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In one of my previous articles “Discover the proven marketing strategies for Online Internet Business”, I was talking about email marketing so I want to share with you powerful formula how to write killer emails that makes people to buy whatever you are offering- business, product or service.

This formula contains four main points which your email has to have in order to get great results. If you will follow this strategy you will see results and remember that nothing happens overnight so you need to develop skill to write a killer emails. Copywriting is basic skill that every internet marketer should develop.

So here are the four main points:

1.) Headline – the most important part of email, because people will open your email only if your headline is catchy and that people will think that you have something special for them. You need to stand out of the crowd and let me tell you that headline like “Make $10,000 Per Month With This System” is not working anymore in these days. Your intention here is to create a relevant headline, something that capture the appropriate attention of the people who would most be interested in your message. Headline can be also shocking and great tip is to use questions.

2.) Body of email when you use emotions – people buy for emotional reasons, not logical ones. They use logic to rationalize their decision. Fill your email with emotion and you will move prospects in the direction of buying from you. How you can move people with emotion? Tell a story. Give a potent quote. Offer a statistic. Make a confession. Give a testimonial. Spell out how life will be when they use your product or service – or how life will be if they don´t use your product or service. Ask yourself these questions: Does your ad make them stay and read your email? Does your ad speak to his or her interests, needs, hopes or dreams?

3.) Body of email when you guarantee something – you are probably well aware of your own skepticism when reading ads, whether online or in newspaper. People need to know they are not going to be gypped. Guarantee your service, and say in your ads. This does not have to be elaborate, but it does need to be there. The wisest advice I can give you here is to make your guarantee a “risk reversal”. Instead of the customer taking all the risk by buying your service, put all the risk on you. Spell out a guarantee that no sane person could resist. Do you explain in clearly, easy, exciting terms the advantage of your product or service? Do you reveal what the customer will get? Does your ad make them feel and want your service? Do you tell them what is in it for them?

4.) Call to action – end your ad with call to action. Tell your reader to write, call, visit website or email you. And make it easy to do. Asking someone to write back sound like work, asking them to visit website sounds easy. People want to you to tell them what to do. Basic mistake in copywriting is to not use clear call to action.

These are four magic points that your email should include: Powerful headline, emotional body of email with some guarantee or benefits and strong and clear call to action.

The first step that you must take if you want to make money online consistently, is to build your targeted list of customers. These will be the individuals who will become the foundation of your business. In order to achieve this, you are going to need a what is called a “squeeze page”.

A squeeze page, which has also been referred to as a “landing page”, or an “opt- in page”, essentially explains to the visitor what they will receive in return for providing their name on email address on the page. The key here is simplicity. You just want to give the viewer enough information so that they enter their name and email.

Okay, so how to you get your visitors to hand over their email address. After all, people are bombarded with junk mail 24 hours a day, why would they possibly want more mail? The key is to provide your visitors with a valuable product, which is specific to their niche market, for zero cost. Yes, I know that it looks like a bride, but we are breaking no laws here. Essentially, you are offering something which must be delivered via email, such as a special report, and eBook, software, etc.

Just for a little bit of trivia. Do you know why this web page is referred to as a squeeze page? Just think about it for a moment. You are putting the squeeze on your visitor. Unless they provide you with their name and email address, they are getting nothing. You are putting the squeeze on them by giving them the choice. Provide the email address and receive something of value at no cost. Or do not provide the email address and receive nothing of value, at an opportunity cost.

So now I think you are starting to realize the value of an opt-in page. I am sure by now that those of you who do not currently utilize a squeeze page are wondering how to get your hands on one. The good news is that there is nothing complicated about a squeeze page. It is essentially a simple one pay website. However, if you do not at least have a rudimentary understanding of HTML Code, as well as a program such as Dreamweaver or HomeSite, you will have no way of creating one. The good news is that there are some options.

All that you have to do is go to the search engines and start searching for squeeze page templates. You will find a lot to choose from. You will also be able to customize your opt-in pages to something which fits your target market. The great thing about some of these landing page templates is that they take into full account the direction in which internet marketing is heading by enabling you to add video to your squeeze pages. Nothing motivates a visitor to hand over their email address than a video which fully explains to them the benefit of doing so. Either way, you are going to need opt-in pages if you with to make money online.

