The Secrets to Buying E-mail Lists Versus Renting
Rent an e-mail list or buy it?Do you understaand the advantages and dis-advantages?
Which is a better list source:
A good strategy, is to go to prospective partners and tell them exactly what you’re looking for in terms of how many leads you’d like to generate and how much you’re willing to pay to acquire a single customer or lead.
If your numbers are reasonable, the vendor may agree to get paid when you meet those target goals.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
5 Critical Elements to Testing E-mail Frequency
A/B testing is a great way to test graphic placement or call to action. 
But what if you want to test e-mail frequency and timing?
With segmented testing, you divide your list into separate segments. Everyone in a group will stay in that segment or treatment throughout the life of the test.
One of the best uses for segment testing is in the product or service renewal process. Will a customer renew if he or she is contacted two weeks before the service runs out? How about two weeks after? How many e-mails should you send before the actual expiration date?
Plan your test. Are you testing timing, frequency, or both? Decide if you’re testing the entire list or if it’s just going to be people who are expiring in the next 60 days.
Remove test subjects from your general list.
If you’re testing frequency, it’s very important that no one else in the company contacts anyone in a stream for the duration of your test cycle.
Reach out to salespeople, customer service teams and telemarketers to let them know they need to keep their hands off those in your test segments.
Make sure there’s enough differentiation in the segments. If you’re testing duration, it’s not enough of a statistical difference to send one stream e-mails that are two days apart and another segment e-mails that are three days apart.
You need to really vary the timing by at least every few days. Sometimes people don’t open e-mails right away, You need to account for that.
See the test through to the end
See the test through to the end. It might be tempting to stop a test after noticing that one segment is obviously doing better than the others, but don’t.
That’s not to say that on day 45 of a 60-day test you can’t scale the test to the rest of the list—the addresses that aren’t in any segments. They can start benefiting right away from what you’ve learned.
Examine your results.
Marketers looking for additional conversions will be checking sales metrics, of course, but it’s also worth looking at other e-mail criteria to see if your tests served other purposes as well.
Were people more likely to open messages that came more frequently? Did your spam complaints increase at any point?
When you’re testing e-mail frequency, you’re going to be carefully watching spam complaints and pulling the plug on any tests that are increasing both spam complains and opt-outs.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options.
Follow-up E-mail to Website Visitors
Experian Marketing Services reported…
that marketers that sent an e-mail to website visitors who had abandoned shopping carts had 20 times the transactions rates per revenue compared to standard bulk mailings.
The importance of follow up
This same report also mentioned that marketers saw double the open rates and quadruple the click-trough rates of most other e-mail campaigns. Testing these findings in your own e-mail Website campaigns will prove the effectiveness.
Not following up with these hot and recent website visitors is like leaving money on the table or not completing the sales cycle.
The lesson from this is target people when they are ready to buy and they’re more likely to actually do so.
Strategy of most life cycle marketing
By targeting your e-mail messages based on where the recipient is in the sales cycle, you should see bigger responses and more satisfied customers and more retention and repurchases over the long run.
Business to business marketers have a good hold on acquisition but as the length of the sales cycle grows more people become involved in the buying decision.
Because of the poor economy many business to business marketers have several people involved in the buying decision and because of this they need to fine tune their efforts.
Segmenting lists more carefully
in the beginning, sort out prospects to see which group to separate them into. Asking prospect each time represents a touch by inserting a poll into the message.
Prospects in the consideration stage need more nurturing and marketers need more metrics so the message can be quickly changed should the prospects actions change.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List.
E-mails That Generate Leads
Prospect List Segmentation…
with relevant real-time messages is the best conversion solution.
The recession has caused many marketers over 70% according to Forrester research to spend their marketing dollars on retention efforts.
Acquisition by email is much more difficult in this current recession. Still when executed correctly email marketing can become a strong tool for lead generation.
If you handle e-mail lead generation as you would in live in person sales calls it would be more relevant to the customers needs.
You need to discover ways to warm your prospects up by creating narrow segments or microtargeting which enable you to reach out to customers and better match where they are in the buying cycle.
The secret to lead generation is…
To be successful at lead generation you need to develop dynamically generated content by bringing in either your Website or profile data that you collected in your customer relationship database.
