Note: Folks…say hello to David Lindop from Setfire Media. He’s here with E-MoneyMarketing’s first ever guest post. Glad to have his input. And hope you guys enjoy his article on email marketing – Jag 

Email marketing gets a bad rep these days.

What has the potential to be a powerful customer retention and sales tool has been used and abused to the extent where it has to justify itself as legitimate communication the second a customer opens their inbox: guilty until proven innocent.

Learning how to better understand your email marketing campaign is the first step to making it work harder; delivering more positive reception, more sales, and of course, more revenue. There’s a slew of email marketing metrics and it’s vital you are confident in cutting through to the metrics that matter most, and how to use them to improve your email campaign performance.

Delivery Rate

Delivery Rate is most often derived from how many emails were originally sent out minus the number that were bounced back. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? However, it offers no further advice on whether the email was deleted immediately by a spam filter, or diverted into a spam or junk folder. It’s important to remember that email clients like Gmail have the ability to recognize and label familiar communications as spam without ever alerting either the sender or the recipient.

What can you learn from this?

· A percentage of all delivered email WILL end in a junk folder and you’ll never know about it.

· Thus there will never be an official unsubscription from the recipient because chances are they’re not even aware they have received anything from you.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the exact opposite of delivery rate, although it’s often split up into hard bounces and soft bounces. Bounces of the hard variety are being sent to an email address that doesn’t exist; like sending a letter to a completely fictional address. If the domain or recipient isn’t recognized, the email will be returned to the sender. Soft bounces can occur for a number of reasons such as when the recipient’s inbox is full. This doesn’t happen very often these days except in the cases of free services like Hotmail and Yahoo.

· Remove hard bounce addresses as soon as possible to reduce wasted budget, but don’t delete them from your records.

· You should be aiming to reduce your email marketing bounce rate to make your campaigns more effective overall.

Unsubscribe Rate

Many of the reasons why people unsubscribe from email marketing lists is down to how you got their email address in the first place. There are three general ways to procure email addresses:

Buying a list of emails – When you send your email communication out to a cold list of people who have never heard about you, be prepared for a significant unsubscribe rate.

Compiling a list from your previous customers – Unsubscribes from previous customers on your database can mean you are sending too many emails and none of them are of any particular interest to your recipient base. Unless you have some real news worthy of telling your customers or you have a significant offer that doesn’t insult them, I’d seriously reconsider if you need to send that particular email creative you’re working on.

Opt-in emails – An unsubscribe from these guys is far more telling. If they signed up in the first place then perhaps you are bombarding them too much, or they have received some unacceptable service from you recently.

· Use a form on your unsubscribe landing page to offer people the chance to tell you why they have decided to remove themselves from your marketing list. Be prepared for some cutting remarks.

· Find ways to top up your email base (your recipient list) to counter the effect of unsubscribes and provide the opportunity to engage a wider audience.

· Don’t treat low unsubscribes as a measure of recipient interest; use more active metrics like opens, clicks and conversions instead.

Open Rate

The Open Rate is a bit of a misleading metric… use it with care. It doesn’t show you how interested potential customers are in what you have to offer, and it’s certainly no indication they are a gentle nudge away from actually clicking through to your website.

Most email clients (Hotmail, Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook etc.) display a snippet line which needs to be clicked on to load the full content of the email, which will usually contain a piece of tracking code or pixel image that allows the sender to get reports back. What this actually means is that the recipients email client displayed this code; nothing more, nothing less. However, as long as you understand this, it’s still the best indication we have of judging how many human readers actually opened the email.

· The open rate tracking can be activated without the user ever having read the email.

· Identify those customers who never open your emails and send them a completely different type of offer, something you’ve never tried before! It’s a great way to try out your ideas on an audience that won’t negatively affect your sales figures and you never know: you might just discover a way of reaching a new type of customer for your business.

· If you’re paying for your email marketing on a per email basis, and the above tip doesn’t work, delete these non-responders from your mailing list and reduce your budget.

Click-through Rate

Now we’re cooking! This metric starts to give us some solid insight into how interested the target audience is in your product or price (or story if you run an informational website). Industry sectors can experience wildly different click-through rates, ranging from an average of 57% in the restraurant sector to 5.7% in the automotive sector (source Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index™ for January-June 2006), and it’s often a sign of how saturated the email marketing arena is in your chosen industry, and how loyal customers are within that market.

Aim for the highest click-through rate as possible by including a clear and compelling call to action in your email communication; don’t trust the recipient to decide the next course of action. What constitutes a compelling call-to-action is down to your understanding of your audience and market but here are some examples from my experience:

· Buy 1 Get 1 Free Voucher Code – Ends at midnight!

· Enjoy 25% off your regular purchases – Click here to order before we run out of stock!

· Send this offer to your friends and earn a $5 gift voucer with one who signs up to our program.

· Call us for a free, no obligations chat on 0800 123 444 to discuss your policy

Notice, Grasshopper, how retail calls-to-action often rely on two elements to encourage email click through: an good offer and a compelling deadline. You can develop this even more by including personalisation to really connect with your customers on a individual level. If you employ these tactics, make sure your landing pages are ready to convert this traffic and deliver on your promises – otherwise your readers may feel conned and your unsubscribes will rocket.

