Monday, November 24, 2008

Sending Email to Your Marketing List Can Be Simple

By Chris Blanchet

Building an e-mail list takes time and effort. If you have succeeded in building a list, you may have hundred or even thousands of names and addresses for people who are great prospects who are primed and ready to buy the products you sell. What a feeling of relief to have accomplished such a feat!

So what happens next? Writing an e-mail follow-up or a broadcast message to your e-mail list might seem like an easy thing to do when, in fact, it can be way more intimidating than putting the list together in the first place.

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 strategy that Responsive Tutorials teach in their E-Mail Marketing course is to switch between "content" and "marketing" when sending out your messages. This only will not only improve conversion rates, but will help in building trust and loyalty with your list.

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.

Since your marketing list subscribers see more and more marketing e-mails dumped in their inbox every day, Responsive Tutorials teaches another great lesson: How to make sure your messages are read and not overlooked or deleted. With so many other marketers fighting for their dollars, how do you build loyalty and even anticipation for your e-mails? While this is another issue altogether, you can take very simple steps from making the formatting easier on your reader's eyes to avoiding common mistakes in writing the body of your e-mail. The end result is that your readers should turn into steady buyers.

Responsive Tutorials course comes at a price of $47. The nice thing is that the content is video, making it more manageable than an e-book. They provide 48 minutes of easy to follow content spread across eight specific lessons. The nice thing about the tutorial is its simplicity. (Also, as a bonus for ordering, their site is offering a no-charge copy of Brad Callen's 84-page e-book, Search Engine Optimization Made Easy, allegedly worth the price of the tutorials -- however, it is not part of the course, so its content was not reviewed here).

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