Sending content..
that matches someones profile very closely. You can examine this is little further when you purchase a list or rent space on another persons website.
If you have a hair styling business and your reaching out to a list where someone has signed up for 20% off on their next perm by opting in to your Website newsletter. Your going to get better results than if you bought a list of residents within 10 miles of your beauty salon. The reason is they never expressed any need for a perm or opt-in for a relevant newsletter.
The hard sell
Resorting to the hard sell is a big mistake without creating a relationship first, this is a much slower process but it can prove to be much more effective over the long run.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List.
Email Marketing Lists is Preference in Down Economy
E-mail marketing is gaining attention..
From direct marketers around the globe for it’s marketing value chain as companies seek to energize their approach and tap this often criticized channel to drive customer value while simultaneously lowering overall
marketing costs.
Driven in part by the recent economic downturn, firms are in a bind to leverage this very low cost channel, while rising above the tide of clutter and customer’s poor perceptions that they helped form with years of do not spam policies and mass blast image.
Like direct mail marketing
E-mail is now shaped by terms like A/B testing, multivariate testing, and rules engines, to name just a few.
Gone are the days of campaign management, list operations and more mundane aspects of the customer acquisition process.
E-mail service providers are leaving out the most critical element of relevancy:
Customer-based analytics.
Direct marketers are bundling capabilities…
To test different calls to action, creative elements, key message points and other components of e-mail that will drive response.
However, while these capabilities may be used to understand the click-through rate of one creative against another, or even across several variables through testing, they often treat the customer base as a whole.
With an estimated $200 billion of direct marketing spending it is that understanding a customer’s unique perspective, relationship status, and share of wallet are all critical factors in their decision to respond or open an e-mail.
Adoption of these long standing, one-to-one marketing principles are missing in many of the current leading email solutions or at best are difficult to manage or integrate.
Companies looking to drive e-mail relevance need to address several critical questions when considering outside vendors.
At what level can e-mail be
differentiated? When I provide unique offers/emails with varied content, how do I as a marketer get a handle on the distribution of these offers across my customer base? How do I see the offer mix before sending out company initiated e-mails?
In other words, if relevance and results are the primary objective, ensure that the lessons of traditional one-to-one marketers are at least embedded in the solutions of the future. If not, you may find that another significant investment and transition is just around the corner.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List.
Developing Your E-mail Campaign
….Marketers typically focus on two areas: open rates and
conversions.
It’s a reality that clever subject lines often lead to high open rates.
“Caution do not Read This E-mail,” “Did you know that your employer is reading this e-mail” are great examples of this kind of subject line.
These? And many of other subject lines like them?
Will drive up your open rates. That’s good news, right? So, what’s the problem?
There are a few problems.
First, is the pressure it puts on the marketer to create an equally clever and amusing campaign. A clever subject line that leads to a dull e-mail will fall flat.
Moreover, a clever subject line that leads to a hard-sell e-mail raises complaints.
What about clever e-mail campaigns? Do they perform well?
Clever subject lines and e-mail campaigns work best for borderline
spammers who are trying to entice people with whom they have either questionable or no relationships to open the e-mail.
But for CRM marketers, those who are deploying campaigns to their opt-in lists, the results driven by clever campaigns are typically disappointing and can increase both unsubscribes and complaints.
The main reason for their failure..
Is that e-mail campaigns need to have one very clear, very solid call to action, one that logically follows your business model.
Don’t bother trying to be clever since this can often detrack your proposition.
So if clever isn’t the answer, let’s define great.
Clarity and sense of purpose are what make a great subject line and great e-mail.
The call to action..
In a great e-mail campaign is clear after one second of viewing, and it is an expected next step after reading the subject line.
Subject line: Early Bird Special on New Spring Arrivals E-mail message: Spring arrivals are now in stock.
As an early bird subscriber, you get the best selection and free shipping
when you order this week. Link: Takes you directly to the spring arrival page (with a personalized welcome to the early bird subscriber, when possible)
This is a clear subject line that is followed through in the e-mail. It is followed by a single message that is not cluttered with secondary offers or distracting images.
It respects the subscribers’ time by letting them know immediately
the promise the marketer is making to them, and step by step it follows up on the promise.
