| May, 2003 -- Issue 30 Valeriu S. Popescu, Editor and Publisher The Internet Marketing Profits Center, Inc. Past issues available on newsletter archive ISSN: 1583-4180 phone: +40-232-477900 fax: 1-925-666-2853 email to the editor anytime at: Marketing Online Since 2000 |
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This issue includes: 1) "Kick-Starting E-mail Profit List Growth From One Single Shot!"2) "How To Target and Personalize Your E-mail Promotions To Immediately Boost Your Bottom Line."3) "Classified Ads."4) "Tell Us What You Think!"
E-mail marketing has gone through a lot during the past years. Despite of recent blocking filters or other bad things raised against your promotions, e-mail still the ultimate marketing tool - inexpensive, instantaneous, and measurable. Perhaps the most critical step in guaranteeing the success of your e-mail promotions is to send your messages to a targeted list of opt-in subscribers who have specifically requested to receive information on a particular topic from you. That's your "in-house" email list and I have to admit, it's carrying his weight in 'gold'. Sooner or later, you'll face the same challenge: how to build a list of qualified, targeted prospects from scratch on a shoestring budget. Or, even better, how to do it without any additional costs. The major difficulty I believe many new online marketers have is they're so intent upon building an e-mail list they spread on too many options in the same time. The result is they fail to grow significantly their list. Instead, a better approach is to try to focus on a single promotion 'til the end and exploit to the fullest potential. After you take the maximum results from THAT promotion, be creative and repeat the process with another one. But how to get MAXIMUM results? The answer is simply to give: you have to automatically multiply your profits! Let's take a look around. Suppose you run a newsletter and have a web page or pop-up window which clearly invite prospects to join you. As a reward for giving their e-mail address, you offer to the prospects a bonus valued at $19.95 (it is very important to actually tell prospects how much it worth the bonus!) That's fine -- but not enought! You are loosing money just because you leave empty profit places in your message. Wouldn't be nice to build actually 3 different mailing lists, with 3 different automatically money-making generators, just from one single shot? Of course, and here's what to do. For better understanding, I'll stick with the same newsletter example. So, clear-up your newsletter invitation and insert couple of extra carefully selected phrases. Follow these steps: Step #1: Insert a Newsletter Subscription Obviously, this is your primer objective. A new subscriber is a potential new source of profit. It is a common sense to tell people what to expect up front. The more relevant seems your offer to the desired relationship, the better. The results: you have subscribers permission to contact them by e-mail on a regular basis (monthly, bimontly, weekly) and hit them with new proposals. Ideal would be to know EXACTLY how your list react upon your e-mails. This way you'll know when it's the perfect time to insert a backend offer. Think: would be more profitable to endorse products weekly, once a month, every 3 months? What kind of products they are eager to buy mostly? The best option here is to make references to another of your products. If you don't have it, consider to settle down a profitable joint venture or join a high paid affiliate program. Step #2: Insert a Special Report This is pretty clever: upload your report to an autoresponder. The trick is to provide both high-quality content AND an offer of some kind that will earn you a profit! You know the rest: the autoresponder send out automatically -- at your predetermined intervals -- additional reports and follow-up messages to those who get the initial report. All you need it's a 5-8 pages report about a hot, controversial and very emotional subject. The first rule: your special report MUST provide high-quality content! The trick is to "smoothly" insert in the report one of your offers. Again, the offer come from another of your products, joint venture or an affiliate program. This is your first supplementary automated system in place to bring in more sales and profits! Step #3: Insert an eCourse Am I crazy? Isn't the same thing with special reports? Nope, not at all. When you use a special report and follow-up e-mails, it is better to send them at different time intervals. For example, first message ALWAYS have to hit the prospects mailing box couple of minutes after they subscribe. This is the day one for an autoresponder setup. The next follow-up messages have to go on different periods: on day 3, 7, 21, 30, 60... and so on. With a professional autoresponder, you can set-up your own intervals. Don't push too hard your subscribers unless you want to bother and force them to self-remove! Opposite to these e-mails, are eCourses. Due to the human nature, an eCourse will obtain much better results. That's because eCourses are themed together (you send lessons day after day) and you can express the power of reciprocity, consistency and repetition. Each lesson of the eCourse provides at least one offer (and usually multiple offers) for the reader to consider. Many buy, some don't. Show your subscribers that it's easy, safe, comfortable and beneficial to go thru all you wrote! Well, this is the second additional money-making system you'll want to upload to your web site. And will work for many years to come since you automated ALL the process. By the way, if you want to implement this marketing strategy, you'll need to use a sequential autoresponder to convert your subscribers into paying customers. A perfect automatic system that support multiple sequential responder series, personalize each and every e-mail sent, manage an unlimited number of lists, process your "subscribes" and "unsubscribes" in real-time, schedule promotions to be sent at exactly the right time to get the highest response, zero vulnerability to viruses, freezes, hackers... and much more -- with no additional charges! Click here for an "all-in-one" solution that lets you link the most critical components of your email marketing into one complete, hassle-free system. There's... no installation hassles, no compatibility