CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. The Act was passed in 2003 to combat exactly what the title says, unsolicited porn and marketing e-mails.
The key word there is unsolicited. The idea is to stop, or limit, the number of e-mails sent to people with blatant marketing messages and pornographic images.
The Act, as it is written, is quote long and I won’t cover every detail of it here. But I do want to discuss the meet of the Act - what you can and can’t do.
The part of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 that deals with what you can’t do in email marketing is Section 4. Among the prohibitions in this section of the the CAN-SPAM Act are:
- Sending commercial email through an unauthorized computer
- Deceiving recipients of email regarding the origin of commercial messages
- Including material falsehoods in the header of commercial email messages
- Falsifying the identity of the registrant of five or more e-mail accounts or two or more domain names from which commercial email messages are sent and sending unsolicited commercial email from any of those accounts
- Falsifying a successorship to five or more IP addresses and sending unsolicited commercial email from those addresses
So you can see there are some broad interpretations with regard to these prohibitions. They’re actually pretty lenient. These are not all the prohibitions in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. These are simply the prohibitions found in Section 4 of the Act. Tomorrow I’ll cover more prohibitions and we’ll really get to the heart of what you should do with your commercial email.
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Category: Not Spam
Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 10 of October , 2007 at 9:15 am Leave a comment
I know the challenges of starting from scratch. You have no list, but you have a lot of content to send out. Where do you get the names?
You have to be careful with sending our unsolicited emails. That could get you into trouble. Of course, you could use the tried and true methods of list building: an opt in box on your website, an email marketing landing page, also called a squeeze page, and building strategic partnerships. But those methods take time and you won’t build a list overnight.
Another option is you could rent an email list. But should you?
There are several factors to consider before you decide to rent an email list. Obviously, price is one of those. But don’t make the decision on price alone. Other factors are just as important. One of the primary considerations is whether the list rental company you are considering can meet the specific and unique needs of your company. Do they have a list that can make you money?
Here is a list of questions you can ask any potential list rental company you are considering:
- Have the right demographics for your target market
- How do they maintain the accuracy of their lists?
- Do they have a money-back guarantee?
- Have the contacts on the list agreed to receiving third-party e-mails?
- What is the company’s spam policy?
- What kind of tracking is available for the list?
- How many emails can you send to the list for the price you are paying?
- What is the typical response rate of emails sent to this list by other companies?
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it should give you some food for thought. Bottom line, do your homework before you just jump out and rent a list from the first company you encounter. You may be able to build your list in other ways.
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Category: List Rental
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 9 of October , 2007 at 7:53 am Leave a comment
Fundamentally, there are two types of email newsletters: Text and HTML.
A text newsletter is one that you write out, and it may include hyperlinks, but there will not be any graphics. It is all text. Very primitive looking, just like a digital letter.
An HTML newsletter is a bit more sophisticated. It can look just like a website except that your recipients can read it in their email application. There is extensive coding throughout the newsletter and anything that you can do on a website can be done in your newsletter. You can embed video, you can include audio podcasts, hyperlinks to web pages on another website, extensive graphics, etc. No limits.
The question is, which type of newsletter is right for you? I’ve seen both types of newsletters succeed. Text newsletters take less time to create, though content production may not be any less time-consuming. An HTML newsletter will have to be designed using the elements of HTML, CSS, and other Web design languages. Do you know those, or know someone who does is willing to help you with your newsletter? You might have to pay someone to produce it for you. And that’s OK.
When it comes to deciding whether you use a text newsletter or HTML newsletter, consider the cost and time factor, but also consider what your readers will want to see. Even if you choose the HTML version, you’ll have to decide whether to use a predesigned template or design it yourself. It’s not an easy decision and you shouldn’t go into it lightly.
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Category: Email Newsletters
Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 8:14 am Leave a comment
The secret about email marketing is out. It seems that everyone wants to do it. Most people now get a ton of email in their inbox every day and end up deleting most of it without reading it. The big question for most of us is, How do we get people to read our emails?
The first thing people need to learn about email marketing is that your unsolicited email will end up in the garbage bin unread. People hate spam and most people won’t read it. It’s ineffective, not to mention illegal. Don’t waste time or money send out spam emails.
A better approach is to get people’s permission before contacting them by email. There are several ways you can do that. You can offer something for free on your website in exchange for their email address (be sure you tell them that you will be sending periodic emails to them with offers). You can sell a product or service and one way of getting people to provide you with an email address for future mailings is to offer your product or service at a discount. You can also offer an e-course by email. By providing a course that people can take through email that is rather short (5-10 email messages long), you can acquire their email address and use it for marketing purposes later.
There are various ways to get people to give you permission to contact them by email, but it is a necessary step. If you run a brick and mortar store then ask for it at the point of sale when you ring them up. If you can capture the email address there and send a confirmation email later then you’ve utilized the double opt-in process. They have told you twice about their interest to receive email marketing messages from you.
One thing is absolutely necessary when it comes to email marketing: Get the prospect’s permission!
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Category: Email Marketing Basics
Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, 7 of October , 2007 at 5:41 pm Leave a comment
Are you getting people to open your email messages? If not, there might be a problem with your subject line. The subject line is the most important aspect of your email because people will open the email you send based on the subject line alone.
The same is true of each item within your email. People will generally only read those parts of the email that have a headline that screams “read me!” The headline is the first encounter that your email newsletter readers have with your email message. If you write a good headline then your recipients will read the email marketing item. If you don’t, then they won’t.
