8 Tips to Increase Response in Email

Email marketing is a great thing to do when you own any kind of business. Here’s an article I found about increasing your response rate, by Paul Easton.

Opt in email marketing is no different than normal direct marketing in that small simple changes will increase your response and success. These tips will help with both plain text and html email:

1. Personalize - "A persons name is still the sweetest sound" Having first name in both the subject of the email, and the body of the message will help your email get read and not just deleted or being mistaken for junk mail.

2. Free - Offer something free: It's an over used word on the Internet, but it still works. It must 100% free, not an item you have to pay postage and packaging for. Otherwise your user who checks out your offer will feel cheated.

3. Tracking - Always track any promotion, which means using tools that will allow you to track responses and conversion of visitors to sales. A good service to use is adminder: http://www.adminder.com Tracking also allows you to find out what information is most important to your readers.

4. Talk - When you write your email copy, write as if you are having a one-to-one conversation with the recipient. This makes your customer feel like a real person and not a number.

5. Short but informative - Provide the information in a short and clear method showing the main information using short paragraphs of 3-4 lines making it easy to read or skim over. Using bullet points and line space between paragraphs to highlight important points.

6. Benefits not features - Show what the item or service can do for your customer, not what its features are.

7. Call to Action - Use a sense of urgency with ease of contact.

8. Easy to contact - Use a clickable link such as http://site.com or mailto:you@yoursite.com
This format will create a click on link in most email programs. If you are marketing internationally you will need a format suitable for American On Line -- The biggest US ISP. Something like this: [ AOL Users Click Here ]

Always test and target to your market, response rates can be up to 20% with the right message. Trial and error will prove you right or wrong. The power of the promotion to an in-house list is something very over looked. The list must have agreed to receive information (opt-in) from you or you just become junk email.

About the Author:
Paul Easton is a self confessed Internet Marketing Nut and Editor of "Power Promotion Plus" -- An ezine dedicated to web site promotion tools that work with 3 free gifts for subscribing Check it out here: http://www.Digitalawol.com/?source=Article

How to boost sales by Internet Marketing

Day797
Internet Marketing, also known as Online Marketing, Online Advertising or Internet Advertising, is the promotion of products and services over the Internet. Internet Marketing, in fact, aims to create a better business opportunity for an organization by promoting its products or services using online media; hence, businesses - both online and off line - are increasingly making use of Internet Advertising as part of their marketing strategy.

Initially, Internet Marketing was all about building a website or putting up banner/display ads on other websites. A website with appropriate text content, image inclusions and audio/video features is indeed an excellent option of reaching out to global audience and informing them about a company's products/services, their features, et al. The website remains the basic building block of Internet Marketing even today; however, it is now being blended with key web site promotion techniques in order to achieve the advertising goals.

Internet Marketing Key Techniques

Search Engine Marketing Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the process of marketing or advertising a website via search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Two totally different approaches are followed for Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization and Pay per click Advertising.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a web site promotion technique that improves the site's organic ranking in searches based on select keywords/phrases and attracts more web traffic. If you have an Internet Business, SEO is something you cannot simply do without.

Pay per click or PPC Advertising which appear as links next to the organic results on search engine result pages involves listing a website by bidding on keywords. PPC calls for methodical keyword selection/optimization so that the keywords match with the search terms used by target segment of users and capably increase web site traffic.

Pay for inclusion (PFI) listing in website directories is another popular SEM technique.

Email Marketing Email Marketing is the method of conveying information about a product or service through email. After the initial glitch (on account of spamming), email marketing has been effectively used for web site promotion. These days, of course, it is permission based email marketing that is being practiced and internet businesses are using the opt in lists, giving the customers the right to refuse further communication.

Mass mailing and e commerce newsletters are two popular e-mail marketing tools.
Banner Advertising Banner Advertising is an Internet business marketing technique, which revolves round placing dynamic graphic ad links in others sites. Users require clicking these links to open your website.

