Copyright (c) 2008 Don R. Crawley

Legitimate email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and prospects. It’s inexpensive, fast, efficient, and environmentally friendly. Email marketing allows you to target your customers and prospects by their particular interests, it allows you quickly announce special promotions (either planned promotions or impromptu promotions based on changing conditions). Email is the perfect way to send a monthly newsletter. Email marketing’s efficiency was underscored in a study by the Direct Marketing Association which found that in 2005 email marketing returned an amazing $57.25 in revenue per dollar spent on it!

How can you get started with email marketing? Start by collecting your customers’ email addresses. Even if you don’t currently do email marketing, gather your customers’ email addresses now so that, when you decide to start communicating with your customers via email, you’ll already have a good list. Have a sign-up sheet at each of your checkout counters or at your reception desk. Be sure to include a sign-up form on your website. Offer an incentive such as a monthly drawing from the collected email addresses. Be sure to include a privacy statement on your forms and sign-up sheets such as, “Privacy notice: We don’t share your information with anyone.” (Of course, that means you can’t share that information ever.) Remember, email addresses are free (or very inexpensive) to gather.

Now, the three secrets to making email marketing a winner for your business.

Secret number one: Do only “permission-based” email marketing. In other words, only send email to people who have requested your email messages and make it easy to opt-out of future emails. There is a slimy side to email marketing thanks to spammers. Obviously, you want to be associated with the reputable side of email marketing. If a customer, a prospect, or a site visitor willingly provides their email address, you’re not spamming. If you get it any other way, you’re spamming. A commonly used technique for dealing with subscription requests from your website is called a “double-opt-in”. A double-opt-in requires the individual to first request your email marketing, then a confirmation request is sent to their email address. They must click a link in the confirmation email or otherwise confirm their desire to receive your email before they’re added to your list. The rule is simple: If in doubt, don’t send it out.

Secret number two: Make your email marketing messages compelling for the reader. Keep them short and to-the-point and ensure that the recipient will see the value in whatever you’re saying. Increasingly, people are becoming distrustful of “hypie” messages that sound like they were written by an advertising copy writer. Make your message real, make it personal, and make it deliver a benefit from the readers’ perspective. If there’s nothing in it for them, they’ll just delete your message or possibly even report it as spam.

Secret number three: Be consistent. Whether you choose to send an email campaign every week, every month, or every quarter, be consistent. One very successful email marketer even includes these words at the top of every email he sends: “Sent the third Tuesday of every month…” Your consistency in your marketing efforts reflects your dependability as a company.

What about the mechanics of email marketing? Many very small businesses just use their regular email accounts. Such a solution can work, but it doesn’t scale well as your email list and business grow. It also requires you to manage your new subscribers and unsubscribe requests. A better solution is to use a commercial email marketing service. Such companies provide templates to make your messages look professional. They also provide tracking information on how many messages were actually opened and read, automatic opt-out links on your marketing messages, tutorials, assistance in complying with the CAN-SPAM act, and more. Costs start at about $10 per month and go up from there based on various criteria such as the size of your list and the frequency with which you send messages. Most such companies provide a free trial period so you can get familiar with their service. There are many email marketing companies, but here are three for you to consider: iContact (www.icontact.com), GetResponse (www.getresponse.com), and Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com).

Make sure you’re compliant with the CAN-SPAM act. Of course, this is not legal advice (I’m no lawyer!), but compliance means being honest in your subject lines about the content of the message, including an easy opt-out method in every message, and including your complete contact information in every message.

Regardless of how you decide to do your email marketing, now is the time to start gathering email addresses. Email marketing, done properly, is flexible, affordable, efficient, and potentially very profitable for your business.

One of the fastest ways to reach prospective customers to your products or services is through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. PPC search advertising works when a website contracts with one or more of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or MSN and bids on keywords. A person types in a keyword in the search box, and their ads pop up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Acquire an instant stream of likely customers by making your ad stick out above thousands.

Know Your Niche

A niche is an area of the online market specializing in one type of product or service. In Pay Per Click internet marketing, identifying your niche involves determining what keywords surfers are likely to enter into a search box when looking for a website like yours. Come up with a basic list of keywords that describe your niche market; you can even search the internet to help you find more words that you might not have thought of to add to your list.

Select Unique Keywords

To win the PPC war and not sacrifice a lot of money on very competitive keywords, opt to pick on low competition variations of your main keyword that are unique and are less popular, and therefore cost much less. You can utilize keyword analyzer software for this or basically type in your keyword in the search box and count the adverts.

Design Eye-Catching Ads

You only get to have less than 125 characters for every PPC ad, so make the most out of that valuable space. Craft eye-catching ads to grab your surfers’ short attention span. Asking your readers how they will benefit from your product or service is the best way. Make sure that your ad is applicable to your niche. Some search engines, like Google, will place your ad on the higher list of ads bidding for that keyword based on how many times your ad has been viewed, rather than how many times it has been clicked. In the title of the title of the advert and in the ad itself, use your chief keyword to increase the likeliness that persons will click your site for your advert has exactly what they are looking for.

