Junk mail. SPAM. We all know about these pesky e-newsletters and email blasts that show up uninvited in our inboxes. Most recipients simply hit delete, a few may actually unsubscribe to the e-newsletter they never subscribed to and sometimes a handful may even blacklist or report this SPAM to the “authorities.” And while inboxes everywhere are being stuffed with unsolicited information, there is no question that value-driven, permission-based email is important - and it should be part of your marketing mix. A Merkle report showed that 50 percent of respondents of a survey said they had bought something based on a permission email message. Another 50 percent said that a company that “does a good job with email” can have influence over their buying decisions. Without permission, however, 32 percent said they stopped doing business with at least one company because of their own “rules” about email.

So once you’ve encouraged your customers and prospects to opt-in to your database to receive e-newsletters, then what? How are you going to not only tempt them to read further, but to take action? E-newsletters are great for disseminating information, but without a carefully thought-out plan that creates cause and effect for each newsletter “story,” you will quickly fall short of reaching your goals and return on investment. It’s easy to tempt your customers and leads with information, but how do you convert them into a sale or other action?

Here are some tips on creating effective e-newsletters that add results to your bottom line:

- Quality not quantity: E-newsletters are meant to be read quickly and are often times “skimmed” by the reader for valuable information. Create three to four entries for your newsletter and keep the content and copy short and to the point, just two or three sentences that give them the flavor of your information. Add in graphics and photos that directly relate to the story for those who are more visual thinkers. Remember that you are trying to tease your customer with information and inspire them to take action. If you give away the store in the e-newsletter, your readers will simply read and delete and nothing more.

- Use compelling headlines. Readers will skim your enewsletter so tempt them with intriguing headlines and give them a reason to read it from beginning to end. Use action verbs in your headlines (e.g., gain, uncover, lead, change, improve). Pose questions. Cite startling statistics like “A simple change to your email can drive 100% increase in your open rate.”

- Lead them to your website: Each entry should include a direct link to your website, but not simply your homepage. If a customer is engaged in a story in your e-newsletter, directing them to your homepage will ultimately be very frustrating. Imagine being told to go to a new coffee shop without receiving directions. Would you take the time to figure out how to get there? Maybe not. But if someone handed you simple directions that guided you directly there, you’d go - perhaps again and again. The same holds true for your e-newsletters. After you’ve supplied a bit of information, provide a link directly to the location on your website where customers can find out more about a particular product, special deal, download a free white paper, or place an order.

- Intertwine selling and giving: While you ultimately want your customers and prospects to purchase your products and services, e-newsletters also provide a medium to position you as a forward-thinker and thought-leader. Are you aware of new trends on the horizon that your competitors don’t know about yet? Do you have simple tricks that your customers can use with their end-users to better sell products and services? Leading your customers to informational sections of your website helps to reinforce their perception of you as the one with the insight and the answers, the “go to” guru to whom they’ll return time and time again.

- Build valuable relationships: Utilize your e-newsletter to develop existing and new relationships with customers. Make your e-newsletter interactive and invite people to email you directly with comments, thoughts and problems. Provide a forum where customers can submit questions and challenges. Then post your solutions on your website and in your next e-newsletter. Invite customers to engage in your blog and establish an online community. Better yet, solicit articles from your customers for inclusion in future editions. By using ideas and articles from your customers, vendors and partners, you create even more credibility for your newsletter (and it doesn’t just become self-promotion). It also encourages your recipients to think about what’s important to them as well.

- Finding the right balance: Creating a timeline and a simple production schedule based on upcoming events, product releases, service contracts and the like helps to determine how often and when to email your e-newsletters. Rule of thumb is about every other week but at a minimum at least once a month. Don’t send out e-newsletters for the sake of sending - if you don’t have anything new or innovative to say, hold off until you do. Avoid Mondays and Fridays for delivery as well. Statistics show that Tuesday through Thursday mid-morning or mid-afternoon are the most fruitful times to hit “send.”

