Introduction Welcome

Welcome to Effective Email Marketing Strategies!
This course is designed to give you tips and advice for growing your business or
organization with email marketing.
This course begins by showing you how to get your email marketing program off
the ground and how to build your email list while complying with regulations and
consumer preferences.
Then I’ll show you which types of email content and designs are most
effective, and I’ll give you tips for coming up with good content and making
your content more valuable.
I’ll also show you how to adapt your emails for mobile devices, how to combine
emails with social media, and how to automate your emails to save time.
Tracking your emails and avoiding bounces, spam filters, and blocked email is
also important, so I’ll show you the best practices for getting more email
delivered, opened, and read.
All of this and more is just a few clicks away, so let’s get started with
Effective Email Marketing Strategies.

1. Email Marketing Basics Using email in your marketing mix

You don’t have to be in business for very long to realize that you need to
communicate with lots of people to attract customers.
Of course, your business also needs to make sure that your marketing
communications bring in revenue over and above the cost of those communications.
Email is a great solution for building customer relationships
affordably, because it’s a familiar communication standard and because
it’s so cost effective.
The fact that email is a cheap way to communicate isn’t the main reason to use email however.
Email also has a very high Return On Investment or ROI.
In other words, an effective email marketing strategy can generate a lot of
sales for a relatively small investment of time and money.
In order to get the highest possible return on your email marketing investments,
you first need to understand where to use email in your overall marketing plans.
The first thing to understand is the fact that sending email to total strangers
does not work. You’re more likely to get spam complaints than interest from
prospective customers unless you send to a permission-based email list.
Now, I show you how to build a permission- based email list in another section of this course.
Instead of spamming people, use email to help convert current prospects into
customers and current customers into loyal customers.
Use email to educate people about the features and benefits of your products
or services, differentiate your business from your competition, and to ask for the sale.
You can also use email to help increase customer loyalty and referrals by
sending emails that strengthen your customer relationships.
Send them thank you emails, holiday greetings, and offer special privileges to
make your customers feel like they’re appreciated.
As you watch the rest of this course remember that all the tips and ideas I
share can be adapted to your specific type of business or organization,
because no matter what kind of business or organization you have, keeping your
customer relationships at the center of your strategy will put you on the road
to email marketing success.

Getting the job done

You’ll need at least two technologies to execute your email marketing strategy:
an authoring technology to create the content of your emails in HTML and a
delivery technology that has the ability to deliver and track emails sent to
a large email list.
In order to do literally everything on your own, you’re going to need to own
your own email server.
You’ll need extensive programming knowledge and database skills.
I don’t recommend doing absolutely everything in-house, even for a large company
with lots of technical resources.
Instead use an email marketing provider or EMP to help you run your strategy.
An EMP is a company that offers a suite of tools to help you create, send, and
track your own marketing emails.
Most EMPs allow you to create emails without the need to know any HTML or the
programming languages.
And you won’t need to set up and manage your own email servers and delivery
gateways, because EMP is sending email from their servers on your behalf.
Your customers will never know the difference and you’ll probably get
better delivery rates too.
EMPs give you tracking reports and database tools to manage your email lists and
some EMPs even provide support and educational resources to help you gain
expertise in marketing and the use of the EMP’s tools.
Enterprise-level EMPs give you access to advanced features, such as
point-of-sale integration, email automation, advanced segmentation, and
behavioral targeting.
Remember that one of the most important assets of your email marketing strategy
is your email database.
Make sure you use a company that secures your email database properly and
protects the privacy of your email list subscribers.
In the next section of the course, I show you how to protect your database in
another way: by avoiding unsubscribes and spam complaints.

