Email Marketing

Welcome to Email Marketing Blueprint and in this course, I teach you how to craft profit pulling emails from every email marketing campaign you put out there. It doesn’t matter whether you are doing a time sensitive promotion blast or you want to set your sequential autoresponder to dispense emails on a fixed interval, I will be showing you how to ace your email marketing in the following areas:

· How to boost your email open rates so you have more people in your mailing list opening your emails instead of discarding it to the trash bin

· How to boost your click through rates after they open and read your email

· And of course, how to get passive income and leads from your automated email marketing campaigns! As an online marketer you have to understand that list building and email marketing are very much hand in hand. Building an opt-in mailing list just isn’t enough; you need to cultivate a relationship – a respected relationship – from your subscribers. Truth of the matter is: email marketing isn’t really hard once you know the game inside out. After testing 9.2 million promotion emails blasted out in the last 12 months, I had arrived at more conclusive results which I am indeed very excited to share with you! While the nature of the subscribers is in the wealth creation / make money industry, you will find that the principles are in common with almost any other rabid niches. I hope my research and testing will help shortcut your guesswork and improve your email marketing campaigns by leaps and bounds. Again, whether you blast out time sensitive promo emails or load your autoresponder with interval messages, everything you are about to learn applies all the same. However please do not treat this as an incentive to get too lazy from testing yourself. I still recommend you do your own testing and create a habit to continuously improve your email promotions. Even though this course is on email marketing, you need to come to terms with some truths about it. For one, email marketing is not as effective as it used to be. To be more exact, email marketing started to lose the effectiveness it used to have prior to Facebook’s popularity. As of this time of writing, more Internet users spend more time checking their Facebook and Twitter account daily. Slightly more than half of the global Internet users have a Facebook account and people aged 20 and below prefer to check their Facebook account for messages than their email! You can say the same for Twitter in spite of its 140-character limitations per direct messaging. And get this: Gmail, one of the leading email providers, had recently implemented the ‘priority markers’ feature allowing their users to mark selected emails as important and thus change the ways people prioritize their emails for reading consumption every time, they check their Inbox. And let’s be honest: promotional emails rarely ever reach PRIORITY status! Then they a smart system that detects and filters spam emails and it gets tweaked frequently, therefore making even legit email marketing harder. Given those reasons, am I implying that email marketing is dying? In spite of these factors, email marketing is still far from dying because it remains an essential Internet feature! But I want to bring those truths to your attention because you need to understand that there will always be new technology, and technology changes things. Plus, don’t forget the sheer volume of spams, ads, and other marketers also using email are competing for your prospect’s attention just like you. This means you need to employ different, more effective tactics to capture your prospect’s attention and get him to act on YOUR email instead of your competitors! This is imperative especially if you happen to operate in a niche that is highly competitive, and that it is not uncommon for people to subscribe to more than one mailing lists – examples like, but not limited to: Internet Marketing, business opportunities, Multi-Level Marketing, Forex, real estate, weight loss, dating and relationship. In other words, for almost every subscriber who joins your mailing list you can safely assume that they are also on your competitors mailing lists. And you know how buyers can be harsh and unforgiving when it comes to comparison shopping! Speaking of shopping, I want to get this huge popular misconception out of the way about ‘giving away free content’. Here are three main reasons why giving away free content to your subscribers is pure nonsense:

· First of all, it defeats your true purpose and goal of building a mailing list. The reason you build a list is to convert your prospects into buyers, and buyers into long time customers! This is essentially why you are building a list ripe to email market and do it for profits!

· Secondly, when you send a ‘content only’ email your subscribers don’t take action. I guarantee you that. Send them an email containing a 400-word article on tips and how to do something – with no links or call to action whatsoever – and you will never make a red cent. And worse, your subscribers are usually busy people they rarely have time to read a lengthy ‘content’ email!