Creating e-newsletters doesn’t have to include perfect prose or award-winning graphic design. At the end of the day, the newsletters that people read and/or keep are the ones that provide useful information and a desire to want and to learn more. By creating a two-prong approach to your e-newsletters, you’ll not only see measurable open and click-through rates, but also an increase of traffic to your website where customers can learn more, or even better, complete a transaction.

Email marketing is one of the critical components in your attraction marketing efforts because this is a big part of how you build relationship with the people on your list in a leveraged way (i.e. via email messages rather than one on one phone conversation or face to face meetings).

Remember, in pretty much any business (including and especially network marketing), we are really in the ‘people’ business.

And also remember, people do business with those who they know, like and trust. You want the people on your list (those that opted in to your capture pages) to get to know you better, and start to like you and trust you through the valuable content you provide them. Email marketing is an essential piece of your overall relationship-building strategy.

Okay, let’s get right to it.

First and foremost, in order for you to even share your valuable contents with your list, you need to get every email that you send opened by your prospects on the list… because if they don’t open your email, you won’t get your prospects to visit your website once they’ve read your message (which is what you want).

HOW TO GET YOUR EMAIL OPENED UP INSTEAD OF GETTING DELETED

It all starts with your SUBJECT LINE.

The first thing your email has to do is grab your prospect’s attention.

This is often challenging to do because they’re getting TONS of other emails at the same time. But, having said that…

You should try to stay away from using hype, exclamation marks, and other stuff in your subject line that “screams” at your prospects.

This will make you look like a “spammer.” You never want to be… your emails WON’T get opened let alone read. Plus, a bunch of your prospects will be likely to opt out of your list.

Now, it’s important to note that you’re not trying to actually sell any product, service, business opportunity, etc. in the subject line. Too much information in the subject line means the reader doesn’t need to open the message. You want to entice people to open your email and to read the contents.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Bad example: “{firstname}, Why you should never give away the secrets in your subject line.”

Better example: “{firstname}, How may times have you made this mistake in your subject line?”

You see… in the above example, the bad example is giving away too much information in the subject line which will immediately be deleted by any prospects who see the subject as irrelevant… even if you have awesome tips and content within your email message.

You always want to make people curious and want to know what’s in the email as you can see in the better example above.

Also, it usually helps if you personalize the subject line by inserting the prospects’ first name as shown in the above examples. But do remember that it will be counter-effective if you use the name just for the sake of it and not making much sense.

Couple of examples here to illustrate the above point:

Bad example:”{firstname} - The real secrets of writing powerful emails”

Better example: “Hey {firstname}, check out these 3 secrets for writing killer emails.”

The reason to use someone’s name is to make it sound conversational.

Remember… if your email doesn’t get opened you have a ZERO percent chance of getting a response from your prospect no matter how great the inside of it may be!

TALK TO THEM LIKE AN OLD FRIEND

Before you sit down and start writing your own subject lines, do this.

Go through your own in box and check out the emails you’ve gotten from personal friends.

Then put together a subject line with that same kind of personal touch and friendly tone! This might seem pretty obvious, but it takes some practice to change your style from a business-like tone to a personal one.

One last tip to share about subject lines…

Asking a question in your subject line often gets your email opened.

For example, “Do you make this mistake with ____________ ?”

It makes the subject line pretty catchy that peaks curiosity and grabs attention.

Email marketing is an art as well as science. Learning how to write effective emails is not like learning how to use a light switch; it’s more like playing an instrument. Practice is just as important as knowledge.

On this article I will show you 12 easy steps that will help you to create a profitable mailing list with a minimum effort and a very small investment. If you have patience in developing your list you can make tons of money with your site:

STEP 1: Get a Domain Name. If you have never bought a domain name before and are unsure what to do. Make sure you pick something catchy!

STEP 2: Get Hosting for your Domain Name. You are not going to have a presence on the Internet until you get hosting. You can think of hosting as online real estate, as this is where your website will live. You need a hosting account, as you will need to build a squeeze page up online, host images etc.

There are thousands of hosting companies online. A good hosting company should have everything you need: good terms and conditions and 24/7 tech support by chat/phone/ email.