Less is more in this case, and it is the most effective way to deploy your e-mail strategy. Your customers will not get bored with your subject lines; in fact, they will appreciate your clarity and take actions when appropriate, exactly as you plan.
You are showing your subscriber that you know exactly what you are doing and take your subscribers seriously; that, in other words, you don’t have to be clever to win their business!
Gimmicks can only get you so far.
Building solid relationships through transparency, make-a-promise/keep-a-promise behavior, and outstanding customer support are the best ways to create, deploy and return ROI on your next e-mail campaign.
To create a great e-mail campaign, eliminate the noise and get to the point. Your customers and your bottom line will both react positively.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
DYMO Label Writer Twin Turbo The perfect printer for any small business! See why people rave about this direct mail marketing printer and why you can’t survive without it!
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List.
Better E-mail Marketing Campaigns
Here are some tips to help your e-mail marketing
Campaigns deliver the best results. When using E-mail third party service providers like (Aweber or iContact).
Be creative.
Many E-mail service providers offer lots of templates for you to choose from. Using templates as an e-mail marketer can make your life easier, but is that the best way to get results?
Test a variety of e-mail templates to see which works best for your niche and market.
Discover what your unique selling proposition is..
Finding out what is unique and how you are different from the competition.
Generic does not work for most companies, since today lowest price will drive sales unless you can prove to your customers that you are unique.
Finding a template that matches your company’s look and feel could be challenging.
Find a design that helps make your messages distinctive.
Writing well is important, but what about the actual message? What you say is more important than how the message is delivered.
Overlooked by most email service providers is the requirement that in order for messages to be read, there has to be something compelling to read.
Studies show that people scan the content in e-mails looking for items they like.
Professional writers are trained and experienced in creating interesting communications that catch the reader’s attention within a concise and readable format.
Outsourcing your writing
To someone more capable would free more time for you to focus on more important things.
But the goal of marketing is to create top-of-mind awareness through persistence and consistency.
Sending single, one-off messages rarely works; further, this takes time and Look at your metrics carefully.
Many email service providers want to bolster their results by fiddling with their statistics to make results seem better than they really are.
The most common practice is how they measure opens, clicks and opt-outs. ESPs typically present “open” statistics as a percentage of the total e-mail sent, which is the way it should be.
However, click-through rates are often presented as a percentage of opens, not a percentage of all e-mails broadcast.
For opt-out rates, it’s often back to the larger total of e-mails sent.
Make sure to obtain metrics that are meaningful and useful. Otherwise, you’ll get a false impression of the effectiveness of an e-mail campaign.
Find the best e-mail service provider fit for your particular niche e-mail service provider . Competition in the ESP space is intense, and there are a lot of choices.
Before selecting an ESP, make a list of your e-mail marketing requirements.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!>
Building Your “E-mail List” With Online Surveys?
This is a great way to build your list….
and qualify potential prospects for cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.
Your survey could be used on your own website, as well as on external
websites or blogs.
1. It’s important to pick a question or topic that is timely, something that is in current events and that most relevant to your target market … perhaps even slightly controversial. Now, develop your headline.
The headline
Should provoke thought and prompt response.
2. Think of your answer choices. You can certainly do a simple yes/no question, diversify options that makes the prospect think and involves them in the question.
It’s also helpful to include an “other comments” box. You’ll be surprised at how many people want to give you their two cents—this element really makes the poll participatory.
3. Make sure you let prospects know that you will not sell or rent their e-mail names. Can-spam laws and you want to clarify that their e-mail addresses will not be compromised.
You should also advise prospects that…
by taking the poll, they will be opted in to your free coupons or offers which they can opt out of at any time, and that they will be notified via e-mail of the poll results.
Offer them a free download or e-book…
Target market niche, bonus report or article—with relevant
subject matter related to the poll—as a token of appreciation for taking the poll.
Follow-up with some loyalty e-mails
4. think of a good picture or illustration that drives traffic and complements your headline. Something visually powerful.
5. Have a clear call to action in your creative, for example “take action now.” Get people excited about the poll they are about to take. Your creative can be a dedicated e-mail.