· Most amateur email marketers’ reason that giving content is important because it will reduce their un-subscription rates while making their subscribers happy. This is B.S. again on two other counts. One, you can never please everyone. Two, when people realize they don’t have time to read or ‘consume’ your emails they will hit the un-subscribe link at the bottom of the email, thus you still get un-subscriptions! Don’t just take my word for it. Take a look at what leading Internet companies are doing in the area of email marketing. If you are on Amazon’s mailing list or bought something from them before, notice that Amazon.com always sends promotional email offers recommending other products related to your previous purchase? They do not give free tips. They do not give ‘how to’ and they certainly don’t give free content. They are in business of selling you more stuff, and that’s coming from an Internet company that 34 billion dollars a year in revenue! Groupon.com always send bulks of discount offers in their emails. But they never give free content. It’s always been promotional emails all the way! These are just prime examples. Subscribe to the list of any big companies and you will see they always send out email offers; not free content! That said, forget about trying to please everyone with ‘free content’ – the true purpose of email marketing is to simply convert as many prospects into buyers as possible. Period. And if you already have a list of buyers, your next goal is to get them to become lifetime customers, like what Amazon.com and Groupon.com are doing! Because contrary to the popular opinion you always hear on marketing forums (shame on them actually) and what a handful of your subscribers think you should be providing… it’s NEVER about giving away free content! But does that mean you should go all sales pitchy? Here’s the catch: ironically, you also cannot approach your subscribers with a ‘hard sell’ tone! (There’s a reason why spam filters were created, and what un[1]subscribe links are for!) If ‘in your face’ selling worked effectively, everyone would be resorting to spam methods. And even if you had gotten your subscriber’s permission to email them (hence opt-in), this does not give you the incentive to send ‘hard sell’ emails to them. This is the frustrating part a lot of email marketers are facing with immense confusion. On one side, you have amateur email marketers who think that giving away free content will build their credibility and trust (not really true). On the other side, you have annoying email marketers who try to hard sell in their emails, they are actually no different from spammers even with the benefit of their subscribers’ permission to email them! So, what’s the solution? You don’t sell in the email; you merely pre-sell! I will be covering more on this in the later section of the course. I want to get those parts about email marketing clear before I dive into my email marketing results for you to duplicate for yourself. Because no matter how subscribers you have – be it 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 – if your understanding on email marketing is poor or flawed you will get dismal results if any at all. The good news is that from my testing, I have learned that mass human behavior can be predicted to a degree. And therefore, you can count on mass behavior to a degree! For one of the many instances, you can rely on most people around the world to check their emails in between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM Eastern Time. Why so? You are about to discover from my testing shortly! When it comes to boosting your email open rates, you are competing for the attention of your readers. And even if the competition was minor, you still need to give the reader a compelling reason to open your email instead of deleting it with the rest of the unimportant emails. Email marketing, like everything else, is a numbers game. And there are ways to increase your email open rates. It can never be 100% - even personal emails get lost or deleted by mistake, and all the more with commercial emails. So the only variable you are in control is to boost your email open rates so as many subscribers in your list opens it as possible. Let’s start with the email subject line since it’s the ‘make or break’ impression. The rule of thumb is to keep the length of the subject line anywhere in between 25 and 45 characters long. Anything longer than 50 characters and you might experience a drop in your open rates! Because people use different email clients or programs, and depending on what they are using they can read only so many characters per line. Thus, the safest thing to do is keep it under 45 characters. Another open rate killer is CAPITALIZING ALL YOUR LETTERS. Online, it comes across as if it’s shouting and therefore it’s treated as rude and obnoxious. Second, it’s harder to read. For example, compare these two email subject lines: WHY I LOVE MINI LAUNCHES… and Why I love mini launches… Note that the capitalized subject line is harder to read than the other. Another danger is overusing the word “FREE”. Modern spam filters recognize FREE as one of the many common spam words and it’s easy to rake up negative scores that might result in your email getting filtered to spam or bulk folders. Even if not for that reason, you will foster a ‘freebie seeker’ relationship with your subscribers which is another problem you don’t want to have as a marketer. So, in the event you’re giving something away for free, I recommend using other synonyms like: zero cost, no cost, on the house, and no strings attached. SENDER NAME. Keep it below 20 to 25 characters. Also, don’t add special characters like *** to your sender’s name because contrary to what you may think, doing this actually kills your open rates too! You might think you would have stood out from the rest of the email senders but in actual fact, this is almost associated with other spammer activity that use special characters in their sender’s name. So, keep it simple, just use your name as it is. And if the email is sent from a company, your company name should be in 1 to 2 words (preferably just one, like “Amazon” and “Groupon”). When sending out the next email, make it a habit to put in some figures. Example: “Your $100K a year blueprint video”. You don’t have to add figures in every single email subject line you put out but it is preferable that you make it a common practice. Other examples include:

· 7 reasons why I love mini launches...