As entrepreneurs and home business owners/seekers, we all are engulfed with opportunities, strategies, tactics, tools and resources in network marketing from all corners all the time. As a beginner you can easily get overawed by the sheer volume of information thrown at you and if you’re an experienced marketer you’ll acknowledge that unless you’re meticulous in dealing with the information overload, you can be thrown off the tangent quickly and lose focus of what you’re trying to achieve.

So how do you deal with this information overload?

First and foremost, there is just no point complaining about the quantity of the content. We all are in some way or the other contributing to this content. So the point is to turn the issue around and learn to handle the content in our daily routine. As the saying goes, while dealing with a flood, you don’t curse the water but figure out a way to keep yourself away from it swallowing you.

Se here are some quick tips:

Never Let Information Lead You
It’s good to have a fair idea of what you’re looking for. And set a limit to how much time you’ll spend to sort out the information. Then sift through the content and spend no more than 5-10 seconds on a piece. If the information cannot tell what it has to offer within that time, probably it’s not worth your time. Simply do a “Shift Delete”.

Remember that the more we try to do, the less we get done; and the more inundated we are with information, the less time we spend absorbing it.

Mind How and Where You Get Your Content
Basically there are 3 modes by which you find content. Either you explicitly seek for it (targeted), you stumbled upon something while navigating or en route to your targeted content (discovered) or that you received without the user actively seeking for it (delivered) in the form of RSS feeds, newsletters or any other push technology service. So you have to decide what kind of information you want in what proportion and try to put a discipline around it.

Get A Handle on Your Content
Don’t let the quantity of the content bog you down. Just find away around managing it. A few tidbits..

* Avoid being obsessive about the content. It’s not going anywhere
* Keep a specific time during the day to surf the information
* Keep your focus of what you want and guard against getting sidetracked to other content
* Make a point to note interesting content and read them within a week’s time, or else you’re never going to read them
* Be selective about your sign ups
* Organise content by categorising the topics for ease of use and reference later

Finally, content especially marketing content is out there for all kinds of people for all sorts of things. You need to be your own judge to decide if that content is within the relevant context and that makes sense to you.

Wisdom is with the discerning, alright?

Yours in Success.
Tanzz Mohd

All of us hate getting spam emails – whether they are the “sexual” ones or the ones about price reductions or whatever.

Yet legitimate email marketing can be very effective for both you as the person sending out the emails and for the person receiving the emails.

How does this work?

Under the paradigm of legitimate email marketing, you only send emails to people who have said “yes, they are interested in getting your emails.” And on each email they get from you, they are given the option of “unsubscribing” – being taken off your email list.

Step 1: You have an email opt-in box on your website. You ask for a name (a first name is enough) and an email address. Often you offer an “irresistible offer” – a freebie that is of interest to your target market. The person signs up.

Step 2: Now here’s the double email opt-in part: Some people give a fake email or a friend’s email just to get the freebie. (It is irresistible, right?)

Then your automatic email marketing system sends an immediate email to the email address given asking for the person to confirm that he or she did indeed sign up to be on this email list. If the person does not wish to be on the list, he or she does nothing.

If the person does indeed wish to be on the list, he or she clicks the confirmation link (sometimes it requires two separate clicks).

Then if a freebie was offered, as soon as the person confirms his/her email address, the person is given the link to immediately download the freebie.

The implications of this double email opt-in system:

A person has said yes to getting emails from you. You now have the email address of someone who was initially interested in what you have to offer.

You can now use this email address – with good judgment – to send follow-up information and offers.

Each time the person gets an email from you, he or she is automatically given the option of unsubscribing. And, yes, there will be people who will unsubscribe because they just wanted the freebie or they are now getting too many emails from all of cyberspace or whatever.

Do not take these unsubscribes personally. You must look at the unsubscribes as people who would never be interested in buying any products or services from you. These are often the people who collect freebies and nothing more.

Using an email marketing service

Could you do a double email opt-in system yourself? Yes, if you can program all the steps. But here’s the rub:

There are several technical steps that email marketing services do in order to “signal” the spam filters that the emails you send out in a batch are legitimate. I’ve read about these steps – and if you are a tech geek you can probably do each of these steps yourself.

