September, 2009

Effective Websites Newsletter

Hi,

This month's newsletter contains the first part of a series on marketing and relationship building through email.

Dave Salahi

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Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing has numerous advantages over other forms of marketing, including:

• Low cost—the low cost of email marketing means it has a high ROI, higher than any other internet marketing approach, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).
• Anyone can benefit from it. You don't need to be a large corporation to have an effective email marketing campaign.
• It's measurable. You can monitor the number of people who open your messages and the number who click the links in your messages. In fact, you can even identify the individuals who take these actions. 
• Email can be very targeted. If you have segmented customer/prospect information you can send customized emails to specific groups.
• Email is immediate and actionable. You can write an email this morning and send it this afternoon. This allows you to respond quickly to changing market conditions. When people receive your email they can click to go right to your website and order online.

People rarely buy the first time they become aware of a company. You need to stay in contact with your customers and prospects so that when the time comes that they need your product or service you'll be top of mind. With all that email has going for it, email is worth considering as the way to stay in touch with your customers.

Permission-Based Email Marketing

Unfortunately, email marketing has been tarred with the spam label so you have to work to avoid that by gaining permission from the people you wish to email. There are federal and state laws you must comply with. And if you don't observe best practices you could be reported as a spammer which could lead to your emails being banned by large email providers like Gmail and Windows Live and by internet organizations whose purpose is to reduce spam.

And if all that's not enough to convince you, remember that your goal is to win customers, not annoy them. We're all dealing with information overload so you need to make sure that you're sending messages that your recipients want to receive. The first way to do that is to use an opt-in approach in which a person has to take an action to sign up (e.g., filling out a newsletter sign-up form on your website). A few years ago double opt-in was touted as the gold standard among reputable emailers. However, various technical and procedural difficulties resulted in low rates of confirmation and today, according to the DMA, only 3% of major online retailers use a double opt-in process.

In addition to offering an opt-in approach, you also need to make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Every email you send should include a link that the recipient can click to quickly unsubscribe.

Engaging Your Readers

The next thing you need to do is send useful and informative emails. If your email campaign consists solely of ads for your products your recipients may just ignore them. This is not to say that you shouldn't send promotional messages. It's just that it's more effective to send some helpful information along with your ads. By sending "news you can use" people will look forward to your emails and will be much more likely to open them before clicking the delete button.

You also want to make sure you're sending email with the right frequency. If you send email too often, you'll annoy your recipients. If you don't send it often enough they'll forget about you. I think the right frequency is every month or two but this could vary depending on your business. If you plan to send email more frequently than monthly you may want to provide an option that allows the recipient to opt out of weekly emails, for example, and only receive them monthly.

Coming Soon…

There's lots more to know about creating an effective email marketing campaign. Here's a sampling of related topics that I'll be covering in a future newsletter:

• Don't send email from your regular email program (like Outlook or Gmail). Instead, use an email marketing service or have bulk email software set up on your own web server.
• Create an email template that will work well in all the common email clients. Email programs and websites are notorious for mangling your carefully laid-out emails. However, by properly designing your email template you can minimize these problems.
• How to build your email list
• How to check your messages for "spamminess" to prevent them from getting caught in spam filters. Most large internet service providers and email services automatically turn on spam filtering (without asking or even notifying their users) so it's important to make sure your messages look clean.

I'll be covering these topics and more in a future newsletter. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email me at dave@artistic-webdesign.com or call me at 949-362-0842. And, if you like what you've been reading here, add dave@artistic-webdesign.com to your whitelist to make sure future issues of this newsletter don't get caught in your spam filter!

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What Are Your Questions?

What are your burning questions about internet marketing? Call me at 949-362-0842 or email me at dave@artistic-webdesign.com with your questions. Or fill out a one-minute survey on our website. Then watch for the answers in an upcoming issue of this newsletter.