Friday, November 21, 2008

Send Proper Email Messages to Your Marketing List

By Chris Blanchet

Putting together an e-mail list does not come easily. If you have a list of hundreds or hopefully even thousands of names, congratulations. Without doubt, achieving this goal did not come easily, but at least now you know that you have a primed list of prospect who are ready and willing to start buying your product.

But what steps do you take now? Writing your first e-mail follow-up or broadcast to your marketing list can be ten times more difficult than assembling all of those leads!

After all, the last thing you want to accomplish with your message is to offend your prospects by taking the wrong approach or by inserting even one line that they may perceive as marginally offensive. Once this happens and your prospects start clicking the dreaded "unsubscribe" link instead of your product link, then all of that hard list-building work will have been for nothing.

One of the key things the professionals at Responsive Tutorials teach in their E-Mail Marketing tutorial is that you will have greater success with your marketing list in terms of not only keeping your leads but in selling to them if you alternate your follow-ups and broadcasts from "content" to "marketing."

As an example, try sending a content-based message first and omit any marketing or product pitching. Not only will you provide value to your readers, but when you follow-up with a message that promotes a product, you will improve conversion rates on your messages. This is particularly true if the product has a strong relationship with your prior message. But even more importantly than making a single sale is keeping your marketing list away from the unsubscribe link. Keeping them on your list will result in more sales over the long-term, especially as you establish more value and trust.

With more e-mails landing in your marketing list's inbox every day, Responsive Tutorials raises a great point. How do you not only make sure your messages get read (instead of deleted or overlooked) but how do you turn your readers into steady buyers who look forward to your e-mails? The other tutorials cover issues such as brainstorming, common e-mail marketing mistakes, and optimal message formatting. Their objective is to show you how to ethically transform your readers into a steady income stream.

For $47, Responsive Tutorials gives you 48 minutes of video tutorials. As a video, the content is easily manageable and a lot simpler to follow than instructions in an e-book. Overall, the eight videos are just long enough without being overwhelming or boring with each having a specific focus. As a bonus, Responsive is offering a copy of Search Engine Optimization Made Easy by Brad Callen, a well-known and respective producer of marketing material. According to Responsive's website, the e-book is worth nearly twice the amount of the tutorials alone, but since it is a bonus we haven't reviewed the book. - 15359

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