If you’re not a tech geek, your emails will have a harder time getting through spam filters than those from an email marketing service because you won’t be using the “secret handshakes” that let spam filters know you’re okay.

In addition, with an email marketing service there are all kinds of list divisions you can do. For example, you can divide your list by product or service bought, event attended, etc.

In terms of limited time resources, I highly recommend using an email marketing service.

Internet marketing ideas using an automated email marketing system

How can you use email marketing to promote your brand, book or business?

Let’s look at some examples:

1. You’re a local restaurant and on rainy days your business drops off substantially. On a rainy morning you send out an email blast to your customers announcing a rainy day special of a free sandwich that day. Of course, when people come in for their free sandwich, they’ll want to buy something to drink and maybe a bag of potato chips and maybe dessert.

2. You decide to start giving in-person seminars on how to get employees to appropriately use Facebook and other social media on company time. You give a seminar at Company X that goes very well. You send out an email to your list talking about the seminar, including a testimonial from the head of Company X. You include in the email what the usual fee for a company seminar is. And then you offer that anyone on the list who schedules the seminar within a certain time period will get a 10% discount off the seminar fee.

3. You sell a $299 information product from your website. It’s a product that a lot of people could use if they only understood the power of the product. You send weekly emails sharing valuable information that the people on your email list can use now. And at the end of each email you gently remind people about this great product – you’re slowly educating your list about the power of the product. After several weeks of seeing what valuable information you share, several of the people on your list may decide to buy your $299 product because they now trust that you will provide $299 worth of value.

4. One of the most important reasons to use email marketing is to send a follow-up thank you when someone does purchase a service or product from you. And, of course, you may take that opportunity to offer a companion service or product, especially if the person is finding the first product or service very helpful.

Writing emails that do not sound like the spam emails

When you use the internet for email marketing, you must learn to write emails that are NOT perceived as spam because your emails have valuable information in them – information that can be very useful to the people receiving your emails.

This is a skill that can be learned over time by paying close attention to emails you get from other businesses and taking note of what you think works or doesn’t work. You can also hire an outside expert to write the emails for you.

And remember that email marketing can be a very powerful tool in your internet marketing toolkit.

Does your Internet business website have an opt in email list, and does every web page have an opt-in form so that people can add themselves to your list? If not, then you’re neglecting one of the most lucrative aspects of building an Internet business.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, building and maintaining a list of subscribers interested in receiving email from you can make a big difference. Everyone who visits your website and fills in your opt-in form is allowing you to keep them informed about any updates on your website and also to tell them about your business.

As an opt in email list owner, you’re safe from spam accusations because everybody on your list has filled in the opt-in form on your website, and they have also confirmed their request by email that they received from your autoresponder. Basically, each subscriber on your list has sent you his or her name and e-mail address and confirmed that he or she is willing to receive emails from you. These are considered double opt-in subscribers.

However, just because somebody has gone through the double opt-in process doesn’t mean that he or she will read your newsletters. It’s up to you to provide useful and interesting content and to encourage your opt in email list of subscribers to open your emails by writing compelling headlines that arouse their curiosity. When writing your headlines, though, be sure that the content of your newsletter relates to the headline, otherwise your subscribers will feel cheated or disappointed and will either unsubscribe from your list or simply stop opening your emails.

Another key to building a list of subscribers who actually read your email messages is to avoid the temptation to over-sell your business. If every single one of your emails does nothing more than try to persuade your subscribers to buy your products or join your business opportunity, you’ll probably be disappointed with the results. Certainly your subscribers will quickly stop reading your messages.

Instead of trying to sell to your list of subscribers, try to build a relationship with them. To do that it’s important that you think about what your subscribers actually want from you. Most likely what they want is useful information about the market niche that your business is serving. They also want to be entertained. So, right from the start make sure that you inform and educate your subscribers with lively, entertaining and cheerful messages. Then you’ll be able to introduce them to your products and services later.

How late is “later”?

It could be a brief sentence and a link at the end of your email, or you could add a little business promotion and web link in the PS section of your email. Or, you could choose to avoid any direct promotion at all in the first few messages that you send out.

Really, it’s a matter of finding the formula that works best for you and your subscribers. But, the point is to show them that you’re an expert in your field whose judgment can be trusted, and to entertain them in the process. Warm and informative newsletters are vital to winning over your subscribers, and winning over your subscribers is of course important to your ultimate objective which is building sales for your business.