Becoming an appreciated email sender

There are laws against unsolicited email or spam because people hate it.
Since hate is not a buying emotion and the government makes the rules, here’s
what you need to know to become an appreciated email sender.
Let’s start with the law.
Now, what I’m about to say is not legal advice in any way, shape, or form.
It’s just a summary of possible issues.
Use a licensed attorney to make sure you follow the law when it comes to email marketing.
And the main law governing commercial email is known as the CAN-SPAM Act.
You should read and comply with all parts of the CAN-SPAM Act, but here are
the major guidelines.
First and foremost, you need a relationship of affirmative consent between your
business and anyone to whom you send a marketing email.
You also need to provide a simple and free way for your subscribers to opt out
of receiving future emails.
The industry standard is one or two clicks to unsubscribe.
Also, make sure the information in your email is true and accurate.
You are not allowed to fake your from line, use misleading subject lines, or
send emails from a false email address.
Finally, make sure you include your physical business address in every email.
A post office box is okay.
Keeping your emails legally compliant will keep you out of trouble with the
government, but your job as an email marketer isn’t to make the government
happy; your emails need to impress prospects and customers.
Here are three tips to make sure your email marketing is well-received and
appreciated by your subscribers.
First, ask for explicit permission before sending marketing emails.
I talk about permission and building a permission-based email list in the next
section of the course.
Second, ask your subscribers to share their preferences when they join your
email list and send only the information your subscribers request.
Third, make sure that you send emails with the proper frequency and relevance.
In general, people will tolerate almost any email frequency as long as your
email content is valuable and relevant.
For example, weather is a daily occurrence, so weather information is likely to
be appreciated on a daily frequency.
If you send a daily email asking people to buy something however, you’d better
be pretty sure that your subscribers are interested in daily deals.
Now that you have a basic understanding of becoming an appreciated email
sender, let’s leverage your knowledge by moving to our next topic, building an email list.

1. Building an Email List Asking for permission

Email marketing without permission can spell disaster for your marketing emails.
You can’t legally send emails to total strangers and even if you could, you
wouldn’t make very many people happy by sending them emails they didn’t ask for.
Therefore, an email list without permission isn’t very valuable.
However, when an email list includes the email addresses of prospects and
customers who have explicitly asked your business to send them emails to stay
informed, you have a very valuable asset for your marketing strategy.
In this part of the course I am going to show you how to include permission in
your email marketing plans so that your email list is full of people who want to
receive your emails.
The first step in the process of building a permission-based email list is
deciding on a permission level.
Now, there are three basic types of permission.
The lowest permission level is implied permission.
For example, when someone hands you a business card and says let’s stay in
touch, you could assume that means sending a few emails.
But be extra careful with implied permission, because people may be unpleasantly
surprised if you start sending marketing emails without first confirming the
content and the frequency of those emails.
It’s a good idea in the case of implied permission to send an email confirming
your decision to add someone to your email list and include a link for opting
out if you’re new implied subscriber doesn’t want to be on your marketing email list.
The second permission level is explicit permission.
For example, when someone fills out an online form to join your email list,
that person has given you explicit permission to send the emails your email
sign-up form specifies.
Explicit permission is the industry standard for email marketing and the
recommended level of permission for most email marketing providers.
The third permission level is confirmed permission, also known as double opt-in.
Confirmed permission works like this: when someone explicitly opts in to your
email list, you send an email asking the new subscriber to confirm their
decision to join the list.
Usually this happens by clicking a link or replying to the confirmation email
with a specific message.
Confirmed permission ensures that your email list subscribers are highly
interested in receiving your emails and confirming permission generally improves
your delivery rates too.
Now let’s go over a few forms of permission that actually have the potential
to get you in trouble.
You should avoid building your email list based on someone else’s permission.
For example, don’t send marketing emails to people on email lists belonging to
your vendors, your colleagues, your partners, or trade organizations.
If you want to reach people on other email lists, ask the owner of the list
to send the emails to their list on your behalf and ask them to explicitly
opt in to your email list.
Some email lists are sold or leased out by list brokers and permission-based
quality is very important if you decide to use a broker to send your emails.
If you decide to use a list broker anyway, make sure the list broker you use is
completely compliant with all laws and industry best practices.
Since your email list is valuable, protect it like an asset.
Don’t share your email list with anyone and don’t violate your permission
standards by sending emails your subscribers didn’t sign up for.
In the next section of the course I show you how to collect email addresses from
people so that you can build a list with quality and quantity in mind.

