Do you hesitate to send email to your subscribers and customers?

If you’re one of the people who worries that your customers will think you’re spamming if you send them email, no matter HOW useful the information is, I urge you to reconsider.

The truth is, when you do your email marketing right, not only is it an excellent source of income for you, but your subscribers and customers will actually appreciate hearing from you!

Here are three tried and tested ideas for successful email promotions:

Damaged or returned stock promotions: Offer damaged or returned stock for 50% off! Everyone gets returns, it’s a part of doing business. And of course damaged stock is unavoidable.

Why not take advantage of email to clear out your stock that’s otherwise going to take up space, while at the same time offering your customers deals that they’re sure to appreciate?

Limited time offer: By offering a great discount on your products for a limited amount of time, people who receive the email feel like it’s urgent they respond, so there’s less chance they’ll close the email to “think about it” and never come back.

Limited quantity offer: Similar to the limited time offer, the people who receive this email will also feel a sense of urgency.

If you go with “limited time or quantity offer” stick with the offer. If you write in your email that a product is available for a …. time, stick to it.

Sometimes you see that a product is available till midnight, 14 days later it’s still available till midnight. Doesn’t look right to me.

And those are just a few to get you started. Use your imagination, and I’m sure you’ll come up with all kinds of things to send your list that they’ll really ENJOY having.

Do you panic at the thought of writing your own promotional email?

Here’s something you should know: writing an email is 95% rules, and only 5% creativity.

So as long as you stick to the rules, you’ll write an email that’s suitable for sending to your customers every time!

Hypnotize the reader with compelling benefits: The most effective email promotions grab readers’ attention with compelling benefits that speak directly to the readers’ deepest desires and greatest fears.

Benefits build the value you need to drive people to act when presented with your call to action.

Write your email like you were talking to a friend.

Be informal, use contractions, and don’t be afraid to start a sentence with “and” or “but.”To transfer ownership, you want to make sure your reader can actually picture themselves using your product.

Use automation to create personalized offers: Nothing is more appealing to people than the ‘sound’ of their own names, and nothing grabs someone’s attention faster than something that affects them directly!

We don’t recommend you try to get yours subscriber to purchase directly from your email. Instead, you should ask them to “click here now to learn more,” or something similar.

How it LOOKS makes a big impact on readers, too. Here is how to format your email.

Width: Be sure to format your email message in a table that is not over 60/65 characters wide. If you exceed that, your message may be cut off on the right side of the screen or, at the very least, not print properly

Images: Try to avoid using graphics whenever possible. People with slow connections will have trouble downloading them, and people reading your message offline won’t see them at all.

Bolding: Use bolding just to emphasize the biggest and best benefits in the offer. You should be able to scan the message and instantly understand the biggest benefits

Bullets: Using bulleted points is one of the best ways to break up your copy and make some of your key points really stand out. As will all formatting techniques, make sure to don’t swamp your email with bullet points.

Finally, once you’ve written the letter, give it a final “scan test.” Set it aside for an hour, then return to it with fresh eyes BUT don’t read it word for word. Scan over the letter and see which sections jump out at you. Make sure that those sections contain the key benefits.

Stick to these few simple rules, and you’ll have no trouble turning out emails that get a response, because your customers actually WANT to receive them!

Bjorn Brands is a successfull enterprenuer who transitioned from having his own building company to a great online business. Check out his site and see for yourself at http://www.moneyacces.com
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You probably have an email address or more than one and more than likely you receive spam in your inbox on a daily basis. Or, perhaps you have a spam blocker that catches the majority of junk email before it makes it to your inbox. Commercial email that you do not request is considered spam and it is the last thing people want to see in their inbox.

There are lots of Internet marketers out there who do not think through their actions very well and make the big mistake of spamming thousands of email addresses on a regular basis hoping to make a few sales. The problem with this is there are risks involved and it will likely be illegal in the future. You don’t want to do something to harm your service or product so take the time required to develop a list of opt in email addresses so you only send emails to those who have given you permission to do so.