issues, and no worries about whether or not it will work with your business... right from the start, you just point, click, and send! Step #4: Insert a Mystery Bonus Mystery bonus? Yes, yes, yes! People universally love mystery. Make sure you won't let the prospects know what is all about up until they subscribe -- just tell them it's a "mystery" and profit-pulling surprise bonus. What you need at this point: an ebook that is coded with your own links! Ideal would be to write an ebook which PRESELL one of your products. Another option is, of course, to get the book from an affiliate program or buy full reprint rights from a new, hot, 'in-demand' product. You see, insert just couple of extra words and you automatically generate the third source of easy profits. (Psst... invite prospects to pass it out as an incentive, bonus, etcetera!) Conclusions: Instead of having only a newsletter invitation on your web site (this is just an example; be creative and come up with something different!), this e-mail marketing strategy allow you to immediately increase the number of your "in-house" lists and skyrocket sales and profits. Most of all, it is easy to implement and takes you less than an hour of work. From one single shot, you build three separate automatically profit-pulling lists and a viral marketing tool in place. Now, go... and get folks to grab them! Things to remember BEFORE you implement this e-mail profit list growth strategy:
Let me ask you a very important question: What are you doing to make sure that your e-mail promotions are getting noticed, read and acted on by the people you are sending them to? I'm not talking about writing killer copy - although that's essential - or offering a great product or service. I'm asking how YOUR customers and subscribers know that YOUR offer is relevant to them specifically. What is it that makes each and every one of them individually sit up and take notice of your e-mail promotions? The most successful e-mail marketers will answer these questions without even thinking, and just about every one of them will mention the two strategies we're going to be discussing today: targeting and personalization. Once you've learned how to exploit these two powerful marketing concepts, you'll dramatically increase the effectiveness of ALL your promotions. E-mail Success Strategy #1: Targeting Using e-mail to target different segments of your audience is one of the single most effective ways I've found to market products or services on the Internet. And if you've been collecting opt in e-mail addresses on your web site, then you can get started right away! Here's how: The simplest way you can market to different segments of your opt-in list is by targeting them based on whether they are (a) existing customers, or (b) visitors to your site who have opted in to receive your free newsletter, eBook, etc. The message you send to your customers might focus on selling them an upgrade to a product they already own. Because you've already earned their trust through a previous sale, this promotion should do quite well. Of course, you'll need to approach your subscribers - those people who haven't made a purchase from you yet - from a slightly different angle. You might try offering them a 25% discount off their very first purchase, for example. Here are some other techniques you can use for targeting your customers and subscribers:
Now, you'll notice that some of these strategies require that you know a bit more about the people on your opt-in list than just whether they are customers or subscribers. By collecting more specific information from the people who are visiting your site, you'll be able to target your e-mail promotions in some very sophisticated ways. Here's an example: Suppose your product is a book on how to buy foreclosed properties from the bank. Your opt-in form might ask people whether they're interested in buying property for investment purposes or for use as their personal residence. Armed with this information, you could send two different promotions targeting these two different groups. One could outline the benefits of buying properties as investments, and the other could focus on buying your family home at a substantial savings. And since you would already have an opt-in form set up at your site to collect e-mail addresses, it would be really easy for you to customize this form so your visitors could tell you WHY they're interested in foreclosed properties. Your form could read something like this:
By targeting different segments of your audience with a promotion that is specific to their interests, you can just about guarantee that your results will be dramatically higher. IMPORTANT NOTE: Remember that the form you use to collect opt-in e-mail addresses has to be simple and easy to use. If you start using this form to ask too many questions, you're going to see a substantial decrease in the number of opt-ins you get. If you are going to ask your subscribers for more information than just their names and e-mail addresses, I highly recommend limiting yourself to ONE additional question. I hope you can see how powerful this strategy is! It allows you to talk to your customers - and prospective customers - about things that matter to them specifically. And when you target your offers to meet their specific needs, your response rate will improve significantly. And the best part is that once you've got this kind of system in place, there's hardly any extra work on your part! E-mail Success Strategy #2: Personalization Guess what? If you've been collecting people's names when they opt into your list, then you've got a very powerful piece of information. Nothing makes people sit up and take notice like hearing - or in this case, seeing - their own name. Personalizing your promotions is one of the most widely used tricks in direct marketing, yet it still works like absolute magic! I learned firsthand how effective this technique is a few years ago when I decided to conduct a little marketing experiment. I took a small list of my customers and split it in half, then sent an e-mail to each group that was exactly the same, with only ONE exception. The subject line of the first e-mail read:
The subject line of the second e-mail, which had EXACTLY the same body as the first e-mail, had been customized to display the recipient's name. For example:
