Monday, November 24, 2008

Send Proper Email Messages to Your Marketing List

By Chris Blanchet

Okay, so you worked real hard to build your e-mail list. No doubt, it wasn't easy, but now you have a list of several hundred and hopefully several thousand addresses for great prospects. What a great feeling! All of these folks are primed and ready to start buying.

But what steps do you take now? Writing your first e-mail follow-up or broadcast to your marketing list can be ten times more difficult than assembling all of those leads!

The last thing you want is for those leads on your marketing list to get turned off by an aggressive marketing technique or by reading just one marginally offensive line that sends them straight to the bottom of the page to click that "unsubscribe" link. (Groan). All that work for nothing!

One of the key things the professionals at Responsive Tutorials teach in their E-Mail Marketing tutorial is that you will have greater success with your marketing list in terms of not only keeping your leads but in selling to them if you alternate your follow-ups and broadcasts from "content" to "marketing."

As an example, try sending a content-based message first and omit any marketing or product pitching. Not only will you provide value to your readers, but when you follow-up with a message that promotes a product, you will improve conversion rates on your messages. This is particularly true if the product has a strong relationship with your prior message. But even more importantly than making a single sale is keeping your marketing list away from the unsubscribe link. Keeping them on your list will result in more sales over the long-term, especially as you establish more value and trust.

Since your marketing list subscribers see more and more marketing e-mails dumped in their inbox every day, Responsive Tutorials teaches another great lesson: How to make sure your messages are read and not overlooked or deleted. With so many other marketers fighting for their dollars, how do you build loyalty and even anticipation for your e-mails? While this is another issue altogether, you can take very simple steps from making the formatting easier on your reader's eyes to avoiding common mistakes in writing the body of your e-mail. The end result is that your readers should turn into steady buyers.

For $47, Responsive Tutorials gives you 48 minutes of video tutorials. As a video, the content is easily manageable and a lot simpler to follow than instructions in an e-book. Overall, the eight videos are just long enough without being overwhelming or boring with each having a specific focus. As a bonus, Responsive is offering a copy of Search Engine Optimization Made Easy by Brad Callen, a well-known and respective producer of marketing material. According to Responsive's website, the e-book is worth nearly twice the amount of the tutorials alone, but since it is a bonus we haven't reviewed the book. - 15431

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