An opt in email list gives you the luxury of being able to build a warm and trusting business relationship with a potentially unlimited number of people for no more than the cost of a professional autoresponder service and the time it takes you to research and write your newsletter messages. So, don’t neglect to build your list, and don’t sabotage your efforts by trying to sell to your list before you have warmed up your readership and won them over. Win them over, and you’ll have turned strangers into customers for life.

Most segmentation analysis tests for email campaigns will show that the most of all the response you will ever get from a newly registered email name will come to you within the first 6-8 transmissions.

Strategic segmentation for your email list can help you make the most of this valuable information.

There are several ways you can strategically segment your email list: 1. New to file, new customers and leads 2. Source, online offline etc. 3. Recency of purchase 4. Number of emails already sent 5. How much money have they spent

All of these email list segmentation strategies have merit depending on your business model. The way an e-commerce site selling products in a shopping cart will approach customer segmentation strategy will differ from how a lead generation site will approach segmentation.

However, one type of segmentation is always a good bet… new to file email contacts. These folks can be buyers or leads but in both cases they justify a solid segmentation strategy.

New Customers Segmentation: New customer segments should not be simply pooled together with your 12 or 24 month buyer file. Remember, after about 8 transmissions these people are going to start tuning you out. And that’s even if you are relevant and interesting. So, if you are going to get anything good out of your email promotions you better do it in the first 8 sends.

12m and 24 month buyer files often contain mostly one time buyers and customers who have not purchased for a long time. Approaching these folks with discounts and sales focused on “reactivating” makes sense. Most people have tuned you out but it only takes a few responses to make email “pay” for itself. So the average business will continue to blast away at these customers even with the pathetic response rates they get.

Hitting new customer segments with the same sales message you are using to stimulate “reactivations” of older email segments is a mistake. In many cases you are actually down-selling your hottest customers.

Instead these new customer segments should be regarded as prime targets for up-selling and migrating to higher ticket items. This approach will increase the lifetime value of the customer. If you can effectively automate this process then do so. And if your average sale is high enough you may want to actually start manually responding with customized sales pitches to your new customers especially for the first few highly lucrative sends. See email marketing response rates.

New Leads Segmentation Segmentation strategies for new leads (newsletter sign ups, contest entries etc.) are different from new customer segmentation strategies. But some of the same principles apply.

Don’t just throw your new leads into the same pot with all your 12m leads. Again these leads are most likely to reply within the first 6-8 transmissions, after that they start to tune you out regardless of your message. In fact if you are a B2B company trying to convert these leads by phone you may want to hold back from email until you have exhausted the phone. You’ll always get a better response by phone.

If you are approaching new lead segments by email then think of each of your 6-8 first sends as a sequence of persuasion. And this persuasion should be pointing these leads towards higher life time value, higher ticket sales and so forth.

Don’t start off by offering deep discounts and sales or other low margin tactics. Yes, try these methods after all else fails but use these first 6-8 email sends as unique opportunity to develop high margin sales.

Overall Segmentation Strategy When developing your email promotions be sure to use segmentation strategy as a method for making email promotions more profitable.

If you’re using e-mail to generate leads or make sales, you’re probably spending a lot of time honing your message and making sure that it’s persuasive. But do you give equal time, thought, and attention to the short “SUBJECT” line that introduces your main message?

If you don’t, then be afraid. Very afraid. You see, it doesn’t matter how compelling your e-mail offer is, or how brilliantly your message is written. If your subject line isn’t working right, your e-mail will never get opened and your campaign will be a failure.

That’s right. The humble little subject line that announces your e-mail to the world has an enormous influence on campaign results and can make or break you.

Want to handle subject lines the right way? Here are some thoughts that might prove extremely useful . . .

1. Think of the subject line as if it were an envelope.
When you’re creating a paper direct mail package, you know you have to come up with a killer envelope. If the envelope doesn’t get opened, the letter doesn’t get read and you don’t make the sale. Same thing with the subject line. It determines whether the prospect will read your message or trash it.

Of course, getting someone to open a paper envelope is a heck of a lot easier than getting past the subject line. Why? Because with a paper envelope you have plenty of space to write teaser copy and add photography or illustration if it’s appropriate. You can create something unique that stands out from all the other mail in the pile and screams out benefits that will get the prospect to read the letter within.