STEP 3: Get an Autoresponder Account

There are many autoresponder providers. The autoresponder is where your subscribers are kept in the database, where you get the subscription form to put onto your Squeeze Page, where you create your follow up messages and where you track how many people are opening and clicking on the links in your email.

It is very, very important!

An autoresponder is between 10$ and 20$ a month, but worth every cent. You might make this investment back straight away, but this will be pittance when you start making sales from your list. In internet marketing circles it is said that each subscriber on your list is worth $1 a month, so you do the math!

There will be a learning curve when you start using an autoresponder, but they have excellent support, live chat and tons of video training.It really would be a wise investment to spend some time learning how to navigate around the autoresponder you choose and all its capabilities.

STEP 4: Get a Free Product to Promote at Giveaway Sites

Preferably you should write your own product to giveaway, but if you are just starting out you can find on internet sites were you can download free ebooks. At this site, you can download some free ebooks and give those at giveaways.The great thing about ebooks from Butterfly Reports is that you can brand them with your own affiliate links, so you can get additional streams of income. All the ebooks at this site are valuable, as they are checked before they become available to download. To differentiate yourself from other people offering the same ebook at the giveaways, it is also good to select a few other ebooks, which you can include as bonuses. Zip up all these ebooks, ready to upload to the internet at a later stage.

STEP 5: Set up a Squeeze Page to Promote

Essentially you need a HEADLINE to capture attention, a call to action and an opt in form, which you create on Aweber and copy the html over to your Squeeze page. When you know what you are doing, this can take as little as 10 minutes. For extra you can check  DeskTopBucks, which has plenty of videos to help you set up a squeeze page and your Aweber account.

STEP 6: Upload Your Squeeze Page & Download Page to the Internet

Now you’ve created your squeeze page, you will want to upload it to the internet. For this you will need an FTP client. There is a great free one called Filezilla, which you find easily in Google. There is a bit of a learning curve with FTP too, so be prepared to take some time over this. There are plenty of videos over at YouTube if you search Filezilla to help you through. You will also want to upload your free ebook folder as well, so you have a place to send people to download your product from. Alex has another secret here that works really well. Instead of giving a direct link to the free ebook, send people to a Thank you page. You should place there other opportunities and discounts, as well as the download link that create additional income streams, which is a really good idea for you to incorporate too.

STEP 7: Create First Message on your Autoresponder Account, Highlighting Where to Download Product Now, you need to create the first message in your Aweber account. This will say, thank you for subscribing and include the download link to your free gift or thank you page. Once again, if you get stuck on the video tutorials available at Aweber or DeskTopBucks; videos will help you at this stage too.

STEP 8: Check Squeeze Page Works

Go to your domain name, and put your name and email address into the opt in form, and double check that you receive the email that you set up in the previous step. It’s also a good idea to check the download page too.

STEP 9: Create a Quick Folder and Dedicated Giveaway Email Address, So You Have Details to Hand When Signing up and Contributing Gifts to Giveaways.

Adding your gift to a giveaway can take 20 minutes or if you are organized, just a few minutes so some quick advice on getting organized. Set up a quick folder!

STEP 10: Sign up to as Many Giveaways as you can (Ongoing)

You will be kept up to date with all the latest giveaways that you can contribute to, if you regularly visit GreatGiveawayGuide. Follow the on screen instructions of each giveaway and you’ll soon get the hang of it.

STEP 11: Promote Giveaways (Ongoing)

The main rule of every giveaway is to promote the giveaway. When you first start out, you won’t have a list to promote to, so you will need to find other ways to promote the giveaway, like putting the promotion link on twitter. I get a lot of traffic from my twitter account.

You can also add your give away link in your forum signature and write a few useful posts. You could write a few articles, perhaps about how great giveaways are and put up a page promoting the latest giveaway site. Or even start blogging about what you are doing online, and include the promotional links on there to. Then once you have a small list, you can start promoting giveaway sites to your list. After all your subscribers found your gift on a giveaway site, so you know they like them! And don’t worry if you feel stuck with what to write about there will normally be promotional emails you can use on most giveaway sites.

