Internet Business Without The Hype
Email Marketing Tips Blog Carnival – Edition 8
Welcome to the eighth edition of the Email Marketing Tips blog carnival. It’s usually hosted by John Furst at the E-Biz Booster Blog but I’m guest-hosting it today. So bear with me if you’re a regular reader and things don’t look quite the same as usual… I received a good number of submissions, but the majority of them were not directly (or even indirectly for the most part) related to email marketing. I wanted to keep it as on topic as possible, so I have only included the submissions that I felt were suitable. So, let’s get to this edition’s posts… Robbin Block presents Get a Life (cycle) posted at Blockbeta Marketing: Unique Perspectives and Resources for Small Businesses.
Robbin’s post is a good reminder that there are no hard and fast “rules” about how often you should email your list. It’s all about what’s best for your customer. John W. Furst presents Email Marketing Tips: List Building posted at Chris Garrett on New Media. This is part two in a six part series about email marketing from Chris Garrett at chrisg.com. Nothing earth-shattering, just some solid advice for marketing through email. Make sure you read all the other parts as well. John W. Furst presents Success in Landing Page Conversion? Before & After posted at SeoWorld. This one isn’t specifically about email marketing, but most of the information can be applied to it. It’s got a list of 16 things you can test on your landing pages, so if you’re wondering what you should test beyond the headline, price and PS, you’ll get lots of good ideas here.
John Lenaghan presents How To Come Up With Killer Email Subject Lines posted at Internet Marketing Chaos Self-serving link to my submission for this edition of the carnival. That concludes today’s edition. You can submit your blog article for the next edition of Email Marketing Tips through the carnival submission form and you can find past editions and upcoming hosts on the blog carnival home page. Tags: blog carnival, email marketing tips, List Building Filed under List Building by John Permalink Print 2 Comments August 28, 2008 How To Come Up With Killer Email Subject Lines Do you struggle with writing subject lines for your emails? I’m talking emails you’re sending to your list, not to your grandmother or your best friend. The subject line is probably the most important part of writing an effective email message.
The content of the email itself can be absolutely fantastic, something that will make the reader whip out their wallet and buy anything you have to sell them, but if the subject line doesn’t get them to open the message, it’s worthless. The subject does the same job as the headline on a good sales letter. It gets the reader interested in reading on to find out more (and ultimately do whatever it is you want them to do – buy, click, whatever). For the longest time, I struggled to come up with good subject lines, and my open rate suffered a lot of the time. But then I changed the way I wrote my emails, and a couple of small changes made a huge difference.
1. Write the message first If you write the subject line before you write the message, half the time you’ll have to go back and edit it anyway. As you write the email, you’ll have new ideas that could take the message in a different direction than you initially planned. It’s a lot easier to write a subject line that will grab the reader’s attention when you know exactly what the email says and can pick a hot button to focus on.
2. Know who you’re writing to When you write the subject line (and the main message for that matter) it’s a lot more effective when you write it to a specific person. Have a person in mind – someone who has the problem your message solves or wants to know how to do what your message explains. It doesn’t matter if they’re real or made-up, just that they’re you’re ideal target customer. Decide how they would feel when they’re in that position, and what they really want. Remember, they don’t want to lose 10 pounds, they want to look good for their high school reunion next month. Hit their hot buttons in the subject line and you’ll get a lot higher open rate.
The other thing I did to make writing subject lines easier is to create a swipe file of good examples from other marketers. A lot of people get tired of receiving tons of promotional emails from internet marketing lists and they unsubscribe. I actually see people in forums who are proud they never got an email about the latest big product launch. I’m the opposite – I subscribe to as many lists as I can so I can swipe ideas from people who are promoting stuff to me. Especially people like John Reese, Frank Kern, Jimmy Brown or Mike Filsaime. Regardless of what you think of their marketing techniques, they know how to get people’s attention. There is a catch here though. Don’t subscribe with your main email address. Go sign up for a free Gmail account and use that address to sign up for these lists (or Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your favorite free email site). This is really important if you’re signing up for lists in a market that you’re interested in personally. You’re not trying to find more stuff to buy, you just want to get ideas you can use.
