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Make Money Online Sending Emails

Tips On How To Make Money Online From Affiliate Marketing – Part 4

Email marketing is also an effective way of staying in communication with your customers. You can achieve outstanding results with email marketing by investing a small amount of time and  momey. Email marketing is inexpensive, as there are no production costs, materials or postage costs, apart from email marketing software programs.  Using your opt in list of email addresses of customers and/or subscribers that have agreed for you to can send emails to them, you can use email as a channel to send communications incorporating promotions, brochures, new product announcements, and other aspects of your marketing campaign.

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?

Email Marketing is simply using email to distribute your business’ marketing messages to communicate with your prospects and customers. Email Marketing makes it easy to put the right information in front of the right people at the right time. For ver a decade, email marketing has proven to be an effective marketing, lead generation and sales strategy.  Being instantaneous, average responses to these types of email occur within 48 hours of being sent. The most popular form of email marketing is growing your own list, for example a newsletter, and sending emails to the list containing tips along with things subscribers might be interested in buying. 

Email Marketing can also cover advertising on email newsletters or follow up emails to existing customers. While you could include these other wider definitions in email communications, a lot of people discussing email marketing mainly use the term to describe the process of building a list with a view to growing ader loyalty and making sales.

IS EMAIL MARKETING DYING?

With the advent of new marketing techniques such as social media, video and mobile marketing, and a host of other new  communication channels, one might assume email marketing is a thing of the past.  However email marketing is not on the decline, if anything the reverse is true.  Don’t assume that email is yesterday’s news, and has little chance of keeping up with the other marketing methods now available.  The numbers say this assumption is incorrect, with email usage being remarkably steady, even in the face of new competition. Research shows that email is still the preferred method for receiving commercial messages of 74% of adults.

This perhaps surprising statistic explains the continued proliferation of e-zines and other email marketing today by small and large businesses. There are good reasons to conduct email marketing campaigns in 2011.  Campaigner recently surveyed its users about e-mail marketing, resulting in 33% indicating they were going to continue with their e-mail programs in 2011, and 61% responded that plans were underway to increase the use of e-mail in their marketing programs.  Almost 100 percent planned to continue or expand their e-mail marketing programs to gain new prospects. 

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING USED FOR?

Email marketing can be used for branding, lead generation or networking, or sales. Many businesses see th value of e-mail marketing as part of their overall marketing and sales process  because of its return-on-investment (ROI).

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU USE EMAIL MARKETING FOR A NEWSLETTER?

Twelve e-newsletters evenly spaced out across the calendar delivers consistency without being overwhelming for you or your prospects.  It’s a great way to show your knowledge and experience in the industry and your community. Take a few minutes each month to subscribe to newsletters from other businesses with similar customers to see how they use email marketing for newsletters.and brainstorm great ideas for topics. You will derive value from listening to others involved in the conversation and keep the pulse of your prospects. 

SHOULD YOU OUTSOURCE YOUR EMAIL MARKETING TO A THIRD PARTY SERVICE

Whilst there are a number of excellent email marketing software services such as aWeber, it is always a good idea to have your needs handled by a third party service provider. There are other benefits of having an off-site service. There are many options to choose from, ranging from self-serve programs to ones that completely managed by an outside vendor. Choices are often dictated by the level of expertise and resources available internally, your expertise and available time.

EMAIL MARKETING MISTAKES IN AFFILIATE MARKETING

Many small businesses succumb to similar mistakes when formulating and executing an email marketing campaign. One of these is bland and/or misleading subject lines. Before a recipient opens an email, the subject line is the only point of contact between your business and them. The subject line must be compelling. so inject creativity and imagination into the subject phrasing. Dull subject lines like ‘May Newsletter’ result in lower open rates compared to teasers written in an ad headline style.  Each subject line needs to promise the reader will gain something by opening the email, so the value proposition needs to be obvious, and  communicated it in as few characters as possible.  Displaying who the email is from has an impact on open rates, so ensure the recipient knows the email has come from your business and the ‘From’ field of the form hasn’t been filled out so it looks like spam. 

Make sure your email marketing consists of emails that read like little more than heap sales pitches, as whilst it might be your purpose to increase sales, subscribers won’t appreciate this viewpoint when reading such an email. Don’t conflate your priorities with your recipient’s desires and interests. Expect mediocre results if the email doesn’t address the reader’s needs. Its a mistake for email marketers to think the size of a campaign’s database is the most important thing rather than the level of engagement and comprehension of people’s preferences and behaviours, namely the breadth of information in the database. A database of 2 million people, only 10% of whom are active is far less impressive than a database of half a million with 75% active which comprises information as to the recipients’ preferences.

