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Email Subscribers Value Information Especially Insider Information

March 21, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Subscribers Value Information

I recently watched a television program about an upmarket London department store and the way sales staff treated their highest spending clients. Learn how email subscribers value information.

The part that stood out for me was that the top sales people had their own lists of clients and they would contact them whenever something new came into the shop.

Now the point is that they did not contact just when any old stock item was updated, but when something they knew their clients would like came into the store.

The upshot was that the customers loved to be “in the know” with the very latest information and many of them could not wait to come into the store and buy the items which were recommended to them.

This can work brilliantly with your email marketing campaigns too.

For the very best chance of getting the best results you will need to:

know exactly what your subscribers want to know
have timely, up to date information that your subscribers value
be seen as authoritative and, above all, trusted by your subscribers and
have goods or services that you can recommend and sell to your list.

Tell people what’s new, what they will love and where they can get it and use your RocketResponder account to do just that.

A Quick Example Of A Reconfirm Email

March 19, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Example Of A Reconfirm Email

We have already seen why it might be a good idea to give your RocketResponder list an opportunity to unsubscribe from your list from time to time. Let us now take a look at an example of a reconfirm email.

Examples of where this may be useful include:

if you change the way you want to communicate with your list – eg from mainly blog updates to marketing-type emails
if you have just imported a list from elsewhere
if your list is very old
if you have not really communicated with your list for a long period of time

Just turning up in their inbox in these circumstances could lead to a lot of unsubscribes and, even worse, spam complaints.

The unsubscribes are more or a less a given, they will happen, so by sending out an email giving your subscribers an option of what action to take means you can manage the unsubscribes better and hopefully totally avoid the spam complaints.

So this is what you might say. I will use the example where I have not communicated with the list for a long time and where I want to send different types of email than before:

Hi [firstname],

It is [name] here from [company or website] and I will totally understand if you have totally forgotten who I am.

However you did sign up to receive emails from me and I am going to start sending them at long last.

I used to just email you when I updated my blog, something I have badly neglected in recent months, but now I want to include sending some marketing tips and suggestions I think you would find really useful.

However I can understand that you might not want any more emails at all so if you click the big “unsubscribe” link below then you will be immediately removed from this list.

If you want to stay then I look forward to us getting to know each other better in the weeks and months ahead.”

You can see that it is short and to the point.

If you do decide to do this then keep your email short also but use your own wording so that it is personal and reflects your writing style and personality.

You Must Know What Your Audience Wants

March 17, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

Know What Your Audience Wants

I used to work on a busy newsdesk at a national newspaper and it is no exaggeration to say that many hundreds, of not thousands of emails would come in every day. You must know what your audience wants or you won’t get them to take the correct action.

It was a full time job in itself just reading through all the information which came through the newsroom each day to find ones we would want to follow up for publication.

The fact is that only a tiny percentage of the information which poured into the newsroom ever got to come out of the other side as an article in the next day’s publication – the rest was just deleted.

But at least everything got read before it got deleted right? Wrong.

There were not enough hours in the day to read everything so this is what would typically happen:

not a look in – some people or organizations who had gained a reputation of sending absolute rubbish would have their emails immediately deleted – unread.
you’ve got to be joking – some emails were just too long and boring to read and as a result, they did not get read at all. If the email went on for six or seven pages and looked boring then it would not even get read. Yes we may have missed some good stories by ignoring this source of content but that is what happened.
you have ten seconds starting from now – If I didn’t know who an email was from then I would look at it…for all of about ten seconds (or less) Basically if the first paragraph didn’t grab my attention then I stopped reading and moved on to the next one.
I know you and I like you – Some people sent in emails that were timely, relevant, interesting and right up our street. These were always given the most attention as they were most likely to contain material we could use as content for the next day’s paper.
Please stop annoying me – At the opposite end of the spectrum were emails from PR companies which were nothing short of marketing drivel. You could judge the levels of desperation by the amount of times they would send the same email and follow them up with maddening phone calls.

You don’t have to work for a newspaper to learn lessons from these examples because they can apply to anyone who sends an email to anyone ever.

Basically know what your audience wants and send emails that will actually want to read. You won’t get it right all the time but if around eight out of ten of your emails are on target then you should be doing very well indeed.

Help Yourself Avoid The Email Spam Trap

March 14, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin 1 Comment

Email spam tips

Email spam tips: Last time we looked at what email spam actually is but today it is time to look at how you can help yourself unwittingly be labeled as a potential spammer.

You may get this unwanted tag if you decide to include information at the end of your emails about why your email is NOT spam.

There is no reason in the world to do this because it only serves to make you look like a spammer.

RocketResponder’s Tim Linden wrote about this on his own blog recently and this is what he had to say…

One of our customers is having problems with deliverability and so I was looking through his account for reasons for this.

His from email address was a custom domain, valid email address, even had SPF records to allow RocketResponder to send from that address (which isn’t necessary the way we send them, but the fact he did it was above most normal customers).

I was really puzzled because the emails he was sending looked more “newslettery” than “spammy” too. Until I got to the bottom of the email.

Every email had at the bottom one of those really long 3 paragraph warnings that most spammers use, where they say they aren’t spamming they have the right to spam, etc. But on top of this one it said it was against the law to report him as spam. Seriously?

Now I don’t know about you but most of the spam I get has one of these warning books at the bottom. So it became very clear he was getting himself filtered for looking like a spammer. But on top of that I know many people would see that “law” as an invitation to prove him wrong.

When it comes to email make it very easy to unsubscribe, and don’t talk about it. That’s it. I don’t see any big time companies putting huge things in there, no they want you focused on the content. So quit reminding them about unsubscribing. Make it easy so if they want to they can, but don’t make them want to more!

So What Exactly Is Email Spam?

March 12, 2014March 23, 2015 Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

What Exactly Is Email Spam

Anyone who sends email for business should want to avoid spam at all costs so what exactly is email spam?

It is perhaps the one thing about business to business emails that annoys people more than anything else.

But just what is email spam and how can you avoid sending it out by mistake?

Spam can actually mean different things to different people.

For example this is how Wikipedia defines email spam:

Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email, is a subset of electronic spam involving nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Clicking on links in spam email may send users to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware.”

That is not necessarily true, or more accurately, not always true in every instance.

For example if you have a list of people then is is perfectly acceptable to send the entire list an identical message with only perhaps the greeting changed.

The key point from the above definition is the word “unsolicited” and it makes all the difference.

If someone signs up to your list then they want to (or at least accept that they will) receive emails from you so that is not spam.

But sending out exactly the same email to a group of people who never agreed to receive email from you is spam. This could happen, for example, if you bought a list of email addresses.

Also don’t be fooled into thinking that just because someone is on your list that you are free to email them about anything you choose.

Say you have a blog and you got people to sign up for “regular updates” but they end up getting ten marketing emails for each blog update then that would almost certainly be considered by many to be spam.

Some other examples of spam could include:

A newsletter sent out to a list of people whose details you obtained from attending a conference 18 months ago.
A promotional offer you are sending out to a list of email addresses you bought from someone else. Clearly you don’t know who these people are, they have no relationship with you and might reasonably be expected not to want to receive marketing emails from you.
Marketing emails you send to people whose emails you obtained in the normal course of doing business with you but who were never asked whether they wanted to receive such emails from you in the first place.