Archive for the ‘mistakes’ Category

Why buying an email addresses list is a bad idea

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

In my last post I told you the importance of giving value as a key factor to implement a successful email marketing program. The other key factor is building a list of qualified subscribers who give us their permission to send them the campaigns. This is always a difficult and slow process that a lot of people want to skip. These people want to take the shortcut, and buy a third party email list or directly go to the Yellow pages to gather emails and send them promotional campaigns with no value at all. Obviously that is not a good idea, for different reasons:

-    Unqualified leads
-    Devalues your brand
-    Disingenuous relationship with customer (what would the email say? “Hello! You don’t know me, but I bought your email…”)

Buying a contacts list wont get us anywhere. Someone with a high quality list will take care of it and tightly control that it is not abused with a lot of promotional emails. For that reason, when someone is selling you an email list (remember that he is selling it to everybody who is paying for it) 99 times out of 100 you are getting a spam list. That’s a list of addresses of people who have not agreed to receive messages like yours, or who are on a list that’s been blasted to uselessness by other mailers.

So when you see offers like 1 million addresses for 100$ you better ignore it if you don’t want to lose your money and harm the image of your company.

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Posted in Lists, email marketing, mistakes | 1 Comment »

9 ways to add more value to your newsletter

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

During the past decades, companies have relied on traditional advertising like radio catchy jingles, TV commercials, Press advertising, telemarketing, etc. The technique is to interrupt the radio listener, tv viewer, newspaper reader, with an attention grabbing ad to convince him to buy our product.

However, the consumer is getting immune to this traditional advertising, just completely ignoring the ads or blocking them with technologies like TiVo or DVR. Every day gets tougher to get the consumer’s attention, and the best way is adding value to the message.

The value – attention axiom works perfectly in email marketing. To build a solid permission –based subscribers list you must provide value, either by producing great content or through big discounts or offers in products that the subscribers are really interested in.

It is this perfect combination of value+permission what makes email marketing get great conversion rates and be a way to strengthen the relationship with your subscribers, getting your casual clients into loyal clients and loyal clients into evangelizers of your products.

Once the importance of value+permission is clear, here you have some tips on how to add more value to your newsletters:

1. Establish the right expectations

The subscription process is the first step of your strategy to get news subscribers. It is very important that you set at this point the right expectations about the content that the subscriber is going to get and the value that it contains for the reader. Also provide links to past issues of your newsletter so that subscribers can see exactly what to expect.

2. Have a Personality

The fact that you are producing a corporate newsletter doesn’t mean it can’t have a personality. You want the reader to feel that there is a real person on the other end of the newsletter. Establish someone as the editorial face and allow him to give it a more informal language, so that he gets closer to your subscribers.

3. Tricks, Tips and Best Practices

B2B newsletter readers love tips. No matter what profession, workers are always interested in receiving practical ideas and best practices that they can really use.

4. Statistics and Benchmarking

Your subscribers want to know how they are doing compared with other companies in their market. Providing Benchmarking information and industry statistics will keep your subscribers attention.

5. FAQ / Ask the expert

Articles devoted to answer questions are a great way to generate the interest of your subscribers and to establish yourself and your company as an expert in your field.

6. Case of study

Readers never get tired of practical examples of success stories and strategies, and they always want more and more.

7. Use your Click-Through Rate (CTR) data

Monitoring which articles are giving you the most click help you to refine your topics and write more about the most interesting for your subscribers.

8. Use surveys

Send surveys a few times a year asking directly to your subscribers which content they prefer.

9. Partners, clients and experts

Solicit articles from your clients, partners and industry experts.

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Posted in Lists, Restaurants, Segmentation, Subject Lines, Uncategorized, mistakes, social media | 3 Comments »

Top 5 mistakes in email marketing

Friday, March 13th, 2009

The last posts that I’ve written are about how to get the best out of your email marketing program (for Restaurants or Hotels and Resorts), reasons to add a newsletter to your web or blog and how to build a successful newsletter. This time I’m turning up side down and I’m going to talk about what do you have to avoid in email marketing. My experience with Pixelnews allows me to identify the most common mistakes in email marketing campaigns:

Too complex design

You have to realize that designing an email campaign is not the same as designing a website. Don’t try to use fancy flash or java scripts or try to embed a You Tube video, it just doesn’t work, and you will get crazy trying to make it look ok in the different email clients. Try to design a layout as clean and simple as possible with the correct links that will get your subscribers to the website or landing page you want.

Adding the wrong reply email address

It is pretty common to find mistakes in the reply email address or marketers that prefer to introduce a false address to avoid to get their inboxes full. Receiving feedback from your subscribers is one of the best ways to improve your campaigns and your product/service, so you cannot afford to miss that replies.

All Image, No text

I’m tired of seeing email campaigns that only have an image or a few images and no text at all. This campaigns hace two main problems:

•    Are very likely to be considered as Spam by the main ISP (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail)

•    Most of the email clients don’t download the images automatically so your subscribers will receive a blank email. Then they will delete it or worse, mark you as spam.

Spammy Subjects

More marketers than I thought still hasn’t understood that using subject lines with all caps, using words like WIN, PRIZE, FREE or using multiple exclamations!!! will make their emails look like Spam.

Wrong Links

The last of the most common mistakes that I’m used to see is when I click on a link in an email and it get me to a blank page with big letters that say: 404 error: Not Found. Before you send out your campaigns make sure that you have introduced the links correctly.

The economic situation that we are living today makes you analyze even more the ROI (Return on Investment) of every of your marketing actions. Don’t let these avoidable mistakes make you lose sales or decrease your reputation.

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Posted in Contacts management, email marketing, mistakes | 8 Comments »