There are many ways to collect email addresses for your email marketing contact list. It might take a little bit of time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start small. Since it is so fast and cost effective to send an email you can easily send an email to as few as 10 people on your contact list and then as it grows you will be able to reach more people. This is important because you want people to perceive your product or service in a good light, not in the light of a spammer.

Remember, it might be tempting to buy a list of email addresses with 10,000 or more names to get a quick start. However, by doing this you will likely receive hundreds or thousands of complaints and very possibly fines, too. That’s the last thing you want to do so take the time and effort to learn how to develop a contact list via opt-in methods. This will be better for your business over the long run.

Not to mention, getting permission to send emails to people is quite easy once you learn how to do so. There are many methods you can use to help people choose to give you their email address. For example, you can offer something for free, host a contest, or simply provide a sign up box on your website. With so many ways to get email addresses there is no reason not to.

Brought to you by Aaron Goldberg. Aaron is an advocate for Interspire, a provider of ecommerce shopping cart software, content management software, email marketing software, and other web software solutions.
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Overall Rank: 5 out 5 stars

iContact is a very user friendly application. It was built with the novice in mind. The iContact interface is easy to navigate and visually appealing. The application is feature rich which allows you to gain more for your buck. Based on my review I would give iContact a 5 out 5 as it stands the test all in areas evaluated.

Pricing – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

iConact is reasonably priced. The minimum pricing for 1000 Contacts is $14. They also offer a Free Trial for 15 day.

Basic Features – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros

iConact has a very rich feature set. Some of the basic features they offer are actually paid services with other email marketing services. One of these include the Survey feature. The Survey feature allows you to create surveys so that you can get the input from the people you have in your database. Utilizing this feature you will be able to gear your newsletter and product promotions to what your customers actually want.

Another great basic feature iContact offers is Image Hosting. iContact’s image hosting plan allows you to host up to 500kb of images on their servers thus eliminating the need to host your images outside of iContact.

Cons

None

Creating Messages – Ranking: 4 out 5 stars

Pros

iConact allows you to use a WYSIWYG editor to create your messages. In addition to creating messages using HTML and the WYSIWYG editor, you also have the option to import a website despite the server the website resides on. I’ve personally used this feature and it brings the website in exactly the way it looks on the web. This is a GREAT feature to use to make sure your newsletter and website maintains it’s branding without having to recreate your newsletter from scratch.

If you aren’t design savvy, iContact offers over 300 templates you can use instead. Just looking at iContact’s visually appealing interface, it’s clear that the templates they offer are just as jazzy and professional. You will also have the ability to setup autoresponders. Autoresponders are essential to any online business. They allow you to automatically keep in touch with your clients based on their interest.

Cons

According to feedback I’ve received, iContact’s WYISWYG editor adds extra HTML code when copying/pasting from a Word document. It appears that once it’s a problem it’s difficult to rectify. The easy solution to that would be to copy/paste from a text editor. The only other thing here is that they do not offer an option to add attachments to your emails.

Reporting and Tracking – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros

Tracking the results of your campaigns is absolutely necessary to determine what’s working and what’s not. iContact has a set of reporting tools that will assist you with this task. You will be able to track the number of people that open your newsletter, click on links in the newsletter, and even be able to tell how many of your emails are undeliverable. Say for instance you have 1000 contacts in your database. You decide to send 500 of them your newsletter on Thursday morning and the other 500 on Thursday evening. Utilizing the reporting and tracking features in iContact you can then determine what time of the day on Thursday yields the best results.

Cons

None

List Management – Ranking: 4 out 5 stars

Pros

How your list is managed is one of the most important factors in email marketing. Some of the key features that iContact offer in this category are list segmentation, sign up form generation, automatic duplicate removal, double opt-in is optional, automatic unsubscribe and many more.

