I’m back to work today after a great visit to see my nephew graduate from Navy boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. It was a fun time even though we didn’t get to see him for long as he had to fly out to his new school in Virginia.

I was catching up on my work and not thinking about this blog yet when I got an email from T-Mobile. You may know that I have had a G1 Android phone since the beginning. I have written about how much I like the phone, but since it’s the very first one there have been some upgrades and I’ve been thinking about getting newer features, more memory, better battery life, that kind of thing.

Today’s email said “Buy the MOTOROLA CLIQ™ with MOTOBLUR™ for $199.99* and a free car charger is yours.” I checked out the * and thought, WOW this might be a good time to upgrade. It had surprised me that they would give me the discount to upgrade, since I still had almost a year left on my agreement (from the G1 buy), but it didn’t mention that either way in the fine print. I had researched the Cliq, and liked what I saw, even thought some people had warned me to avoid Motorola. I was willing to add the extra two years (mentioned in the fine print) to my contract to the one that I had left.

I was very disappointed, but not surprised to get to the T-Mobile site and see that my cost for the Cliq would actually be $369.98. So instead of going right back to work, I wasted some time investigating new Android phones. What I found was that Acer is bringing out what looks to be an even cooler model, The Liquid. The previews all sound like this phone may provide me with even more of what I want than the Cliq.

I’ll wait to see the actual reviews once it’s available and there is not a set price for this phone yet. I imagine it will be more than the Cliq, especially since I won’t be buying it from T-Mobile, but I also won’t be extending my contract.

I’m not sure that I’ll buy the Liquid, but I know that I wouldn’t even have gone looking for it if T-Mobile had sent me an email today with the actual price I would have to pay for a Cliq instead of a generic ($199*) ad.

I was speaking with a customer the other day about ways that he could use email marketing to promote his business. He was belt tightening like most businesses today and he finally realized the possible value and low cost of this kind of promotion.

When I first built his site he asked for and I installed a free open source email newsletter management system called PHPList. There have been several visitors sign up and other than the initial welcome email there hasn’t been anything else sent. I explained that since it may have been several months since some of his visitors had signed up, his first email should be an explanation of why he had not written sooner. It’s possible some of his subscribers may have forgotten that they actually signed up and accuse him of spamming them.

My next chore was to talk him out of buying or renting a list of names to send to. It’s always a great temptation to collect a zillion names any way that you can and start sending email “Blasts”. I even hate the term “email blast”. While this method may have once worked very well for any business (and probably still does for some spammers), for most legitimate businesses the costs in terms of loss of your reputation and bad will from your recipients far outweigh any benefit. I have written before of the value of using your own list of names and email addresses.

Finally I mentioned that before he sent anything out that I would like to have a look at it. What I got was just a giant picture that only promoted his business. No text just pictures and nothing that I would call an special offer.

The first thing that I mentioned was that many email clients (Yahoo, Google, etc.) now block images by default, so those folks won’t see anything but a blank page. I also told him that he needed to send something that his recipients would consider valuable. An unadvertised special or a special tip (a trick of the trade) that would benefit his readers. I advised him to look at his email from his customers point of view and ask himself this question if he wanted to grow his subscriber list and business. Is this email something that I would consider passing on to one of my friends or family?

Here’s an interesting follow up article by Loren McDonald on the email Insider called

Are Your Emails ‘Shareworthy’?

Want to hear why traditional media just doesn’t get it when it comes to blogging?

Have a look at this post on The Viral Garden called New York Times shows how out of touch it is with bloggers.

It’s not just the media that doesn’t get it either. Established businesses think that they are getting into the game of social and email marketing just send out their ads in hopes that they will be read and passed along. They don’t really get it that they are just annoying their customers, not trying to help them find or do what they want.

Read – New York Times shows how out of touch it is with bloggers

I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.

You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters

Post your old newsletters

It is always a good idea to post your newsletters on your site.
This will do at least two good things for you.

1. It will get you new content. That’s one of the best thing that you can do for your site to raise your rankings in the search engine results pages. Plus it will give you many new keywords that you can be found for in the search engines.
2. t will give your potential subscribers an idea of what they will be getting when they do sign up. That will make your newsletter even more powerful because you will be getting subscribers who read what you have and request more.

You can have a newsletters section on your site or a way to do it for my customers who want to do it themself would be to create a blog category named “newsletters” and post your email newsletters in that category. You can place a link from your newsletter sign up page that goes to this category. That way the link will always go to the most current editions. This is also a good page to link to in the header of your newsletter for those readers that are unable to view your email newsletter.

Well, that’s the end of my little mini-course, but there’s so much more to learn, many things that I may have missed or just glanced over and email marketing is changing all of the time. I invite your comments, techniques and opinions. and if you would like to learn more..

I can highly recommend emailexperience.org

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I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.

You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters

No Spam

You might think that “No Spam” is all about yesterdays post. That if you only have a opt-in mailing list you provide an method to opt-out and you have your name and contact information in your newsletters that you are not sending Spam and technically you are correct. I have a bigger definition of Spam. I believe that if I sign up to receive a newsletter and it is all ads and promotional material with no other good information it’s still junk even if I asked to receive it.

Unfortunately many site owners just want to know what’s the easiest and cheapest way that they can “blast” their advertisements to as many people as possible.