Some formats may work better than others, so test them all in low-cost platforms like targeted blogs
6. Make sure your poll runs on websites/blogs that fit the subject matter of the poll. Make everything relevant.
Finally, make sure you have a good reporting system to capture the e-mails and segment by promotional effort and website where the ad appeared (for analysis).
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrpreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!>
How To Improve E-mail Using Search
Whether it’s organic search or Google AdWords
Pay for search marketing can help e-mailers reach out to potential customers beyond their current opt-in lists. It can also help establish your unique selling proposition to your niche and build credibility and trust with your target audience.
Combining e-mail marketing efforts with search is likely to raise ROI for both programs. The following are the steps in accomplishing this
Take advantage of opportunities to move traffic
With capture boxes and allow them to opt-in to your newsletters, coupons or special offers or an exclusive white paper for download that you’re offering via e-mail, these all would be appropriate pages toward which to target your search traffic.
By delivering valuable content driven information to your targeted audience, you’re creating a positive experience with your product and your ongoing communications.
Purchasing ads on search engines can be effective but expensive a much more reasonable alternative is organic search with well written articles including backlinls to your product pages, bases on keyword research.
Ensure that you create a campaign that targets potential visitors in the research portion of their experience, when they’re in the process of gathering the information they need.
Convert search click and conversion rates into e-mail marketing dollars.
If you’ve ever taken a look at your Web site analytics, you might be amazed to see the variety of topics, keywords and phrases people use when searching to find your site.
And it’s worth skimming past the top keywords that always show up to take a closer look at some of the long-tail keyword phrases that may have lower search volumes but are still gaining ground. look for the niche markets with lower search volumes.
Taking a cue from search, note which e-mail calls to action lead to higher levels of interest and greater average time on site, in addition to which offers or links created the greatest number of conversions.
Track and segment e-mail lists.
Smart e-mail marketers understand just how powerful list segmentation can be, especially when it comes to lists created as the result of specific search ad groups. Segmented lists allow you to fine-tune your campaigns and ads to speak directly to the needs, wants and preferences of your audience.
Savvy marketers build campaign and ad group data into both their e-mail and search marketing offers so that it is easy to identify repeat customers who convert again.
Understanding which e-mail campaigns and search ads lead to repeat business will give you the valuable information you need to groom more customers to visit, and convert, again and again.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrpreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists
How to Capture Responses from Your E-mail List Campaign
Tracking responses is everything!
Direct Marketing benefits from being the most measurable of all marketing functions.
Unlike other marketing mechanisms the direct marketer can place a dollar value to the company on the results of his or her spending.
There are really three things that need to be accomplished here:
You need to be able to measure how many people respond to your campaign
- Which list they come from, and
- How each respondent ranks in terms of the likelihood of becoming a sales lead.
- Following the campaign you will also want to measure your cost per response, cost per lead, and how many leads turned into sales.
Tracking Mechanisms
The mechanisms for tracking responses are very similar for email and direct mail. Ideally, a direct marketing piece will offer multiple methods for a recipient to respond, each of which can be tracked by the direct marketer.
Key Coding
Key coding is a direct mail mechanism for tracking segments of a mailing.
It consists of numbers or characters that you choose to represent each segment of your campaign. Each record of the list is than marked with the Direct Mail Email
Key Coding Promotion Codes
URL with Tracking ID URL with Tracking ID Web Site Registration Web Site Registration 800 Telephone Number 800 Telephone Number
The URL with tracking ID enables you to count how many web site visits from each list and/or creative piece occur as a result of the campaign.
The URL is the web site address for the landing or registration page, created specifically for the campaign, that recipients are invited to visit.
The tracking ID is an extra set of characters at the end of the URL which can be captured in order to identify which list the recipient came from and/orwhich creative piece the recipient received. Each visit (click-through) to the landing page can be counted along with how many click-throughs are associated with each tracking ID.
Web Site Registration
Whereas the URL with Tracking ID allows you to count the number of visits or click-throughs, web site registration lets you know who visited your web site, how to contact them, and, depending upon the questions you ask, how they rank as prospects for your product or service.
This is a crucial part of measuring the success of the campaign and maximizing the chances that a response will eventually lead to a sale.
Until next time, here is to your continued success!
.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrpreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Business Information from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists
FREE eBook “Boost Sales With Lists”
