E-Mail Marketing

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It is not unusual for your e-mail marketing strategy to be one of the many details of launching an online presence relegated to something that "we'll get to when we get everything else up and running."

But I promise you that if you incorporate e-mail marketing from your earliest strategy sessions, you will be rewarded many times over. Like the exercise of writing a business plan, it helps you focus on what you want and need to do to have a successful online venture. A well-considered e-mail marketing strategy should be deeply integrated into your website design, making it easy for your visitors to subscribe while automating nearly everything to help you manage your visitor information and begin the dialogue with them.

Following are a few tips to get you started with a rhythm of your own:

1. Develop an editorial schedule. Relevant to what you are doing and what you want to accomplish, your broadcast may be monthly, weekly, bi-monthly. Prevailing market research tells us that touching people at least once per month keeps your business in mind. Build your schedule around the events that make sense for your business or create events to give you a reason to contact your readers.
2. Keep Your Design Consistent. Have a design for your e-mail that is consistent from e-mail to e-mail. Of course, it can evolve, but consistency of design helps to brand you -- in a good way. Keep regular features in the same position from issue to issue, including the special article front and center.
3. Give something of value in each issue. Don't be afraid to give away information, special offers, and some pure fun, like a joke or site of the month.
4. Be consistent in who is sending the e-mail. You want your readers to immediately recognize that the e-mail is from you or your company so they will open it and not delete it. If they know your company name, use that along with the name of a real person.
5. Use a compelling subject line. This is where you will spend the most time, depending on your business. There has been a tremendous amount of research done to learn what makes readers open and respond to e-mails. Of course, everyone's customers are going to be different to some extent. However, it's been found that people respond to something that has "real meaning" for them. $10 off, Free Shipping, and Limited Time Offer are extremely effective and compelling versus, say, 20% off. What does 20% off mean? Oops! They're on to the next e-mail. Be sure to clearly explain what your offer is in the body of your e-mail. There's nothing worse than a potential customer who feels misled.
6. Take advantage of the click-through. Recent research from MarketingSherpa shows that 39% of viewers accept offers on Thank You pages. Where do people go now when they click on a link in your e-mail or on your site? Are you taking advantage of this upsell opportunity? What's most exciting about this statistic is that it is consistent year-over-year, only dropping 1% in the last 5 years.
7. Engage your readers in a conversation. "Markets are conversations" is the first thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com), a seminal online marketing book that is available free online.
8. Relax and have fun putting together your newsletters! That comes through and makes your readers more receptive to whatever it is you're offering. Having a strategy in place from the beginning makes all this possible.

Getting into the rhythm of putting out a regular newsletter is half the battle. Try it. You'll find that the rhythm method actually does work.

Lydia Sugarman, our e-mail marketing expert, serves clients through her e-mail marketing and communications company, Private Label Interactive (www.PrivateLabelInteractive.com).