Resist the temptation to be over-inclusive in the information you put in the body of your email. as the immediate objective is to get the recipient to follow through on a call to action. The email content must elaborate on the subject heading line, and withhold the desirable information in the body copy, in addition to including a call to action, which is the most crucial functional aspect of the email. It is a brief imperative issued to persuade recipients to pursue the value proposition of the email, whether clicking through to a landing page on your site, picking up the phone, or visiting a store to buy a product.

Avoid excessive design flourishes like animation and other visual design elements in email marketing which are more time consuming than email templates, and can put a barrier between your reader and your business,  either rendering the navigation to the key message difficult or obscuring the value proposition. It can also delay email loading times and formatting for mobile readers.  It is a mistake to send each recipient the same email without regard to segmentation, and the different interests and concerns of recipients gleaned from your past interaction with them and how they responded to past marketing campaigns. Segment your database according to interests, and  craft emails that catering to each group to enhance receptivity. 

Be careful not to break the law, as recipients have to have supplied their email addresses  with either express or implied consent for you to legally send them marketing information. Express consent entails that they have filled in their email address or ticked a box for the explicit purpose of receiving more information. Implied consent is when you have received their email address by some other means with the expectation of some further form of email contact, be it marketing or otherwise.

If you aren’t using analytics to track the performance of your email marketing campaigns you have no way of knowing whether your strategies are effective. Ensure you have access to a good quality email analytics package, to discern which features of your campaign are working and which are in need of tweaking. One of the key benefits of email marketing is its ability to track and measure performance in a timely fashion. so you should be testing all components of your email marketing, including subject lines,  imagery, call to actions, send times, layout and so on. Testing can be as simple as conducting an A/B split test where you create two versions of the same email with only a single variation between them, so that after sending each version to 50% of customers you can compare the performance of each to see which worked best.

GENERAL TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR  AFFILIATE MARKETING CAMPAIGN WITH EMAIL MARKETING

The most significant way of improving your email marketing is to give subscribers what they want, sending relevant and interesting emails. When subscribers know  there is something valuable in your email, your open rates and conversion rates dramatically increase. Offer something of value in every email you send, such as industry research, tips and tricks, discounts etc. This helps establish your credibility and credentials and helps you become acquainted with your readers, which you need to do in order to deliver relevant content,

You won’t always know or understand what your subscribers care about, but you can work hard on finding this out by conducting online surveys requesting specific information on your web forms. Once you establish what individual readers want, you can segment them into groups based on their interests. which will  help you send relevant messages to each person.  Campaigns that have a consistent look and feel will be more effective in helping your prospects absorb information, but consistency doesn’t exclude creativity and mixing things up occasionally, as long as you maintain brand standards in design, tone, and personality. 

 WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF EMAIL MARKETING IN AFFILIATE MARKETING?

A good well run and maintained email list, can grow your reader loyalty, especially When customers hear from you repeatedly with good content they are reminded of your value. Where they take your advice on board and discover it works for them it develops trust.  The obvious reason why most affiliate marketers will cite for using email marketing is because it is profitable and low cost. If you need to you can get a message out to your entire list very fast. The ease of email marketing is another beneficial attribute for both you and your reader. For your marketing to be a success it has to be easy for the recipient, but it helps that email marketing is easy for you too as it means you can do it yourself.

‘Push’ is another attractive attribute. While websites and RSS are “pull”, in that the visitor has to come to you, with email you can send your messages out, reminding and re-engaging readers. The more information you collect, the more personalised your email marketing messages can be, and can be tailored and customised. Email  has the particularly special ability to segment, meaning you can split people off into smaller, more focused lists. It can also be potentially viral as it is easy for people to forward your message on to others, spreading further than you could alone.

Email marketing software usually has detailed tracking tools to show how many emails were opened, through to each individual link click so you can refine your techniques and improve performance. You can test different subject lines, calls to action, use of images, and so on, to further improve your results. Email marketing is an excellent compliment to your marketing and sales strategy which combined with multiple tactics can build very profitable marketing campaigns. 

DOES EMAIL MARKETING DIRECTLY INCREASE SALES?

Most email marketing has an impact on sales which isn’t quantified if your email marketing strategy isn’t connected to your sales and marketing processes. The measures commonly used to determine the success of email marketing have little relevance to sales. Email marketing should be connected to sales if measured soundly. Open rates, click through and response rates are the main means by which the success of email marketing campaigns are evaluated.

These measures are then used to justify marketing time, expense and future actions. The popularity of these measures, is derived from the fact that they are easy to measure.  However will merely examining these statistics give you a full picture in evaluating your email marketing success.When looking at response rates for different campaigns ask yourself  What proportion of those prospects who responded to each campaign match your Ideal Customer Profile. One campaign might have a higher response rate but you may not know anything about whether these people are more likely to buy from you than the people who responded to a different campaign.

