The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

Below I have provided a few critical tips for those of you who are new to email marketing. Enjoy!

Building Your Lists

There are a number of ways to build your opt-in list of subscribers. Below I
have compiled a list to help you get started.

• If your business has a physical location ask visitors to fill out a card giving you permission to
    contact them via email with product/service updates.
• Include a sign up form on your website. Most permission-based email marketing software programs will include a tool allowing you to create a sign up form. This allows you to easily capture the email addresses (and any additional information) from your website’s visitors.
• Always advertise your newsletter. For instance, include a short line on the back of your
       business card that reads “Receive Additional Tips and Industry News Each Month In Your Inbox. Sign up for our Newsletter at www.yourwebaddress.com “. This will lead people to your website and into becoming a subscriber to your newsletter.
• The greatest way to build your list is by concentrating on the quality of your newsletter. By
       releasing an informative newsletter that people find valuable they will share this information and the source, further growing your list of subscribers.

Providing Information about your E-newsletter

It is important to inform your potential subscribers on how often they can
expect to receive emails from your company and what type of information they
can expect from these emails.

Quality Over Quantity

By writing quality content your recipients will look forward to receiving
your e-newsletters and will look to them for knowledge in your industry. This
will build further credibility for your company and encourage the recipients to
forward the message to a friend. Sending your e-newsletters too frequently will
annoy your subscribers and can lessen your credibility. From a design aspect,
be sure that the newsletter is reader-friendly. Do not use Flash, brightly
colored text, extra large font, or all caps. For an HTML based newsletter,
create a header that coincides with your company’s colors and/or message. Next,
create a simple 1 or 2 pixel border along with a matching footer. As far as
content, break down your message into nuggets of information. Remember, very
few subscribers are going to read your newsletter if it is the length of a
novel. Break down your message into short paragraphs and use bulleted items to
condense and stress important points.

Keeping your message out of the SPAM folder

The following items are critical in preventing your message from being
blocked by SPAM filters:

• Try to use font sizes that are smaller than +2 or +3.
• Bolded, red font will also add to the likelihood that your message could be considered SPAM.
• Use a Permission-based email marketing software, such as IntelliContact, that allows the sending of multi-part MIME messages. Simply put, this will allow you to send out both an HTML and text-only version of your e-newsletter. The software will detect whether the email
    client can accept HTML based messages, if not, the email client will accept the text-only version.
• Avoid using all caps; especially for words such as “FREE”
• Do not type out any currency denominations in the millions. Example: $10,000,000.
• Avoid using text such as “click below”, “click here”, “free money” etc…
• Obviously, always be sure to include a Subject with your message as well. However, avoid using an exclamation mark or all caps in the subject.

Frequency of Sending

As a rule of thumb, always place yourself in your subscriber’s shoes. Don’t
inundate them with so many newsletters that your message becomes “watered down”
and loses all credibility. Again, always place quality over quantity.

I hope these tips help you in your permission-based email marketing efforts.
There is no more powerful way to convey your message as a company and build
credibility than with permission-based email marketing.

Brandon Milford
brandon@broadwick.com

A critical part of increasing conversions is following up with those who have expressed interest in your product or service. One of the best ways I’ve found to follow up is via an autoresponder. I’ve achieved great results by putting together a series of messages that are sent to our trial users. I have had to tweak them along the way and measure their effectiveness.

Below are a few important things that I have learned:

• Include the trial user’s login information with each message so they can easily login to their account. Many of us sign up for various trials and use different login and passwords for each. By providing the login information in each message you allow the trial user to quickly login to their account without contacting you to retrieve their username and/or password.
• Always provide the contact information for your customer support team along with support resources in a specified location of each message.  This will allow the user to quickly and easily locate this information if they need assistance. For instance, I include a navigational column on the right side of each message with a "Support" container that includes links to our video tutorials, user guide, support phone number along with their available hours and the support email address.
  

• Always let the trial user know that their expiration date is soon approaching. I signed up for a trial version of a web-based software app a few weeks ago and just the other day I receive an email message "out of the blue" stating "Your Trial has Expired". It had been 4 or 5 days since I had logged in so I had lost track of how much time I had before my trial expired. Now, what I do is send out one message three days prior to the expiration of the trial to remind the user of their trial account and let them know that they have only three days left. This gives them a couple of days to log into their account and send out a few sample messages prior to their trial expiring.  Two days later I let them know that their trial will expire the following day and finally a message goes out the day of the expiration letting them know that their trial has expired and encouraging the trial user to upgrade to a full account.
• Include testimonials within your autoresponder messages. I cannot stress enough the importance of dedicating at least 2-3 autoresponder messages to include expanded case studies on a few of your clients. If someone is testing your product they want to know that others are achieving great results. For instance, one of my autoresponder messages includes, within the testimonial, a quote from a client that states: "The months we send out a newsletter we at least double our monthly sales". This is powerful for trial users looking at our product to help increase their sales.
• For those who do not sign up for a full account send a message a week to two weeks after their trial has expired requesting feedback on your product. This will provide information about your company and product and point out places where you can improve.

I hope these tips help increase your conversions.