Email Server Software

Email marketing can be profitable for any business, no matter what kind of product or service you are selling. It is significantly cheaper than other advertising methods and it helps build credibility with your subscribers. As a result, you can generate more sales and profits.

The foundation for successful email marketing is a targeted, responsive and permission-based email list. If you have a list of subscribers that trust you and consider you an expert, you’ve completed the first step and are on your way!

Below you will several list-building ideas that will help you make the most of your email marketing efforts:

Provide useful, relevant and unique content. Your visitors will not give you their email addresses just because they can subscribe to your newsletter free of charge. You have to provide unique and valuable information that will be useful to your subscribers.

Add a subscription form to every page of your website. Make sure it stands out so it is easy to find. If appropriate, you can also include it in more than one place. For instance, your opt-in form might always appear in the top-left corner of your site, while you also include an opt-in at the bottom of some of your popular articles.

Make it easy for your reader to sign up. The more information you request, the fewer people will opt-in. In most cases, a name and an email address should suffice. If it’s not necessary, don’t include it here. (Note: If you don’t have a Privacy Policy, put the words “privacy policy generator” into a search engine and you should be able to find a suitable form for your readers to review.

Publish a Privacy Policy. Let your readers know that they can be confident you will not share their information with others. The easiest way to do this is to set up a Privacy Policy web page and provide the link to it below your opt-in form.

Show your first issue or other sample to your visitors. This lets potential subscribers review your newsletter before they sign up to determine if it is something they’d be interested in.

Archive past newsletter issues. A “library” of past newsletters is both appealing and useful to visitors and builds your credibility as an authority. In addition, if your articles are written with good SEO techniques in mind, they can send additional traffic to your web site through good search engine positioning.

Contact other newsletter publishers. Introduce yourself and explore ways you may be able to help each other. Perhaps you can introduce other publisher’s newsletters or print articles they have written to your list, with a link to sign up. When you contact them, be sure to tell them why you think THEIR readers would like what you have to offer and why YOUR readers would benefit from their newsletters. This is a win-win scenario; both of you will build your lists faster!

Give away bonuses subscribers can use. Create an opt-in bonus for joining your subscriber list. You can write an ebook or PDF report, or even hire a programmer to create downloadable or web-based software. But don’t limit yourself to only a gift for new opt-ins. Remind your readers that the next bonus is coming soon. People hate to miss out on things. If you systematically pass on “goodies” throughout the year, your subscribers are unlikely to leave.

Ask your subscribers to pass it on. Word of mouth is a powerful viral technique that works great with email marketing. If your subscribers find the content you share with them to be informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends. This can be a good source of new subscribers.

Let others reprint your newsletter as long as the content is not modified. Many webmasters and newsletter publishers are actively looking for high-quality content and, if they reprint your newsletter, you will get new subscribers, traffic and links pointing to your site.

Include a “Sign Up” button in the newsletter. If you are using plain text instead of HTML, provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint it online. You want to make it easy for them to subscribe.

Add a squeeze page. A squeeze page has one goal ? to get an opt-in and build your list. Think of it like a mini-sales letter for your subscription or opt-in bonus. It features a powerful headline and a couple of very important benefits that should make subscribers salivate to sign up to your list. Once created, use a service such as WordTracker to find hundreds of targeted keywords, and advertise there using pay-per-click advertising from Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Include testimonials on your squeeze page. This is crucial. Put 1 or 2 strong testimonials from satisfied subscribers on your squeeze page. This can be in any format, but you may find that multimedia (audio or video social proof) is more “believable”. To increase that believability, include full names, locations and/or urls; don’t use “Bob K, FL” as a testimonial name.

Blog religiously. Blogging is a great way to communicate with your potential customers, and it creates a nice synergy with your email marketing. Be sure to include your newsletter sign-up form on each page of your blog. You can start a free blog at Blogger or Wordpress.

Post on other blogs. Post great comments and information on similar blogs with a link to your squeeze or opt-in page. Also comment on others’ blogs through trackbacks. In most cases, your comments will be posted on their blogs with a link back to your site. This is an easy way to generate new traffic and subscribers.

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“Good looks” are very important in an email message. This is often overlooked by many email users. It is a fact that an email’s content is diluted greatly if the message itself is “not good looking”.

Have you ever received an email message that looks something like this… Thank you for requesting more information about our services! We here at ABC Company would like to present a special offer to all of our cherished customers.There are two main reasons why email messages turn out looking like this. Although the reasons are quite simple, many email users don’t understand them. Reason number one is called line length. When composing email, most people just type and type without using a hard carriage return. If it looks fine when you’re done, your email program probably automatically wraps the words in a nice legible format. This word wrap is usually done based on a line length of anywhere from 70 to 80 characters. Well, lets say I receive your message, but my email program doesn’t have the capability of automatically wrapping incoming messages. Since you performed no hard “end of line” carriage returns when typing your message, my email software thinks it’s one long sentence. Now your nice, easy to read message looks like that example above. O.K. So how do you avoid this problem? Simple! When composing email messages, use a hard carriage return before you get to the end of each line. I have found that a maximum line length of 64 works to alleviate this problem almost completely! Of course, you’ll always run into an instance occasionally, depending on your recipients settings, but this should do the trick 95% of the time! Another reason people encounter “funny looking” email messages is called proportional character fonts. Like I mentioned earlier, all email programs are different. Therefore the fonts used by each program varies widely. Basically, there are fixed pitch fonts like Courier (found on Eudora) and there are proportional spaced fonts (like AOL and Compuserve email). With fixed-pitch fonts, all characters in a paragraph will line up directly above each other. With a proportional-spaced font, CAPS, space bars and other keystrokes are wider, so each line is a different length. The bottom line is this. If you create a message using one type of font and send it to an email recipient using the other, the message will not look the same when they receive it! Once again, the solution is simple! By using a hard carriage return before the end of the line you can keep these problems caused by the difference in email programs to a bare minimum. If you plan on sending the same message to multiple recipients, or attempt any drawings, consider testing the message with a friend on another service. There is a third way for your email messages to look bad. Although it is far less likely to happen, you should be aware of it. Many word processing or text editor programs allow you to save a file as another format. (Such as ascii.) It may look great to you, but when sent via the internet it can become scrambled. You may have received one of these messages at one time or another. They are easily recognized by the repeated “U” characters in the text. To avoid this problem, simply use the cut/paste or copy/paste method to extract text from a document in other programs. The last thing you want is an email message with great content, being dismissed simply because it wasn’t “good looking” enough!

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