· Why it took 3 desperate man to kidnap a guru…

· How 3 words can get you any women you want… Also note that I fix a “…” that leaves the sentence incomplete. From my testing experience, I learned that emails that end with “…” produce higher open rates than those without! You can say this is like a ‘cliff hanger’ feature and if it builds enough curiosity your reader will open the email to follow through the story. I also found that the word BONUS gives a +17% open rate increase! This is another reason why I don’t like to use the word FREE. Example: “Inspiration DNA Videos + $1997 Mega Bonus” Implying a scarcity factor produced an extra +12% increase in my open rates compared to when I did not mention it at all in my subject line. Example: [20 left] Private Label Rights to 3 Bestselling Software… However, don’t overuse crazy characters. My definition of ‘crazy characters’ are anything like this: ▀ ▀ ▀ How to pick any profitable stock with 7 secret methods ▀ ▀ ▀ If you haven’t noticed, a lot of spam emails usually include crazy characters that cannot be read or interpreted. If you also over use characters like ! + - % it can also kill your email open rates. In your effort of trying to get attention, it will not only destroy your credibility you will get a lot of un-subscribes too! Also, don’t write your subject lines in an attempt to fool the spam filters by plotting a full stop in between the ‘spamworthy’ words like: Here is your f.ree gift $2,OOO a month gua.ran.teed This makes your email appear less professional. While it was acceptable practice a few years ago, I discovered this practice is considered phased out by today’s email marketing standards. The email subject line being one variable factor, the other is timing. The often-asked question is, “when is the best time in the day to send out an email?” While you cannot configure that with sequential autoresponders, you are in control as to when you want to send out time sensitive email blast to your mailing list. I share this conclusion with other email marketers who had tested and tracked their responses; sending your email between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM Eastern Time produces the highest open rates than any other given time. This is true if your subscribers are based mostly in North America or international. While Americans in general check their email before leaving the house for work (or start their day off in that fashion before work), Asians who live 9 to 12 hours ahead of Eastern Time have the opposite habit: they prefer to relax and check their emails after work. That said, this is not really a surprise why many product launches prefer to launch at this time. However, it’s also interesting to note that responses start to drop after 10:00 AM – that’s how much difference emailing one hour later can make! And if you mail out any time after 1:00 PM (which is past midnight for the other side of the world), you can lose 35% of the responses! By 3:00 PM Eastern Time you can lose about half or more of your responses than if you had mailed out earlier in the morning. So, if you are late for sending out a promotion email, it is advised that you postpone the email promotion to the following day, and email out promptly at 7:00 to 9:00 AM Eastern Time or risk getting bad email open rates and responses. And if you are doing a product launch, it is advisable to start it in the morning rather than in the afternoon Eastern Time. And what about the best days to send? From my mailings, I found that Tuesdays and Fridays produce the highest email open rates. While Tuesdays is probably not a surprise (since a lot of product launches favor Tuesdays), Fridays produce high email open rates as it’s almost the weekend and people in general are more relaxed after working the week. Again, this is true for mailing in the Internet Marketing niche as far as that is concerned. Mondays and Thursdays bring average email open rates, which are still okay. In fact, for some email marketers, they prefer not to mail out on Mondays because of the “Monday Blues” the general masses is having. Wednesdays, in my finding, produce the lowest response of all weekdays. What about Saturdays and Sundays? After one full year of testing the weekend, I have concluded that weekends bring the worst response of all days! It is as low as less than half of the average responses on weekdays even! So, depending on your email frequency, it is best to pick strictly weekdays and try to avoid Wednesdays where possible. As far as weekends