Subject lines all look the same and have to be kept short. (Never exceed forty characters including spaces.) This means that every subject line must communicate extremely quickly. We’ll take a look at how to do that in a minute, but for now, start thinking of the subject line as one of the keys to e-mail marketing success – not an afterthought!

2. Subject lines are well worth testing.
Robert Mendez (www.nethawk.net) is an e-mail list broker/manager who handles countless e-mailings and is a great source of information. I asked him about his take on subject lines. Here’s what he said, “You should always test subject lines if you have enough names. Five thousand names is the minimum you need for an e-mail test cell. It’s worth doing some testing because a strong subject line can double the response.”

Let’s look at that again on instant replay! “A strong subject line can double the response” – increase it by 100%. In other words, a 4% response rate can turn into an 8% response rate just by using the right subject line!

3. Some thoughts about saying “FREE” in the subject line.
Some people hesitate to use the word “free” in the subject line because they’re afraid they will turn people off. For example, in an issue of Softletter, Michael D’Arrigo, Direct Marketing Manager at ScanSoft, is quoted as saying,”For us, we’ve found that a subject line with ‘free’ is the kiss of death. It will be viewed as spam and won’t be opened.”

Email marketers also have the related concern that if they use the word “free” in the subject line, a filter will kick out their message and it will never get read. I personally believe that this is just another suburban legend and that you really don’t have to sweat it. True. There is some filtering, based on IP numbers, that takes place at the ISP level. And some corporations do some filtering. And, yes, some packaged applications let consumers use filtering. BUT this is only a big problem if you’re selling business-to-consumer junk!

I believe that if you use “free” in the subject line, in well-targeted B2B e-mails that offer the prospect something of value, your message will sail right through unfiltered. Let me add that I know as a personal FACT that one of high-tech’s most aggressive e-mailers uses the word “free” in the subject line and that this line is the consistent winner against other subject lines in rigorous head-to-head tests.

The bottom line? I would not give up on one of the most motivating words in our language because of spam or filter fears. You should definitely do some testing!

4. The right way to write subject lines.
Here’s a mini case study that shows you how to think about putting a subject line together. Here’s the subject line from an e-mail sent by a major marketer that targets small and growing businesses.

SUBJECT: Who’s minding the store?

If you click through to find out more, you get to the message: “Small businesses are more vulnerable to crime than is generally realized, yet the risks to them are not publicized and too few take steps to protect themselves, says a new study. Don’t wait until you are a victim of a crime – take steps now to thwart the bad guys. Here are a few tips” . . . etc.

So what’s going on here? Well, the message itself certainly goes on to provide valuable information that small business managers should know. But instead of saying so directly in the subject line, the writer went for a “teaser” approach: “Who’s minding the store?” This teaser subject line might be O.K. in an ad or flyer but is, I would argue, a big loser as a subject line. Why? Because no benefit is mentioned.

Let’s rewrite the subject line and see if we can do a better job of motivating the reader. We could slice it and dice it a bunch of ways:

SUBJECT: Five ways to prevent store theft
SUBJECT: How to improve store security
SUBJECT: Stop store thieves in their tracks
SUBJECT: Don’t let thieves steal you blind
SUBJECT: Crime prevention basics
SUBJECT: How to prevent store theft

You get the idea. The take-away message? The subject line is a vitally important part of e-mail campaign success and should be the subject of your close attention!

Today, many businesses use email marketing to keep in contact with their prospects and clients. HTML emails are widely used for all kinds of professional correspondence. Due to the emergence of new communication platforms, people are reading emails through a number of standalone email clients. When you send an HTML email, you must make sure that it is going to be displayed correctly across various platforms so that your recipients can read it.

In this article, let me share with you 5 tips to design a good email template:

1. Write a good subject line. This is the first thing that your recipients will see when they receive your email. A good subject line will increase the open rate of your email. Therefore, you should spend some effort to craft a good subject line to get the attention of your recipients.

2. Have enough white space in your email. This is important because people have difficulty reading large chunk of text. So make sure that you separate your text into paragraphs and have enough white space in between them. A good practice is to use a horizontal line to separate your paragraphs. This will make reading easier.