Conversion Rate

The term conversion isn’t necessarily limited to securing a sale online. It can mean any goal that you define as a secured milestone of customer engagement: email signups, brochure downloads, calls in to the business, installed firefox addons… they’re all conversions to various industries. Most ecommerce businesses will consider straight up purchases as conversions, and email marketing is a proven way of boosting sales and revenue.

Conversion rate depends on many factors coming to together on your landing page to bring the customer to the point where they are willing to commit to a purchase:

Timing

8am on a Monday morning isn’t a great time to launch your email campaign. Similarly schools won’t respond outside of term time.

Pricing

Get this right and customers will forgive a lot of mistakes. Remember, email marketing is not the place to shout about your average pricing policy.

Relevance

Dear old Mrs. Ogden probably isn’t going to be interested in a 18-30 holiday to Ibiza. Match your message to your database for an instant conversion quick win.

Urgency

If you decide upon an arbitrary deadline for an offer or voucher code you must stick to it ruthlessly. The next time it happens people will know it’s for real.

Trustworthyness

You have literally seconds to convince your potential customer that you’re legitimate and credible. Red Comic Sans and premium call numbers are a definite no no.

Call-to-Action

Tell your customer what you want them to do next. People don’t like to think on the internet so give them a clear direction what to click, call or download.

—

David Lindop is a Search Specialist at Setfire Media, a leading digital marketing company who specialise in Adwords management, SEO, linkbait & social media marketing.

—

You can download the PDF version of this post inside the "Reports Download Section" of your FREE E-MoneyMarketing Membership.

P.S You will get many other marketing reports, cheatsheets and business blueprints inside the membership. You will also get every single valuable blog posts here delivered – fresh into your inbox!

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, online marketing, linking, search engine optimization, SEO, email marketing, metrics, click through rate, response rate, conversion rate[/tags]

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

How To Improve Your Email Open Rate and Click Through Rate By 7.8% and 8.4% Respectively
How To Optimize Your Email Subject Title For Better Email Open Rate
Powerful Marketing ToolKit From Marketing Experiments
Are You Doing Email Marketing The Right Way?

Membership marketing is one of the most lucrative business model in online marketing.

Here’s why…

• Easier to grow a large membership who are automatically affiliates than growing a list and finding affiliates
• Member love the information, services and community you provide. And they will tell their friends
• Regular steady income regardless of seasonality
• Continuity programs are the most profitable long term
• Make the sale once, but the income recurs every month after month…year after year…
• Better buyers – People who buy from you once are far more likely to purchase something else from you
• Ability to sell on backend where a lot of income will be derived from.
• Newsletter can get them back to the membership area.
• Fresh content are generated when members participate on the members’ forum. Search engine loves regularly updated site. Members will also come back again and again with little or no work on our part
• Membership sites are ideal for extra Adsense income, and affiliate sales

There loads of good membership software you can use such as Amember or Launch Formula Marketing.

If you want free, you can always look at open source Joomla and Drupal.

Now all these may seem tough to set up and get going. So what I’m going to reveal to you is a fast and simple way to get a ‘membership’ running.

I picked this up from the Rhodes brothers. Damn…they are good.

This very simple membership model is known as "email course". Yeah. Nothing complicated.

Just simply an email e-course set on recurring payment mode.

People wants to learn something. You package the materials as an email course. Yes an e-course but the only difference is that it is delivered in an email format to your customer’s inbox. It can be a 5 months or 1 year course. It doesn’t matter. You choose.

And with this, your customers have to opt in to your list. If not they can’t get the email course!

With them in, you get to up-sell them other stuff down the road. Build a viable business and your list at the same time – that’s killing 2 birds with one stone.

To make this work, all you need is essentially is

1. Sales page

2. Email auto-responder (e.g. Aweber)

Done.

It’s as simple as it gets. But of course, action still needs to be taken. Nothing moves until something is done!

You can learn more about the email course membership here.

No affiliate link there. Just something I want to share with you. And I think you will agree that this model works.

All Success,

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, membership, email course, email marketing, aweber, autoresponder, sales page, internet marketing, business[/tags]

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

My Maiden Post
Why Internet Marketing, Business and Finance? – Part 1
How An Average Joe Is Able To Build A 7 Figure Business – With A Plain And Simple Site
Why Internet Marketing, Business and Finance? – Part 2

I’ve been fiddling around with email optimization in the past week.

Thinking to myself…how can I improve my open and click-through rate to my list?

Yes I’m always thinking of improving these email metrics.

Because any small increase in conversion can mean a significant increase in profitability.

This is especially true if you use email marketing as a sales channel.

Anyway…I thought I do a split test. Or more specifically split broadcast in this case.

I will spare you all the details and dive straight into the methods I used to improve my open and click through rates (the results you see in my post title is based on just 2 tests).

Improving Open Rate:

Personalize your email subject headline with your subscriber’s name. That’s it.

I found that a name-personalized email headline generally outperforms one that doesn’t.