Test Your Ads

After you’ve written and designed your ads, included with the keywords you would like to bid on, write another ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more clicks or sales. Continue writing another set of ads and try to beat your previous stats. Through this, you are definite to have the best adverts imaginable for your selected keyword. Majority of PPC internet advertising companies will let you run two ads at the same time, dividing the campaign budget to each and displaying each ad equal number of times.

PPC search marketing can be successful, yet cost-effective when done the right way. With the help of the right PPC advertising company, you can choose the right keywords and create relevant ads to promote any online business you have and make a profitable PPC campaign.

Viral email marketing is one of the most popular means of promoting your products or services. You can easily contact several thousands – or even millions – of individuals at one time and have them spreading your email message, promoting your business and generating income for you.

It is important that you understand the mechanics of viral email marketing to take advantage of its full potentials, and get the cash your business needs at a fraction of the usual time and effort.

What is Viral Email Marketing?

Viral marketing is one of the most efficient marketing tool innovated in the online industry. The term was coined after the idea of an information spreading quickly and effectively. In offline marketing industry, viral marketing is what is often referred to as “word-of-mouth” marketing strategy, which is considered by some marketing experts as the most effective type of marketing.

Viral email marketing is a branch of a variety of viral marketing tools and techniques that internet marketers can use these days. Although the benefits are quite appealing, there are certain techniques that online marketers need to follow closely in order to reap those benefits.

Since most people these days utilize their email to communicate on a daily basis, it is where viral email marketing is targeted. You can therefore appeal to every individual in your target market specifically, which when done correctly, have higher potential of generating sales.

If you were to recall the history of email marketing campaigns, it all started with Hotmail. They offered clients who availed of their service a free email account. For every online businessmen though, you can offer a variety of techniques to your prospects through their email that will enable you to utilize the power of this technology to spread the word about your marketing campaign.

Viral Email Marketing Techniques

The techniques you use in your viral email marketing campaign depends largely on your business goals. In most cases, the goals of an online marketer when sending out emails to the people in their mailing list is to inform them about a particular product or information. A subset to this goal is to compel them to forward the message or email to their friends in their email list, thus spreading the word about your line of products.

Why would your prospects forward the email they receive? The key here is to send them emails that are of some level of worth. If not, then it would probably take them a shorter amount of time to delete the email message than they would reading what the content of the mail is.

One effective way to increase readership is to carefully consider the information value or entertainment value you input in the content of your email message. Being informative does not necessarily mean your email message has to be dull. Learn how to infuse some creativity into it. With proper use of useful or amusing content, you will most likely compel people in your mailing list to read your emails and forward them to people who might benefit from them.

Prior to this stage though, you need to have had proper methods of building a large opt-in list. The methods you use must also be targeted, such that the people in your mailing list are most likely to respond to your viral email marketing campaign.

Subject Line of a Viral Email

Although this comes prior to the actual opening of your emails, this is incredibly important. The subject line is the first thing that a person sees whenever they open their inbox. There are only two options for them: to click on the mail you sent or not. Hence, it is important that you convince them to do the former. One technique is to keep your subject line interesting or provoke curiosity.

Using the “Open Me” or “Read Me” approach is fast becoming ineffective. Plus, it is a very lazy approach at convincing people to actually read the mail. Try to keep your subject line short but snappy for higher effectiveness.

Content of a Viral Email

You have three options in terms of how you build the content for your viral email marketing: sales letter, newsletter, or review format. Regardless of your choice of content format, you need to keep it brief yet ample in scope. Remember, people browsing the internet have short amount of patience and you need to feed them the information they need within the shortest time possible.

If you find that the message is too long but all parts are too relevant to omit, consider sending them in parts. This is also an effective way to rouse the reader’s interest.

Another way to convince them to click on the links you provided is by offering them a valuable and tangible object. It does not need to be a lucrative object but must be something of value or usefulness to them. This helps further an effective viral email marketing that produces real results.

Timing or Frequency in Sending Out Viral Emails

Here is another important component for an effective viral email marketing campaign. If you have set the schedule for the broadcast of your viral email messages using an autoresponder, make sure to limit the amount of emails you send the people in your mailing list.

Three times a week should be substantial to advance your viral email marketing, but there are always exceptions to the rule. The key is to be sensitive to the needs and desires of your audience, and to offer them the right amount of information at the right moments.

Overdoing it can result to annoyance on the part of your readers and cause them to opt-out of their subscription. Or worse, they could spread the word about their dissatisfaction, which could negatively affect your reputation.

After all, an effective viral email marketing campaign is built more around the powerful messages you send them, rather than the frequency of emails on their inbox.