STEP 12: Create Emails to go in Your Autoresponder and Check your Click Through Rates (Ongoing)

Now you need to start creating emails for your Aweber account, so that they are sent out on autopilot every couple of days, every week or however often you want to send out an email. On your promotional emails, it is best to send out a broadcast message, as you can see how many people have opened the email and clicked through the link. You want to aim to get a 20% open rate and a 10% click through rate. To obtain this you will have to test different email promotions and see how they fare. As you are growing your list, you can practice these emails and by the time your list is in the 1000s, you would have got really good.

E-mail marketing is one of the most lucrative methods used to earn large amounts of money, bypassing any hard labor or costly advertising investments. It is also a very quick and easily traceable process.

There are various list building programs you can join which allow you to create a list and send messages to them. These programs will generate a huge contact list and allow you to expand your network significantly. Hundreds of free and paid list building resources are in existence today so I strongly advise you to be careful in selecting which ones to use, as some of them are fraudulent and others don’t produce effective outcomes as desired.

Once you build your list then you can start sending offers to them to begin achieving an incredible rate of success. However, I must warn you that e-mail marketing as simple as it is, can be very frustrating and you may feel a bit disappointed at times. The main thing you need to do is to educate yourself and establish what will work for you. It is also very important that you stay in compliance with the regulations in sending e-mails to multiple recipients as you don’t want to be blacklisted as a spammer.

In your e-mail campaigns it is a good practice to personalize your marketing mails by greeting and addressing individual potential customers by using their name. When people see their name in an e-mail it seems less like a sales copy and they will be more inclined to read what you sent and possibly click the link to your site to make a purchase.

In addition, special care should be given to plan your marketing e-mails commanding attention right from the subject line and making the content of the e-mail itself relevant and interesting to the reader, for in doing so you will be more effective in receiving a response.

Once you have established a customer base you want to keep them by maintaining continuous contact with them, not too often to bombard or irritate them, but on a monthly basis just to reinforce what you offer and also to introduce any new products or services you are currently launching. This will keep you in the forefront of the customers mind and result in getting you repeat business.

While e-mail is an extremely important tool that helps friends, family members, and coworkers communicate, the rampant spread of unsolicited commercial e-mail has made this communication medium less useful. Depending on which security researcher you believe, spam now accounts for 85-95% of all e-mail traffic on the Internet.

Due to so much junk clogging our inboxes, more users, e-mail software programmers, and Internet and e-mail providers have become extremely aggressive in using filters to help trap spam. While good filters can prevent a large chunk of spam from entering e-mailboxes, they may also trap legitimate commercial and non-commercial e-mail as well.

Especially if you perform valid business via e-mail, but even if you just send a few jokes to coworkers, it has become increasingly important to work harder to help ensure your valid messages do not get caught in spam filters. Below are seven tactics you can use to help keep this from happening.

1. Use a subject line. It sounds so simple but I’m surprised how often this gets ignored. If I see an e-mail with no subject in my Inbox and I don’t immediately (and I mean IMMEDIATELY) recognize the sender, more than likely it gets trashed. Some filters will do the same automatically.

2. Describe Your Subject. Don’t just send an e-mail with the word “hi” or “read me” as the subject line. Think of a newspaper - if you don’t see catchy headlines, more than likely you won’t read the stories. The more descriptive the subject line, the more likely someone (or some filter) won’t immediately pass the e-mail off as spam. Just don’t get too carried away and post multi-line subjects, either, as this also may steer people away from your e-mails.

3. DON’T TYPE IN ALL CAPS! Neither in the subject line (yes, I’m harping on the subject line a lot!) or in the body of the e-mail message. Some consider it rude, others amateurish. You probably don’t want to type in all lower-case either, but at least that looks slightly better. Please learn how to use the SHIFT key.

Not only will many spam filters mark such e-mails as questionable, many people may refuse to read them even if they pass through filters.