You will need a good email marketing solution for this. I’m using Aweber and it performs brilliantly for me.

Improving Click Through Rate:

Keep the email as short and focused as possible.

And have the same link repeated twice.

Ok. That’s it!

The length of your email content definitely plays a huge part.

Works even better if you have a cliff-hanger styled teaser that leads the person to want to click on to the link.

Think ‘benefit + curiosity’ and you got a winning formula.

Simple ain’ it? And it works.

As usual, let me know what are your thoughts. My ears and eyes are peeled.

All Success,

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, email marketing, open rate, click through rate, internet marketing[/tags]

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

How To Optimize Your Email Subject Title For Better Email Open Rate
How To Improve Your Email Confirmation Rate
Are You Doing Email Marketing The Right Way?
Google Adwords Quality Score – Busting "Bid High and Get High Quality Score" Myth

A lot of email marketers will often ask – “how big is your list?”

A valid question. However, I prefer to ask this – “how targeted and responsive is your list?”

For me, quality of the list take precedence over quantity.

Quality first and then quality…and then finally quantity. Everyone can buy a whole database of leads but how many percent of that will actually convert into your subscribers or customers?

Now, if you want to ensure your prospects are really targeted and responsive to you, get them to double opt in.

In that way, you can be sure they really do want your information.

“What!…Double opt in???….But you will get a far bigger list with single opt in!”…as many will tell you.

True. But do you consider the following scenarios such as…

• People keying in email addresses with typo errors…
• People keying in bogus email addresses…
• People keying in other people’s email addresses without permission instead of their own…

Do you? Do you think such leads you will get are quality? Not a chance.

And if untargeted prospects get into your list, you will usually end up with a high spam complaint rate. You want that kind of hassle? Or rather you rather concentrate on marketing and providing value?

No doubt about it. You want them them to click the confirmation link to double opt in after they have enter their initial details.

And that brings us to today’s topic – how to ensure that as many people will click the email confirmation link as possible…

Good O’ me will show you some tips.

Let’s not waste time. Here goes…

How to improve your email confirmation rate, step by step:

1. Create a custom thank you page

Once they entered their initial details, direct them to a custom thank you page.

In your custom thank you page, state down the following details your subscribers will expect to see in the confirmation email

- Name/Email address that the confirm email comes from (e.g. your name, and admin@yoursite.com)

- Subject line of the confirmation email

2. Tell them what they have to do

Click the confirmation link! That’s what!

3. Lastly…the benefit of doing so… 

You want them to click. But first, you must tell them                  what’s in it for them if they do so.

It can be…a free gift round the corner…or a discount voucher for them…or a value-added report for download…

Something enticing. Something good for them if they opt in.

With an incentive, they are far more likely to click the confirmation link.

You might want to throw in a video on how to go about the whole process if you have time on your hands.

4. Last note…

Remember to tell your subscribers to white-list you. You don’t want to have your emails going into their spam inbox!

Okay. There you go. What do you think?

Do you think they are helpful? Agree? Or violently disagree?

Let me know. My ears are peeled…

All Success,

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, business, double opt in, single opt in, Email Confirmation rate, open rate[/tags]

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

How To Improve Your Email Open Rate and Click Through Rate By 7.8% and 8.4% Respectively
How To Optimize Your Email Subject Title For Better Email Open Rate
Are You Doing Email Marketing The Right Way?
Testimonials

For us email marketers, one of the key metrics we track is the open rate.

How do we define open rate?

Say you send out an email to 100 people. If 1 of those open up your email, it is an open rate of 1%.

The open rate gives you a good indication of how well your email campaign is going. And how your subscribers are responding to you.

There are many ways to increase your open rate, but today I’m gonna talk about how to optimize your email subject title – probably one of the single most important elements that drives open rates – as one of the ways.

Truth be told, these techniques I’m about to reveal to you are so simple, you might laugh and say these are nothing new.

But remember – simple works.

Let’s go in details…

1. Include the word ‘you’ in the title if you can…

2. Incorporate ‘benefit’ and ‘curiosity’ element in your subject headline

Talk in terms of everyone favorite radio station – WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me”. And invoke their curiosity enough to prompt their itchy finger to click through.

3. End off your subject headline with 3 triple dots (“…”)…

This is to create a “to be continued” feeling that you will compel your reader to want to click to find out more…

4. Include your branding in front of the subject headline. For example, your company name is “Profitable Marketing”, then your headline can start with “[Profitable Marketing] Headline xxxxx….”

The front branding tag is to allow your subscribers to immediately identify that the email is coming from you. Once they know you well enough, they will start clicking through more consistently.

Also having the front tag differentiates your email from the sea of other emails in your subscribers’ inbox.

There. Find them useful? Got more to add? Let me know. I’m all ears…

All Success,

[tags]E-MoneyMarketing, business, marketing, email open rate, subject headline, email marketing, click through rate[/tags]

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

How To Improve Your Email Open Rate and Click Through Rate By 7.8% and 8.4% Respectively
How To Improve Your Email Confirmation Rate
Are You Doing Email Marketing The Right Way?
Showdown: Direct Mail Or Email Marketing?