Email marketing campaigns fail for many different reasons, but the most common mistake online marketers make is not designing the campaign in a manner to produce results. Over the past couple of years I’ve developed this list of key elements to ensure my email marketing campaigns are both profitable and successful. Now I’m going to share them with you so you’re email marketing campaigns will do the same for you.
1: Choose Your Mailing List Very Carefully
Any email marketing campaign is only as good as the mailing list used. There’s many different choices when determining the source of your mailing list so you want to be very careful when making this decision. Too many times email marketers believe the best way to produce results is by using shotgun marketing techniques with harvested email lists. The premise is based on large numbers and the law of averages, in that you’ll produce results simply by sending your ad out to as large a number of recipients as possible. This is a very ineffective way to produce results.
The key of choosing your list is based on your target market. You’re ad may be great but if your mailing list doesn’t consist of your target market, you just as well not send it out. You can use a very small targeted list and produce incredible response rates, depending on your ad, but you can get in the 15% to 35% response range. Before you purchase a mailing list, make sure the list owner can tell what market is represented on the list.
2: You Want To Produce Responses Not Sales
When you advertise, your goal is to get the prospect to respond by requesting more information about what you’re offering for sale. Too many times online marketers try to make the sale in their ad and all too often they fail. Your ad must focus on the most powerful benefits your prospect will gain from the purchase of your product and how they can get more detailed information. You want your ad to sound as if you’re talking with each prospect personally to get the best response rates.
3: Make Your Ad Brief And To The Point
In today’s fast paced society, people are busy and your email marketing needs to take this into consideration. Look to your own experience to help you out here. When you’re searching for initial information you don’t want to wade through a mountain of information, you want information that’s brief and to the point. You’ll have more time to go over the more detailed information in the sales material once you’ve made the initial inquiry.
If your ad rambles on and doesn’t get to the point quickly, your prospect will simply skip over your ad and move on to the next. Pick the most important benefits of your product and let your prospect know what they are and how they’ll solve their problems. Make sure your ad gets directly to the point about your offer. Don’t make your prospect guess about what you’re offering. How do you expect them to request more information if they don’t understand what you’re offering them? After reading thousands of ads, the most common mistakes are made in both the length of the ad and that it doesn’t get to the point.
4: Give Your Prospect An Incentive To Respond
The most powerful word in advertising is "Free!" When you make an offer of a free sample or report, your chances of getting a better response is dramatically increased. Discounts and limited time offers can also be used in your ads, but they’re best used in the sales letter when trying to produce an order. For the best responses, make your incentives immediate and short term. You want to create a sense of urgency when using incentives. If you can generate more ad responses using incentives, you’re increasing your chances for making more sales.
5: Include A Strong "Call To Action"
Have you ever read an ad that when you finished you couldn't figure out what to do next? This is a fatal mistake that’s made in many ads. Don’t be timid here, make sure your prospect knows exactly what to do if they want more details. You can have them send an email, visit your web page, call a phone number or any other method of delivery you’ve chosen, just make sure you give your prospect some options and make the call to action strong. This is an excellent place to combine an incentive.
6: Track And Record Your Responses
Developing a successful email marketing campaign isn’t just having a great ad, its having a great ad and knowing what kind of responses it’ll produce in a specific target market! Your ad might be very successful in one target market and less successful in another. But you won't know this if you don't "Track and Record Your Responses!" You can use special codes as department numbers or form numbers, but the best strategy I've used is in linking a specific ad to an autoresponder or web page. Make sure you always record the responses on a tracking form for evaluation and reference.
7: Follow Up With Every Response
It completely baffles me why an online marketer would spend their time, effort and money to advertise and then make no attempt to follow up with the prospects. You've created an interested prospect because they've asked to get more details, don't stake the success of your business on the fact that after they've read your sales letter, they'll place an order without you asking them for the sale again. If you don't follow up and ask for the sale again, you're passing up the opportunity of a 20% to 30% increase in your sales. I don't know of any business owner who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to increase their sales by 20% to 30% percent and you can accomplish this by just following up with your prospects!
8: Test Your Entire Email Marketing Process
The key to producing a successful email marketing campaign is: "To Test Your Entire Process!" Test, test, test, test! Think about this: Is your ad pulling the most responses it can or can it get a much larger response rate? You'll never know unless you test. Here's where you can take a small profit and create a fortune for your business. You want to take a systematic approach that'll give you quantifiable results for comparing specific ads, sales letters, markets and advertising mediums. But be very careful. Don't make wholesale changes, test each component in your process separately. Test, test and test some more! Be patient and be persistent!
9: Expect Questions From Your Prospects
No matter how well your ads and sales letters are written, you’ll still get questions. Online prospects are more educated and want more information before they make their buying decision. In fact, before I make a purchase online, I send an email to the advertiser asking anything, just to see what and how quickly they respond. You'd be amazed at how many times I never receive a reply. When you do respond, do it honestly and quickly. They're hot prospects when they ask a question, so get them the information they want and as quickly as possible, before they cool off. If you don’t want the sale just do nothing.
10: Set Reasonable And Achievable Goals
In most email marketing campaigns, a 1% to 3% response rate is considered very good. You can and will see better and worse response rates by carefully selecting a targeted email list. But you need to set reasonable and achievable goals for your campaign. If your goals are set too high and can’t be reached you’ll become disillusioned and stop marketing. You want to be able to reach some of your goals so set them up in steps to keep building from.
Final Thoughts
Once you begin your email marketing campaign you’ll begin to see for yourself which of these elements you’ve mastered and which ones you still need to work on. In to give your campaign the best possible chance for success, make sure you've considered and applied these 10 Key Elements. Make your selections carefully and with a specific goal in mind and soon you’ll find that you’re easily obtaining your email marketing goals and producing incredible profits from your online marketing campaign.