Now, I had a hunch that the personalized subject line would do better than the generic one. In fact, I was sure of it. But what I discovered surprised even me! The campaign I ran with the personalized subject line had a response rate 64% higher than the one without! And that was the ONLY difference between the two campaigns! The body of the e-mail was identical in both cases, and so was the offer. It was just that one small change in the subject line that boosted the response by 64%! As you can see, if you HAVEN'T been personalizing your e-mail promotions, now is definitely a good time to start. Can you imagine what a 64% increase in sales and profits would do for YOUR bottom line? Of course, you can personalize the body of your e-mail as well as the subject line, and you can use ANY information you've collected about your customers and subscribers, not just their names. For example, let's suppose you are operating an online pet products business, and that you know what kinds of pets your customers and subscribers own. Using this information, you can add another layer of customization to your e-mail promotions. You could start your e-mail off like this:
Putting together a campaign like this is a lot easier than you might think! Many e-mail marketing solutions will allow you to easily merge your customized data into the message. The example above would look something like this before you sent it out:
And feel free to get creative and personalize your e-mail promotions with whatever information you've collected about your customers and subscribers. Here are a few examples:
The best part is that as long as you're collecting information about your customers and subscribers, there's no limit to how successful your next personalized e-mail promotion could be. And once you learn how easy it is to do, you'll be kicking yourself for not getting started sooner! Key Secret for profit-pulling e-mail campaigns: Putting Both Strategies Together! Used individually, targeting and personalization are powerful marketing strategies, but put them together and look out! An e-mail promotion that incorporates both of these techniques - and uses them effectively - is truly a force to be reckoned with! And there are some really clever ways to target and personalize your e-mail promotions all at the same time without doing ANY extra work! Here's exactly how to do it: Let's keep using the example of the pet products site. You know that some of your members are dog owners and some are cat owners. Assuming you have the right kind of e-mail marketing solution, all you have to do is put together an e-mail that looks something like this:
Assuming you are using a flexible e-mail marketing solution, you should be able to automatically merge each subscriber's name into the [firstname] field and merge the type of pet they own into the [pet] field. This way, you are targeting dog owners with an e-mail promotion for dog supplies, and cat owners with a promotion for cat supplies. Not only that, but you're also personalizing each and every message you send out with the names of your customers and subscribers! For example, many of you already know that I've just released Mailloop version 6.0, which will allow you to customize up to 25 fields of data about your customers and subscribers. This level of custom personalization simply wasn't being offered by the other e-mail automation software, and that's exactly why I insisted that it be included when I was designing this solution. I have made sure that Mailloop version 6.0 includes absolutely everything, including sequential autoresponders, newsletter management and automated scheduling, e-mail promotion management and tracking... plus all the advanced features that the other business automation software just weren't able to provide for you. And the best part is that I have designed all these features to be extremely easy to use! Users have been raving about the simple interfaces and step-by-step wizards that literally walk you through every aspect of creating and managing a successful online marketing program. Click here to read a more detailed report on how Mailloop software works, and how it can help you automate YOUR business! Final Thoughts: It's no coincidence that the most successful marketers - both online and offline - target and personalize their promotions whenever they possibly can. The reason more businesses DON'T customize their e-mail promotions is because they think it takes a high level of technical expertise to pull it off. And while that used to be the case, technological advances have made it easy for even beginners to deliver professional-looking e-mail campaigns. These days, sending a targeted and personalized e-mail promotion to a large list of your customers and subscribers isn't much more complicated than sending a message to a friend. You just compose your e-mail, select who you want to send it to, and hit "Send". Once you see how easy it is, you'll be able to dramatically boost your sales and profits by always sending out e-mail promotions that are targeted, personalized, and relevant. Your customers and subscribers will appreciate the effort, too! It will let them know that your business is really paying attention to them on an individual level -- and believe me, that's going to be great for business!
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Dear friend, I would love to hear what you think of this issue of The Internet Marketing Profits™ newsletter. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you'd like to share with me, please send those, too -- just email me right away! And don't forget to check out the previous issues at the Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter Archive. Warmest Regards, Valeriu S. Popescu, Editor and Publisher ^ back to the top of the Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter, issue 30 DID YOU LIKE THIS ISSUE? Please forward it to your friends, co-workers, colleagues and anyone else that you think would like it. Thank you for your continued support! DISCLAIMER: I urge you to exercise due diligence in responding to any advertisement or article posted here or in any other future issue. I do not give business or professional advice in this newsletter and therefore cannot be held responsible for results you get from responding to ads or articles in this newsletter. I urge you to exercise due diligence in all of your online dealings. |