4. Avoid certain topics in the subject line that spammers often use. Many spam filters target e-mail with subjects such as: 
* aging 
* and more 
* dear friend 
* free 
* guarantee 
* important 
* lottery 
* medicine 
* mortgage 
* pharmacy 
* pill 
* property 
* rates 
* urgent

5. Stop sending file attachments in every e-mail. There are three good reasons:

* Some office-based e-mail filters will trap ALL attachments or just attachments of several questionable file types. Depending on the filter, only the attachments may be removed, or entire e-mails may get squashed. If you send e-mails containing attachments, potential recipients may not only miss your attachments but the text inside the e-mails as well.

* Due to problematic exploits in many types of software including those that process archives, documents, graphics, and music, some people are becoming paranoid when it comes to seeing e-mail with attached files. If you want to send an attached file, ask the recipient first so they will be expecting it.

* Even though you may have a cable, DSL, satellite, T1, or other high-speed connection to the Internet, many people are getting along just fine with a dial-up connection. At least they are until you send them a 2 megabyte photo of a family picnic that they weren’t expecting.

6. Stop sending chain letters, chocolate cookie recipes, some crazy story you heard that sounds too good to be true about Microsoft giving away cash and prizes to random people who forward e-mails, etc. If people get used to seeing those kinds of e-mail from you, expect to get ignored. Even if you’re sure that crazy story you heard or read in an e-mail must be sent to all your friends, first make sure it isn’t an urban legend. The Snopes website is a good place to help find this out.

7. Don’t spam. Period. If you become known as a spammer and your server gets placed on a spam blacklist (several such services exist), many people will stop reading your e-mails - because they will never see them.

With the rise of spam e-mail filters comes the increased chance that your legitimate e-mails may get blocked. Help prevent this from happening by using smart, descriptive subject lines, avoiding ‘gotcha’ words such as ‘free’ or ‘pharmacy’. DO NOT TYPE IN ALL CAPS. Avoid file attachments unless your recipients know they are coming. Don’t be ‘that person’ who always sends out urban legends. And never, never, never spam. While nothing guarantees your e-mail will get read, even if it arrives at its destination, following this advice at least increases the chance your messages will not get routed to the “spam” folder.

Email marketing is probably the most effective way of bringing in customers and business for your online business. That is, however, if it’s done right. When potential customers come to your site and sign up to learn more about your product or for your newsletter, they’re expressing interest. Keeping their interest is up to you.

Email marketing can do a lot of the selling for you, if it’s done correctly. Too many new business owners get overzealous with their email campaign and end up turning the people away because they’re too pushy. There’s a fine line between being persistent and being a pest. Send them an email thanking them for responding and give them a short introduction about yourself. People like doing business with someone they know and like. They may not yet know you, but the right kind of email will have them feeling like they know you. There are different methods business owners can use to help with their email marketing including email marketing software, auto responders, etc. Choose the method that works best for you and has you feeling the most comfortable.

Don’t ever underestimate the importance of a good subject line in your email. Don’t be aggressive or overbearing. At the same time, don’t tell them everything you want them to know in the subject line or they’ll have no reason to open the email. Make the subject line interesting enough that they’ll want to read the email. Peak their curiosity. If you don’t hear back from them, don’t give up. You don’t want to pester them every day for a week or you’ll be deleted immediately or worse yet, considered as spam. Give them a week or two and send another friendly email. Friendly emails are often your best choice to keep them interested and, possibly, get your referrals.

Often the people who are shouting from the rooftops that email marketing is dead or doesn’t work didn’t carry out the strategy properly. Most likely they are either not getting enough opens, not enough clicks, not enough sales or all of the reasons just mentioned. There are solutions to fix each and every one of these problems. Let’s talk about them.

First up on the list is getting more opens. How do you this? By writing a powerful and compelling subject line. Your subject line should be as important as a headline on your sales letter. It’s what most of your subscribers are going to be reading. You’d want to include the major benefit of your offer in your subject line. Write at least 5-10 subject lines before deciding on the best one.

The next reason that email marketing might not be working for you for now is because of a low click through rate. This goes hand in hand with opens. If you get more opens, you are likely to get more clicks. Having said that, a few simple tweaks can increase your click through rate. One simple tactic is to plug in your link early in your email. Don’t put at the bottom, where it’s below ‘the fold’ and subscribers have to scroll down the entire email to see it. Your content is also very important in determining your CTR.