It is also a good idea to question whether those who responded to a campaign rated the quality of your offer and what impact it had on their propensity to buy from you. A strategic approach to email Marketing only becomes useful if it plays a role in the overall objective of increasing sales. The goal of email marketing is therefore not just to identify prospects who are responsive to your campaign but to educate them so that they become more receptive to sales. Receptiveness is important because you can only sell to receptive buyers. A more superior measure of email marketing success might be the number of positive receptions received by sales or telesales discovered upon follow up of a campaign. Receptiveness and propensity to buy are clearly related, but inherently more  difficult to record than Response Rates.

They are worth investing time and effort in as they are far more important measures, as they will encourage the allocation of resources to marketing activity better aligned to the selling process. Response rates, which only track a single campaign, don’t necessarily provide marketers with the big picture. Yet frequently response rates alone are used to determine the efficacy of email marketing. In many companies design is a major focus taking priority over all else including content of an offer.   But if you asked the email recipient what they value most and what is likely to influence their future responsiveness to your campaigns it may not be design but the content of the offer that they attach the most value to and which motivates them. 

 Good email design, as measured by high response rates, may encourage a high number of click throughs in the short term but if your prospects find that the content fails to match the promise contained within the email, buyers will be reluctant to respond a second time, resulting in lost prospects. As it is more difficult to measure the quality of the offer as perceived by the email recipient than to measure response rates, less attention is often paid to content than design. as determined by the email recipients than it is to measure response rates, less attention is often paid to content than design.

If you want your email marketing to have the best impact on sales then there is a solution. Expand your marketing measures so that you can quantify the contribution of marketing to increasing sales beyond narrow email marketing measures of open rates, click through and response rates, which cannot be directly related to sales. You may integrate your telesales and website with your email marketing campaigns to achieve this. Email Marketing when conducted as an isolated activity will rarely lead to an increase in sales, especially if you are promoting complex rather than commodity products.  Link your emails with the next logical stage in  sales and marketing process, which might be a phone call. For instance, you have sent out an email which the prospect opens or better still responds to. Schedule a phone call to be made the next day to the prospect.

Likewise you can integrate your website tracking to improve the timing of your emails. The timing of most email campaigns revolves around the marketer not the prospect. Typically, email campaigns are sent out monthly as part of an ongoing marketing program. This timing might be convenient for the marketer, but not necessarily timely for the prospect. Instead of a monthly schedule it would be preferable to send out most of your emails when they are likely to be most relevant toeach of your prospects. Assuming a prospect searches for your type of product on Google, finding you on Google via Google Adwords and follow the link to your website,

Where they return to download something from your website they are clearly displaying interest in your products and/or services.  So it makes sense to put the prospect into a series of email campaigns more frequently at this particular point in time. Such an approach when implemented has been shown to increase response rates by as much as 27% in a sample size of 300. It is well worth the effort if you have the capability of integrating your website with your email marketing engine.

Prospect Profiling is a long established marketing process  used to better match your product and marketing messages with your prospects. Profiling requires that you ask questions and  respond with appropriate actions. Email Marketing can use survey questions attached to the bottom of registration forms to ask profile questions. This approach has been proven to work extremely well as profiling allows you to better segment your prospects and target them with more relevant communications which in turn helps you to educate and influence them.

The above represents a more sophisticated more nuanced alternative approaches to measuring the impact of email marketing campaigns in your affiliate marketing than using response rates alone.

USE A REPUTABLE EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER

Using a reputable email service provider like Aweber or GetResponse will assist you in streamlining your email marketing processes to help you make money online from affiliate marketing. 

CONCLUSION

Email marketing software or autoresponders are a powerful way of conducting your email marketing effectively and generating sales from affiliate marketing. Such software sends email or a series of email messages to someone who requests it based on a defined schedule. It tracks when messages should be sent and other analytics without you having to do anything from your end apart from setting the schedule. It automates the process of sending emails to everyone on that list either through a sequenced distribution or via broadcast on a specific time and day. There are products claiming to help you build your “goldmine” if you start to use it to make money online on autopilot! 

In the next part of this series we will go through the software in more detail, however it is important to remember that there is no magic bullet to increasing sales through email marketing, and like everything else it takes effort, careful thought and perserverance. Making money with an email list is not as easy as you will read on many reviews and you should understand that it is a long learning curve. Growing your subscribers is not always easy and can be a challenging but have long term pay offs in the long run. 

About the Author

Adele Pace holds a Masters of Law and writes in the area of online business and ecommerce. For more resources on online business and ecommerce visit www.pacelegal.com.au.

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