3. Use bullets in your content. Breaking down your content into point forms will make it easier for your recipients to read your email. This is because bullets naturally lead the reader from one point to another. This is extremely effective if your message is long. Breaking your content into point forms will ensure that recipients finish reading your email.

4. Use the right text format. Make sure that the text format of the letters is widely used. Today people read emails from various devices. By choosing a universal text format, you can ensure that they will be displayed properly on the devices.

5. Bring across one message per email. You should bring across one message in each email that you send out. By talking about one specific topic in one email, this will ensure that readers get what you mean. When you talk about too many topics, you will make them confused and lessen the chance to get a response from them. Therefore, always limit the scope of your email.

Do not broadcast an email campaign with a lousy email template. The email template should reflect the brand of your company and when it is done properly, you will definitely get a good response from your email campaign. So spend time and effort to design a good one.

Today people are very sensitive to spam mails. When they receive an unsolicited email, they will immediately treat it as spam. Even for solicited commercial emails, if you send it too frequently, your recipients will not read the emails and send them to the junk box.

The frequency to broadcast emails varies from one case to another. For example, if you are providing a daily update on stock or forex, your recipients will expect to see your email in their inboxes every day. But for another case, a message every bi-weekly will be good.

When it comes to email broadcast, I feel that there is no fixed rule regarding the sending frequency. As long as your emails or newsletter provide value to your subscribers, they will be more than willing to receive them often. So do not always sell something in every email you send. By doing so, you are forcing your recipients to hit the SPAM button.

To determine the frequency of your broadcast, the first step is to decide on what kinds of emails you are going to send. There are many different types of email, from newsletter to press release. After you have listed out the different types, plot the regularity of each type.

Next, you need to determine whether you have enough useful content to send to your recipients. If you have schedule your newsletter to be sent once every 2 weeks, you must make sure that you have useful content to publish. You should never compromise on the quality of the content at all.

If you are not sure what to send, you should ask your recipients what they want to receive. Send them a survey to gather information on what they want. From the results of the survey, you can then create the content that your recipients wish to read.

A simple guideline on broadcast frequency for different types of emails is as followed:

1. Newsletter. Corporate newsletter should be sent at least once a month, 12 times a year.

2. Survey. Survey is a very good tool to gather valuable feedbacks and other information. You should restrict surveys to quarterly for better response rate.

3. Promotional emails. This really depends on how well your recipients are receptive to you or your business. Sending it daily is definitely out of the question. You can try sending it twice a month to see the response rate of your recipients.

If you can achieve the right broadcast frequency, you will definitely see a greater response from your email campaign.

A permission-based list is your asset. This is because with a list, you can create readership on demand. And if your list is loyal and responsive, the response rate for every promotional campaign will be high and lucrative. Therefore, if you are not building your list now, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Here, let me share with you 5 extremely effective methods to build your subscriber list:

1. Article marketing. This is one of my favorite methods to build a list. Article marketing is extremely effective for list building because if you write well, people will perceive you as an authority figure and trust you. As they see you as an expert, they will be more receptive to opt-into your list for more valuable information. So write articles and submit to article directories weekly. Include your website link in the Author Resource box of every article.

2. Forum marketing. Join forums that are related to the market you are in. Participate actively in forum discussions and share valuable information with other forum members. With this, you will build up your reputation in the community and people will start checking out your website in the signature.

3. Create a squeeze page to capture emails and names. A squeeze page should be straight to the point by offering something in exchange for visitors’ emails and names. When you are creating your squeeze page, make sure that you write a compelling headline. The headline is the most important factor that will determine the opt-in rate of your squeeze page. So spend more time on it.

4. Offer a free gift to your visitors in exchange for their names and emails. To further increase your opt-in rate, offer a free gift such as e-book, whitepaper, report, voucher, discount coupon, etc. People love to receive free gift so by offering on your squeeze page, you can definitely entice more people to opt-in to your list.

5. Split test different version of your squeeze page. The objective is to increase the conversion rate of your squeeze page. You can use Google Website Optimizer for free to split test your page.

Remember, list is your asset. Build early and profit more in the future. Also, it is important to maintain a good relationship with your subscribers. List building is all about relationship. If you want to build a responsive and loyal readership, you must provide content that are valuable to them in the first place. Do not compromise on the quality of the content at all cost.