It’s important to remember here that your subscribers are guests of your site who were looking to see what you can do for them. They are hoping that you will provide them a way to make their life easier or maybe just to entertain them a bit. If you do that they will allow you to promote yourself and possibly even help you, but if all you send is advertising it will be ignored and what could have been your most valuable resource will simply unsubscribe or block your mail.

It is also true that in these days of email filters more and more email is being blocked and deleted. Many times the sender doesn’t even know it. The more images that you include in your newsletter the more it looks like spam to the filters.

In addition did you know that most major online email clients (Yahoo, Google, Hotmail) will block your images by default? The best way to get your message through to your readers is to not look like Spam. Just a few pictures and lots of text. Have good descriptive alternate text to describe your images so readers will know what the pictures are if they can’t see them. Be sure to provide a plain text version of your email to users who can’t get html email and provide a link to a page on your site where the reader can go if the email is unreadable.

The main thing that I want to stress in this post is that you don’t get to decide if your email campaign is spam or not, the folks on the receiving end get to decide that. Don’t give them an excuse to block your mail.

Tomorrow – Post your old newsletters

I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters

Opt-In only

It may be tempting go add the names of everyone that you can find to receive your newsletter, but the best way to go is to have your visitors ask to be placed on your mailing list.

It is important that you make sure that the option to opt-in to your newsletter is prominent, easy to use and on every page of your site, but the only way most people will subscribe is if you offer them something that they really want to receive.

In the case of yesterday’s free samples, where you are requiring the visitors to fill in all of the fields in a form in order to get their sample, I would advise to have an unchecked checkbox for your newsletter subscription.

Some people will say you should have the box prechecked so you get as many subscribers as possible, but I believe that you should make it as easy as possible to let your visitors add themselves to your list, but they should never have to opt-out.

You may say that this kind of thing is just petty, but I believe that it’s usually the small things that you do (or don’t do) that let your visitor know that you are not going to take advantage of their trust. You will definitely get fewer names on your list, but the ones that you get will be your best resource, your fans, so to speak.

When you do send them something they feel is worth passing along they will do so with a recommendation and some passion and that will best help you promote your newsletter, your site and your products and services.

Tomorrow – No Spam

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I think that an email campaign is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters

Your own list

Your own list of customers and visitors who have asked for your newsletters are by far your most valuable resource. These are your core business. Very few, if any, lists that you can buy will give you people who are specifically interested in what you have to offer.

The main goal of a newsletter is to get people to actually receive, open and read your email. This is called deliverability. The best chance of this happening is to have recipients who want and have asked for your information.

One of the best ways to get your visitors to sign up is to offer them a gift. It’s pretty easy to offer something to download like a great report, helpful tips or perhaps an ebook that you have written or purchased the distribution rights to. These gifts can be presented as very valuable even though they don’t cost you anything or very little.

Another way to go is to give away something that costs you more. One of my customers Melosleep tried a limited time promotion where they gave away a free sample of their product to anyone who filled out a form. The freebie sites passed their offer around and in a very short time they had a huge amount of requests. It was expensive, but they built up a very large in house mailing list quickly.

A huge list can also be another expense as most web hosts will limit the amount of email any one account can send in order to keep the spammers out. For example this site is limited to sending 100 emails per hour max. There are programs like PHPList that will limit how many emails that it sends an hour, but if you have tens of thousands of names it would take weeks to send one newsletter.

In that case you probably need to use a commercial email sending (or hosting) company. A company with a good reputation so your email doesn’t get blocked even before it gets to your reader as being from a spammer.

Tomorrow – Opt-In only

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It’s amazing how I read about something that a marketer should or should not do and then right after it happens to me. It may just be that after I read about it I’m on the lookout for that activity, but it still amazes me how often they are related.

For example I was just reading Melinda Krueger, the Email Diva last week and she was answering a question from someone who thought that it was a bad idea that a company would invite him to start paying his bill online when that was something that he always did. Then over the weekend I got an email from a company advertising something that I had just purchased.

The price was the same so you can say it’s not a big deal, but after reading The Diva’s post it would have really impressed me if they sent something extra to buy that would have augmented my earlier purchase.

Read Why Don’t You Know Me?

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I believe that email marketing is still one of the best lowest cost ways to reach your customers. If you don’t believe me have a look at your inbox and see just how many of the biggest retailers in the world are trying to reach you.

I believe that every business should have some kind of a newsletter even if it’s only sent once a month. Your own customer list is always the most valuable. These are people who know you and are much more willing to read your mail and even pass it on. I don’t ever recommend buying names.

Remember that these are your customers and you don’t want to make them mad, so do it right and play by the rules.

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam

Pretty simple stuff, but very important.

You can send it out yourself, but remember that many ISP’s these days have a 100 emails per hour limit on their accounts. If your lists get big it may be best to outsource the actual mailing to one of the big email newsletter senders.

I have send many of my customers to read this post by Loren McDonald on the Email Insider blog.

Read Email Life Can Be Hard – Make it Easy For Subscribers

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If you are using email to market to your customers you already know Internet service providers are blocking more and more of your messages.

There are some very good suggestions on the Email Insider Blog called “When ‘Best’ Practices Become ISP Law” for getting your mail through. They mostly have to do with your list of names. How to acquire them and how to manage them.

More…

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