The third solution to solve your sales problem is to simply promote quality, relevant products that fit your subscriber list. If you are in the Internet marketing niche, for example, don’t promote an article marketing product to people interested in looking for AdWords tips.

Have you ever received an email forwarded from someone somewhere? Chances are you have many hundreds of times. What people do not understand is that forwarding emails to people in their address book is literally gifting those email addresses to online marketers. Here is a way you can avoid this problem and help keep your friends email information confident and private.

Pass this information around and you will help reduce SPAM on the net. Personally I get hundreds of forwarded messages in my email box every week. The most annoying factor of these mails is that people forwarding mails to me and my forward to them are actually exposing my email address to people who are covertly copying al the email addresses in the forward and compiling a list of emails for their online marketing programs. Some people even sell these email addresses on the net.

So the next time you get a forward and you want to pass it on to your friends this is what you should do. This is also a great way to send out mass mails to all your business associates without each of them knowing who the rest of the recipients are. All they will see is a “Recipients Undisclosed” message.

The way to send a ‘recipients undisclosed’ mail is to use the Bcc option. In the ‘To’ address bar type in your email address like this:

Recipients Undisclosed

<a href=”mailto:me@your-domain.com”>me@your-domain.com</a> 

then go to the Bcc address bar and insert the addresses of all those you want to send the mail to without the others knowing who they are.

When the recipients receive the mail the other addresses will be stripped off from the mail leaving only their address for them to see - and yours of course.

Now, if you create a mailing list on your mail account you can just Bcc the mail to everyone in the list just by selecting the list. This is really convenient for sending mails to associates of business and anything else where you don’t want the others to know who the rest of the recipients are.

So, pass this around and reduce SPAM on the net.

When you’re facing a lack of sales from your email marketing efforts, oftentimes a few simple tweaks is all it takes to get you back on track. Nobody is born an expert email marketer, but anyone can learn to become one. In this article, we’re going to look at how you can become a big gun in record time.

The first step is to actually have your emails arrive safely in your subscribers’ inboxes. It’s getting more difficult to increase your deliverability rates with ISP’s becoming more strict with their anti-spam tools. But the best thing you can do is to use a service such as Aweber to send your emails and then make sure your spam rating is always 0.00.

Next, you need to get your emails opened. This is done by writing a killer subject line. Most subject lines are either boring or over hyped. Learn how to write a benefit-focused title for your email and more people are going to open it, which will ultimately increase your sales from that promotion.

The third most important factor for success is the content of your emails. Yes, you can send out pure promotional emails sometimes, but not too often. You do actually need to provide worthy content otherwise you are just going to get people unsubscribing. You’ve got to provide value if you want people to stay on your list and act on your offers and recommendations. If all you do is pitch products all day long, expect lots of people leaving in a hurry and very little sales,

Many businesses have discovered that with the soaring cost of postage, snail-mail marketing is not as cost effective as it once was. Many of these companies turn, instead, to email marketing. Email marketing is an effective means of marketing a business, and unlike other forms of marketing, it is usually very low-cost. If you know a few techniques, it can even be free. 

The first step in email marketing is to acquire people’s email addresses, so that you can send them information about your business. You are not sending spam, because when your visitors signed up for your information, they gave you permission to send that information to you. Don’t forget to include an unsubscribe notice at the bottom of every email for those who want to stop receiving your emails.

The most important piece of email marketing is getting people’s email addresses. There are a few easy ways to do this.

You can do a survey or take a poll. People want to know that you are interested in their opinions, and they are willing to give you their email address as trade for giving their opinion. If you have them give their email address, you can then use the results of the poll to send out messages that will benefit your readership.

You can also offer incentives. If people give you their email addresses, they can then get a discount, a free item, or something valuable that they want or could use.

Another way to do email marketing is to have a contest. If people have a chance to win something, they would be willing to visit your site every day. If you send them notice of contests or reminders to enter you will build your mailing list and have an even greater potential for email marketing.