are concerned, you’re probably better off being away from the computer as most people are during that time or work on something else. Even if you want to drop an email to your subscribers, this is the best time to get your subscribers to do some fun things like quizzes, surveys, read your latest blog post, and so on. After your subscriber opens your email, that’s half the battle won. The other half is in getting him or her to answer your call to action. And that’s the premise of email marketing: pre-selling! Remember: you don’t do the selling within the body of the email. That’s what sales letters are for. So, you don’t want to overlap the email’s responsibility with the sales job. Instead, the function of the email is to pre-sell. Get your subscriber to click on the link and follow through, and let the link to the sales letter or offer do all the selling! Selling an idea, a product, an offer, a service… all these take some effort to persuade your subscriber to agree with their wallets. So, it’s virtually not possible to do the entire selling within the email. I mean you can go ahead and try, but be ready for disappointing results. This also violates what I am about to say: You should keep your email body anywhere between 150 to 300 words maximum. Ideally, around 200 words is good. I keep all my emails in word format so I can see my word count in a glance. Even though you can virtually write nearly an infinite number of words in an email, the average Internet user’s attention span is really short. Juggling between being busy, surfing on impulse and other things begging for his attention, you have only a couple of minutes (or even less than that!) to say what you want to say. Also format your email to 55 characters per line. I use this free tool called NoteTab – you can download the freeware at http://notetab.com/ I use this to format my emails automatically and wrap them to 55 characters per line. As established earlier, different users use different email clients. For some, their email client recognizes up to 55-65 characters per line. And then there are those that read all the way from one end of the screen to the other! This makes it difficult for people to read especially if they are using a wide LCD screen. To aid in easy reading, break into paragraphs of 1 to 3 lines. Here’s an example of a non-formatted promotion email: Hey it's John here and I want to address the technical part of Internet Marketing today. I get questions all the time from new marketers, asking how to set up a site really quickly. Usually these are people trying to set up their personal blog, sell their own product, or promote an affiliate program, etc. If you're in a position where you need to learn the absolute FASTEST way to set up a site... Then this is for you: => [[LINK]] My friend and Wordpress expert, Chad Smith, is giving out 24 videos of pure how-to. This is ZERO cost - no salesy crap, no funny business, no fluff. Just straight up tutorials that will get you churning sites in no time even if you have zero knowledge right now. Go grab all and watch these videos in minutes here while they're on the house: => [[LINK]] You're going to like this! Warm Regards, John With huge blobs of text, this email is harder to read. But when you format it into 55 characters per line and break into easy-to-read paragraphs each containing no more than 1 to 3 lines, this becomes easier to digest and comfortable for the eyes: Hey it's John here and I want to address the technical part of Internet Marketing today. I get questions all the time from new marketers, asking how to set up a site really quickly. Usually these are people trying to set up their personal blog, sell their own product, or promote an affiliate program, etc. If you're in a position where you need to learn the absolute FASTEST way to set up a site... Then this is for you: => [[LINK]] My friend and Wordpress expert, Chad Smith, is giving out 24 videos of pure how-to. This is ZERO cost - no salesy crap, no funny business, no fluff. Just straight up tutorials that will get you churning sites in no time even if you have zero knowledge right now. Go grab all and watch these videos in minutes here while they're on the house: => [[LINK]] You're going to like this! Warm Regards, John Essentially, the goal of your email is to get your subscriber to click on the link to follow through your promotion email and go to the sales letter or site of offer. The Call to Action doesn’t have to be complicated; you merely need to draw attention to the link.