The two list management features that jump out at me are optional double opt-in and the ability to design custom forms. When someone signs up for your newsletter on your website it’s nice to decide whether or not they need to verify their subscription. Don’t get me wrong, subscription verification has it place and generally yields a higher open rate. Utilizing the custom forms feature allows you to request information unique to your specific campaign. This is an excellent tool.

Cons

None

Sending Options – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros

iContact offers all of the standard sending options available with other email marketing services. Some of these include sending via the internet, html and text message options, and spam check. While these are generally standard services for most email marketing services, the key is reliability and usability. iContact stands the test in both areas.

One feature that iContact has that others don’t is the ability to manage events. If you are person that do teleclasses or any other event oriented marketing this would be an ideal tool.

Cons

Although iContact offers the ability to to schedule a future date to send your emails they do not have a time option. This can be a rather important feature if you learn that sending out newsletters at a specific time greatly increases your open and clickthrough ratio. No worries though, starting out you can go in an queue up your campaign at the specified time that you need it to be sent.

Support and Extras – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros

iContact offers tech support via phone, email and online. They also have a community that you can ask questions concerning the use of iContact. Your newsletters will be published in an archive for other users to view as well. You will be given a url that you can direct people to allow them to read your newsletters online.

Cons

None

If you enjoyed this article, please visit my Online Business Blog and Digg this article. Also leave comments if you have anything to add.

For more product reviews, see Resource Center for Online Businesses

To your online success,

Keyeraines

Copyright © 2008 Keyeraines Unlimited, Inc.

Nakisha Muhammad (Keyeraines), has a 12 year financial background in the mortgage industry. However, she has had a passion for technology starting at a young age. She is a fundamental programmer and web designer. She finds pleasure in researching and sharing her knowledge with others in hopes that they won’t have to work as hard to learn what’s she’s learned. With that she started a website to be a true resource center for online/offline businesses. You can visit it at www.doingbusinessonline.net.
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Overview

One aspect that attracted our attention to Vertical Response was the fact that it has won many awards throughout the years including a listing on Inc. 5000′s list of the fastest growing companies as one of the best places to work. Now, in our experience, happy employees mean that customer service will tend to be much better than for companies whose employees aren’t happy, who don’t feel as though their efforts are appreciated, or where the conditions are not satisfactory. Vertical Response proves these assumptions true as their customer support is second to none.

When you’re trying to build a customer list through email newsletters and other features, it’s important to have a company that will offer you the support you need. In fact, when it came to reviewing dozens of other email marketing and autoresponder companies, Vertical Response rated as one of the best when it comes to customer support. Add to that the positive features it offers and the promise of success for anyone marketing on the Internet is greatly increased.

Features

We could go on and on about the customer support, but that alone is not reason enough for someone to buy a product or service from a company. In this day and age, however, it certainly has its lasting appeal. Vertical Response has quality layouts for unique and professional looking email and they help you create them with a customizable creation wizard. You don’t have to be an expert on layout or design when you use Vertical Response as an autoresponder.

They also have one of the largest libraries of stock images that you can use to spice up your email marketing. Just remember that even though you have access to over 75,000 images, it’s best not to throw them all into one email marketing campaign, lest your potential customers look elsewhere.

One important feature that potential clients constantly mention when discussing email newsletters and opt-in pages is that they want a simple, one-click way to unsubscribe. How many clients are lost because they won’t sign up if they don’t think they’ll be able to unsubscribe in the future? Vertical Response makes it easy for clients to unsubscribe to lists which allows you to advertise this, entice people to try your newsletter and, once you’ve hooked them, you can reel them in.

Limitations

While there is not much to list as far as limitations for Vertical Response, one of the major issues we have found is that not every feature they offer is included in the basic monthly price. This means that if you want to conduct surveys -as a means of determining what your clients are looking for, if you’re hitting the right buttons, or if your approach is all wrong- you have to pay extra. Other services don’t charge extra for their key features.

Now, there may be customers who don’t mind this because of the exceptional customer service that Vertical Response gives, but we feel that if you offer features, they should be included in the basic monthly cost, not as an extra.