Once every couple of weeks, log into that special Gmail account and scan the messages you’ve received, looking for subject lines that make you want to open the email and read the whole thing. Copy & paste those examples into a Word document, a text file or whatever format works best for you. Then the next time you sit down to write an email to your list, open up that swipe file and you’ll have a nice list of subject lines that you can just modify to suit your needs. Tags: email marketing, email subject, list marketing, open rate, subject lines Filed under Copywriting by John Permalink Print 5 Comments August 20, 2008 Submit Your Posts For The Email Marketing Tips Blog Carnival I’m going to be hosting the September 3 edition of the Email Marketing Tips blog carnival, so if you have a marketing related blog and want to submit an email marketing related post, head over to blogcarnival.com to get it in. If you’re not familiar with blog carnivals, they’re a great way of getting exposure for your blog, and as a result more traffic. They’re basically a compilation of posts related to the topic of the carnival, with a short snippet that links back to the original post on your blog.
There are blog carnivals on almost any topic you can imagine, so they don’t necessarily have to be marketing-related (although the one I’m hosting is). Some carnivals are hosted on the same blog most of the time, while others are hosted by various people. It’s a great way to get more backlinks to your site, often from blogs with good rankings. Plus, you can often get quite a bit of clickthrough traffic directly from the hosting blog, so it’s not all about search engine rankings. You can find out more about how they work on the About Blog Carnivals page. Tags: backlinks, blog carnival, email marketing tips, Traffic Generation Filed under Blogging, Traffic Generation by John Permalink Print 1 Comment August 14, 2008 7 Tips For Recycling Your Content When you write an article, record a video or create any other kind of content for your website, how many times do you use the same content? Once? Twice? More? The fact is, there are quite a few ways you can recycle your content, getting far more than a single use out of it. Let’s look at an article, for example. Most people use an article in one of two ways. They either post it on their own website or submit it to someone else’s as a promotional tool to drive traffic back to their site. With all the talk of duplicate content and how Google doesn’t like it, most people will only use that article once. But you can take that article and multiply its effectiveness with any of these methods: Rewrite it and post the original version on your own website and the rewritten version on one or more article directories. Add a new message to your autoresponder series either using the article for the message or a snippet of it with a link back to the full version on your website. Record yourself reading the article and submit it to various podcast directories, or post the audio version on your website. Create an outline of the article in Powerpoint and then use that as the basis for a Camtasia video that you can submit to YouTube and various other video sites. Break the article into paragraphs and use those paragraphs to make blog posts linking back to your website in one of the blog linking networks.
Flesh out the information in the article a bit and covert it into a short report that you can either sell or give away to generate optins. Combine the article with several other articles on related topics, creating a report that you again either sell or give away. If you outsource your article writing, this can be a great way to get a better return on your investment. If you’re only using an article once, you may only want to pay $5-$10 for it, since it has to do a lot more work to pay for itself. But if you can use the same article 5 or more times, suddenly its ROI is much better and you can justify paying more for it. This is going to result in a better article, which in turn means its probably going to give you an even better ROI. It’s like a snowball effect.
More ways to use the content gives you a better Marketing Consultants Birmingham ROI, which means you can pay more for the article, which means the ROI is probably going to be even better still. If you hesitate to use the same content in multiple ways, consider this example. Think of several of your all-time favorite bands – the ones that you have bought several CD’s (or some other format) from. Now of all the albums you have from those bands, how many of them are “Greatest Hits” albums? What is a greatest hits album but a bunch of recycled content? It might be “remastered” (edited to be a little better than the original) and it might even have a couple of new or previously unreleased songs on it (something added that you didn’t already have, bundled with all the songs you did). But ultimately, it’s selling you mostly the same content you already bought, just in a different format. Music, movies, books, TV – they all recycle content all the time. And they seem to be doing pretty well with it, don’t they?