What about click throughs? Are you getting people to click the links in your emails and visit your website? You’ve got to entice them. If you write good article summaries and use great anchor text then people will click. If you don’t, they won’t. But it all boils down to how you entice. Do you do it well? Is it effective? Maybe you should find out why.
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Category: Open and Click Rates
Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 6 of October , 2007 at 8:27 am Comments (1)
There are several opt-in techniques that are used when it comes to email marketing. Some of them are legal and some of them are not. Some of them are effective and some of them are not.
Just as an example, let’s highlight the “I’m going to send out a mass mailing to a list I just purchased and see who responds.” This has been tried many times, but is it effective? On the whole, any amount of email marketing to people who are not familiar with your business is ineffective. You’ll get a lot more mileage if you get people’s permission before you contact them. That’s why I recommend the double opt-in approach.
What Is Double Opt-In?
Good question. Double opt-in is in reference to getting people’s permission TWICE before you start sending them emails. It’s real simple to do, but before I cover that let me just say why you want to use the double opt-in method.
It protects you from accusations of spam.
When you ask people for their permission to contact them in the future, it is important to CYA. Being accused of spam is very expensive. You won’t just get fined, but you could also lose your account with your ISP. That would be a very expensive lesson.
To prevent that from happening you should use a double opt-in approach. Place an opt-in box on your website in a highly visible location. When Joe Blow signs up for your newsletter he’ll give you his name and e-mail address. Next, an autoresponder message (a pre-written message triggered to be e-mailed to a specific recipient when they undertake a certain action - like signing up for your newsletter) is sent to that opt-in at his email address. In the autoresponder message is a link that must be clicked on to confirm the opt-in.
If the respondent doesn’t click on the link then the opt-in is not confirmed. On the other hand, as soon as confirmation is received then the individual starts receiving your periodic emails. It’s called double opt-in and I highly recommend it.
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Category: Opt-In Techniques
Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 5 of October , 2007 at 8:24 am Comments (1)
When it comes to getting quality content for your email marketing campaigns, how do you do it? There are several methods for developing content for your email marketing efforts, whether we are talking about email newsletters, brochures, post cards, or simply text email marketing messages. Here are some of the ways you can acquire quality email marketing content:
Write it yourself - There is no substitute for doing it yourself. Quality content doesn’t come easy and who knows your business better than you do? You know your products and services better than anyone so you can write quality email content that targets your audience and you make it sell.
Hire a ghostwriter - If you can’t write or don’t have the time, you can always hire someone to do it for you. A good ghostwriter can write your content so that it sells. There are tried and true methods for writing email content that sells and a professional ghostwriter can help you find the right way to reach your market.
Content directories - If you need quality content for your email newsletter then go to an article directory. There are plenty of good ones out there. Hundreds. Some are niche oriented and some are more general. Choose one that fits your niche well or that provides quality content for your email marketing needs.
Use a service - Other ways of getting unique quality content for your email marketing is to join a service that provides content for your type of email marketing. A few of the types of services I’m recommending include:
- Constant Contact
- AWeber
- Vertical Response
Each of these services offer templates for newsletters, e-brochures, and post cards, autoresponders, and the ability to send out email marketing messages of any type. They are a valuable and handy service to have on your side.
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Category: Email Content
Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 4 of October , 2007 at 7:55 am Comments (1)
Constant Contact, one of the largest e-mail marketing service providers online, has gone public with an initial public offering.
Brick Marketing uses Constant Contact because they make e-mail marketing easy. Their newsletter service is out of this world and inexpensive. For $15/month you can send as many e-mails as you want to a list with up to 500 names on it. That’s a pretty good bargain.
Not only can you send out newsletters with Constant Contact, but you can take opt ins on your website with a special code that they provide for you. All you have to do is put the code in your HTML and the opt-in box appears on your website right where you want it to. And you can out e-mail marketing messages in between your newsletter issues.
Another great feature of Constant Contact is the survey feature. You can conduct periodic surveys through your e-mail or website and get valuable feedback from your readers.
The best part of all about Constant Contact is its 60-day free trial. You can test drive Constant Contact for free for two whole months before deciding that you want to use it. And when it comes time to sign up, if a friend referred you to Constant Contact, then you and your friend get a $30 credit. If you are interested in Constant Contact’s services, let me know and I’ll refer you to them. They’ll send you an introductory e-mail and should you ever sign on as a customer, you’ll get an immediate $30 credit. How bad is that?
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Category: Email Marketing
Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 7:55 am Leave a comment
Do you use surveys in your email marketing? You should. Let me tell you why.
Surveys can provide you with valuable feedback on your marketing efforts. By surveying your prospects and customers you can determine whether or now they find issues with your website that you can solve if you know about them. The key here is “if you know about them.”
How are you going to learn about the problems your customers and prospects are having with your website if you don’t ask them? You can’t. That’s surveys in email marketing are very helpful.
But don’t expect every one you send an email survey to to respond. The fact is, not everyone responds to surveys. Maybe they don’t have the time, or they were out of town. Perhaps they intended to, but never got around to it. That’ OK. If you get a response at all then you’re doing good.
According to Marketing Sherpa by way of Marketing Pilgrim, you can expect the following response rates on your email marketing surveys:
• For prospects - between 1% and 5%.
• For customers - anywhere from 20% to 55% — depending on the brand.
• For a consumer marketer - open rates above 15% and click-to-completions greater than 25%.
• B-to-B marketers – higher than all these.
Of course, you always need to test your surveys and your email marketing efforts. But that’s another post for another day.
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Category: Email Marketing
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