Overall Summary

Not enough can be said about monthly charges based on the number of email addresses that you have signed up. In other words, some email marketing services prefer to charge a flat rate or that you purchase the software up front, but how does that help anyone when all you have are twenty or thirty emails at first? Vertical Response allows you the ability to pay for only the number of email subscribers you have, but that is done in quantities of 500 and up.

In this day and age, there is not enough quality customer support, regardless of the company that you’re dealing with, and Vertical Response’s level of support is so high that it makes us want to run into the streets and shout it out to everyone. When it comes to something as important as Internet marketing, we feel that more support is the right path to take.

This article is one of a number of reviews with information on the major autoresponders available at Autoresponder Information.For further information on this and other autoresponders go to Autoresponder Information.
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I’m sure most of you reading this post would have heard of the saying “The Money’s In Your List” right? Many Internet Marketers have been stressing about the fact that you should have a mailing list, so you can sell to these people over and over and over again.

This is only partly true – Because simply by building up your mailing list is not enough to generate you profits if you are not equipped with the right email marketing skills and knowledge. You will find that no matter how many times you send emails to your subscribers, they do not act upon it.

What I’m going to do in this post is to share with you 5 essential email marketing tips that will help you build up a strong relationship with your subscribers, and increase your chances of them acting upon your offers.

1. Write In Your Own Voice

Write casually – Treat your subscribers as your friend and write to them the exact same way you would write to your friends.

The reason is because most of your subscribers are working-class people and, after a tiring day from work, they will not want to read another serious-toned email.

2. Keep It Short & Sweet (KISS)

You should keep your emails short and sweet. Keep each paragraph to at most 3 sentences and each sentence to have at most 7 – 8 words. You would also want to limit your emails to at most 3 paragraphs.

If you have a very long story to tell them, you can always give them a summary of what you are going to say in your email message, followed by a link to your website where the rest of the story could be found.

3. Have Only 1 Purpose Per Email

Many a times, I see that many email marketers have – in 1 single email, a link to a product they are selling, followed by a link to their latest blog post, etc. It’s way too messy and chances are, people will click on neither of the links.

What you should do is to have only 1 purpose in every email that you write – If you intend to tell people about a particular article which you’ve just posted onto your blog, then in your email, you should ONLY talk about that particular article, as well as a link for them to read the whole article, and nothing else.

Likewise, if you would like to promote a particular product and/or service in your email message, then you should give them a brief introduction about it, along with one single most beneficial benefit about the product and/or service, followed by a direct link to that product and/or service.

4. Text/HTML?

In my personal opinion, text emails always work better compared to HTML emails – Because some of them may be using their smartphones, or PDAs to check their emails and if your email is in HTML format, it may not be displayed the way that you want it to be on their smartphones or PDAs (and chances are they are going to delete it and your email message will never be able to get across to your subscribers).

5. Do Not Spam

People hate spammers. So, do not spam your subscribers’ mailbox with your email messages (by doing so will only get you into trouble with the legal authorities).

What I would generally advice is that you should not send your subscribers more than 1 email message in 1 single day (unless it’s really, really urgent and you need to send them a 2nd email message). Instead, what you can do is that you can send a email message to your subscribers once every 3 to 5 days (either to share a new blog post that you’ve just published, or recommend a product and/or service).

So, there you have it, I’ve just shared with you 5 email marketing tips that will help you with your email marketing campaigns. Bear these 5 tips in mind and I’m pretty sure that you’ll have very successful email marketing campaigns.

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About the Author:
Jun Yuan Lim is a full-time Internet Marketer who is dedicated in helping newbies generate their first dollar on the Internet. Visit his website at http://www.junyuanlim.com to discover proven strategies on how you can generate a massive income on the Internet. Jun Yuan has also created a website to provide top-quality Internet Marketing guides at hugely affordable prices. To find out more, visit http://www.internetprofitmachines.com now.
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