· Here Is Your Special Discount Link:

· Click Here Now for More Info:

· Reserve Your Spot Now:

· Get All the Juicy Details Here: It’s not groundbreaking but I found that putting the call-to-action line in uppercase for each starting word actually increases the click through by 6% to 7% more! To maximize the call to action (the click through rate for your links in your email) you should repeat the link 3 times throughout the email body in any of the following fashion: · BEGINNING, END and P.S. Or · BEGINNING, MIDDLE and END (if no P.S.) Do not include more than 3 URLs because some spam filters perceive emails with more than 3 links to be of spam material. Thus, if you add more than 3 URLs you are flirting with getting your emails filtered. This is why you shouldn’t attempt to stuff too many things, or more than one main message, into a single email. Dedicate one email to one main message. And that all 3 URLs go to the same link. TIP: cloaking your long link into the format of domain.com/recommends/something increases your CTR by +19%! Some marketers reported phenomenally higher results than that. And if you want to keep your URL shorter, you can replace “recommend” with “likes”. I use this script called Power Link Generator by Mike Filsaime, although you can try using a free service at http://ViralURL.com/ too. However, you should avoid using free link redirect services like TinyURL and Bit.ly for your email marketing – they are actually CTR killers from my testing and my business friends who do email marketing too! (As of now, emails including bit.ly links risk getting into spam folders for Gmail and Hotmail users. Whether this will be rectified or not remains to be seen.) Also, you won’t be able to track your click throughs from most of these free redirect services (except maybe if you upgraded your account). Nothing beats having your own domain and link redirect. Surprisingly, when I talked to other email marketers, they don’t have any or less than 6 emails preloaded into their sequential autoresponder, or if they do it goes back to the same common mistake I pointed out at the start of this course, “giving away free content only”. While there’s nothing wrong with giving away free content – you should do it – but only once in a while. Or else you will risk converting your subscribers into a list of freebie seekers who expect something for nothing. And when you give away free content, it should be with the intention of proving your worth as an expert. Now the average marketer would tell you to load in 7 follow-up emails into your autoresponder. You know what I say to that? Make it 14. 21. The more the better. Here’s why: nowadays 7 emails won’t cut it. In the world of advertising, the more repetition there is to an ad the exposure will be enhanced further. Also, when you load in 14 emails instead of 7 you variably double your sales closing! Of course, there is no ultimate figure for this and therefore the more emails you pre-load into your sequential autoresponder, the better it is for you. AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR SEQUENTIAL EMAILS QUEUED UP IN GETRESPONSE.COM As for interval, you should set the email message to go out on a daily basis for each offer; and before you introduce the next different offer you can automate to send it 3 days later. As email marketing is competitive these days, you should commit minimum 2 emails to a single offer. If the offer is high ticket i.e., priced $297 and above, you should indefinitely assign more follow-up emails for it. This is not a cast-in-stone kind of rule, but it is highly recommended that your offers are strictly your own products and not products you are promoting as an affiliate. Because you are going to put these messages into your sequential autoresponder, it’s meant to be a set-and-forget campaign. And that’s precisely where the problem can happen: you have absolutely no control over the vendors you’re promoting for as an affiliate. They can take down the page. They can change the offer. They can change the price. Heck, they can even go out of business! And by the time your subscriber gets that email on Day N, he clicks on the link and alas… where did the page go? This can also be a credibility damager. Again, this is not necessarily a hard and fast rule. You can choose to promote products as an affiliate if you don’t have your own product or many of it just yet. However, you should work towards having more and more of your own products. For another good reason, you can be earning 100% of the sales instantly into your account rather than wait 30 days for 50% commissions. And with sequential autoresponder email campaigns like this kicking in like clockwork, every time you refer a new subscriber to your mailing list, they will never miss out your offers; this is how you prolong the lifespan of every product or offer you create even if they were made years ago! While offer creation is beyond the scope of topic, I discovered that kick starting your sequential autoresponder email campaigns with low ticket offers priced under $10 can generate volume sales and interest; this is easily a buyers list builder strategy you can adopt. You can call it a “Subscriber Special Day” or anything along those lines once the visitor becomes a new subscriber of your list anytime. It is wise to keep high ticket offers (priced $497 and above) sometime later into the sequential autoresponder time line and not to be offered out immediately, at least not in the first 7 days. And if you can build a monthly membership site or a continuity program of some kind, this is the fastest way to generate recurring buyer subscription for yourself. Price it low i.e., $20 a month and below and you can easily get volume members paying you monthly! And what do you email about when you have nothing to sell? Even though you are in business of making money, it doesn’t have to be selling or endorsements all the way. A mix of other things like:

· Sending your subscribers to read, comment and share your latest blog post

· To join you on Facebook and LIKE your Fan Page

· Or even do a subscribers, survey! All these activities can cultivate a positive relationship and trust between you and your subscribers. The most important thing, as most veteran email marketers say, is to give your subscribers a CALL TO ACTION of some kind… any kind! As we are about to draw to a near end of this course, I just want to remind you that all the results you’ve seen published here are based on my own testing to my email list. It is by no means a 100% conclusive truth, because as you already know the Internet changes often with technology. And when many people know the same strategy or tactics and employ them en masse, it is guaranteed to be less effective over time. But a few things and rules about email marketing will never change: it has always been about building trust and credibility, when you’re pre-selling and when you’re not. Always keep your email offers relevant – the email message consistent with the subject line. I personally know of some dodgy email marketers who will do anything to get desperate attention of their subscribers, and even risk having their reputation smeared that way. The good news is, you don’t have to resort to desperate tactics like that. I hope you found this course useful and save you plenty of time from doing your own guesswork. But keep your email campaigns innovative as always! Personally, I keep my own swipe email folder. What I do is that since I am already subscribed to other marketers mailing list, I save email messages that I found compelling into my own special swipe file folder for future use and reference. I advise you to do the same so you can stay ahead in the game!