Online Promotion Techniques Different online promotion techniques or Social Media Marketing Methods, like posting blogs, comments and opinions as also press releases (related to the product or service) in a discussion forum are also effective Online Advertising processes. Article Marketing involves listing articles in article directories, article repositories and/or article banks.

Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is a rather innovative and interesting form of Internet Marketing, wherein marketers promote and sell other products/services as part of a program planned by the product manufacturers and/or service providers. The affiliate is either awarded a flat fee or receives a good percentage of the sale proceeds.

The Social bookmarking sites are a great help for people with affiliate marketing programs because such sites are a free and effective way to get back links and drive traffic to websites and blogs.

These are some of the most effective Internet Marketing techniques that work on a personal level to promote a website, increase web site traffic and add to the profitability of the Internet Business. Of course, one does not need to follow all the techniques or strategies for a successful Internet Marketing campaign; instead, it is careful planning and meticulous execution that help achieve the goals of Internet Marketing or Online Advertising

Author: Dipti Pathak is a freelance writer. She has been writing online articles on various topics since 2003. She provides SEO consultancy to SwamiSEO.

Still Spooked by E-Mail Marketing?

Day663
Here's another article by my favorite internet consultant. (My husband!)

E-Mail has been around for roughly 15 years already depending on what you count as the beginning. Hard to believe isn’t it? Remember when you got your first email address? Maybe it was at work, maybe it was through Compuserve, Prodigy or AOL…you dialed a local number from home, sometimes several times to get a free line, then waited while the email crawled in. “You’ve got Mail” was a happy time back then. A lot has changed over the last few years and the term “email” has become a noun, a verb and sometimes a curse word. With all the filters, privacy tricks and even laws to protect us, email has certainly taken on a life of its own and there are a lot of folks around the world always trying to get around these various barriers causing the rest of us to be on the continual defensive.

I bet you occasionally get a good or at least necessary email though even today. Like a hole in one on the golf course (I’ve never gotten of those) it’s enough to keep you going back and slugging through the rest, for that relatively rare gem.

While I am not in a position to solve all of our issues with email today, I can report to you that on a dollars earned to dollars spent basis, email marketing for business is more than twice as profitable ($45.65 for each dollar spent) as the next most profitable direct marketing you can do which is internet advertising ($20.19 / $1) according to a study done in 2007 by the Direct Marketing Association. The numbers continued to decrease for newspaper, direct mail, telemarketing and so on. Yes in spite of what you may have heard about open rates (yes they are low) and automatic filters (they can tend to keep out honest messages as much as malicious ones) email marketing is extremely cost effective.

Some tips on using email marketing effectively: 1. Do NOT buy lists. There are plenty of better ways to get email addresses of people that are actually interested in what you have. Start by asking your existing customers. 2. Do NOT send emails too frequently. The correct frequency will be related to the value you are offering. Don’t send them just to send them, but have a purpose, and one that has perceived value in the mind of the recipient. 3. Do NOT abuse your list. Those who give up their email address to you do so with a level of trust. If you violate that trust you will lose them and probably sooner rather than later.

For more on proper and effective use of email you can attend a Lunch & Learn session at the Catawba County Chamber of Commerce on November 14th at 12 noon. I will be presenting and leading a discussion on how to use email most effectively. You do not have to be a chamber member to attend. Contact the Chamber at 328-6111 for more information or to register.

Using technology can be frustrating at times, but it is not going away so we can either try and run the other way and get crushed or we can learn to use it effectively and prosper with the best going into the future. With the Holiday Season upon us there is no better time to get a handle on this not so new but continually evolving technology.

John Geiger, owner of Webmasters ICE, has over five years experience helping small and medium-sized companies and organizations capitalize on the power of the internet through consulting, education, and supporting products and services. His focus and passion is the use of the internet in providing more effective overall marketing strategies and highly measurable levels of marketing success. http://www.webmastersice.com/