Collecting information

In this section of the course I show you how to collect email addresses to
build your email list.
If you haven’t already, make sure you first view the previous section on
permission before watching the rest of this section.
Now, when it comes to actually collecting emails, there are five basic ways to
ask people to join your email list.
The first way to collect email addresses is by providing an online sign-up form
to your website visitors.
You should put the sign-up form or a link to the sign-up form on every page of
your website, not just the homepage, because you never know when someone will
enter your website or exit your website.
The second way to collect email addresses is to collect email addresses
from people in person.
When someone calls your business on the phone, ask if he or she would like to
join the email list to receive information about the topic of the call.
When you attend networking events or trade shows and when you meet people for
appointments, ask everyone to join your email list.
I call it the 5 Foot Rule.
If someone is within 5 feet of you, ask for his or her email address.
Thirdly, all printed marketing materials should describe a way to join your email list.
You can provide a sign-up form by asking people to write their information
directly on the form, and you can use printed advertising to promote other
methods of joining, which brings me to the fourth way to collect email
addresses: mobile devices.
You can ask people to scan a mobile barcode, like the one this poster.
This one actually works. Give it a try right now on your screen to join the
email list at lynda.com.
You can also ask people to text their email address to join, and you can provide
mobile sign-up forms that can be filled out on a smartphone or a tablet device.
You can use mobile devices for collecting addresses in person as well.
Simply hand your device to someone so he or she can fill out a form on the screen.
The fifth way to collect email addresses is through social media networks.
Place sign-up links to your email sign- up form on all social media sites you own
and promote your email list in your social posts.
Some social sites such as Facebook allow application plug-ins, so you can embed
forms directly into your page.
Remember that an email address is more effective when you combine it with other information.
You may want to collect a first name for personalizing your emails ora ZIP code
for targeting local offers.
But don’t ask for too much information the first time you sign up or
you’ll reduce sign-ups.
You can also ask for additional information once you’ve established a
relationship of trust with the members of your email list.
Collecting email addresses and other personal information isn’t always easy, so
stay tuned for the next section of the course where I show you how to create
incentives to help you increase the number of email list sign-ups you get.

Offering incentives to increase signups

It’s a common misconception that people aren’t willing to share their email addresses.
Actually, they are willing to share.
You just have to communicate the value of your email list effectively.
The idea is to exchange value for information.
The more valuable your emails, the more people will sign up to receive that value.
Now, there are three basic ways you can maximize the value of subscribing
to your email lists.
The first way is to make the information you put in your emails valuable in and of itself.
For example, a consultant could offer free advice via his or her email newsletter.
You can also give your subscribers immediate incentives for joining the email list.
Immediate incentives are usually provided to subscribers in the form of an
automated email sent to the email address used for the subscription.
Use your automated emails to send a coupon or discount, a valuable download,
access to a special video, a free product or service, or anything else that has
immediate benefit to the new subscriber.
For the best results, offer something related to your products or services as
opposed to offering a free gift unrelated to your core business.
That way you’ll gain a prospect who is just as interested in what your business
is as what you’re giving away.
For example, a restaurant could offer a free dessert to anyone who joins the
email list by sending a coupon to everyone who subscribes.
In addition to immediate incentives, you can also offer the same benefits in the future.
The benefit of future incentives is the fact that you can send new subscribers a
few emails before they receive the incentive.
In the next section of the course, I am going to show you how to design an
effective marketing email so that your content and your incentives look good,
function properly, and represent your business as professionally as possible.

1. Designing an Effective Marketing Email Deciding on a format

When marketers refer to the format of an email, it means that the layout, the
content, and the purpose of a particular email work together visually and
functionally as a unit.
For example, a newsletter is an email format. So is a promotion, an event
invitation, and a holiday greeting.
This section of the course explains the email formats that you can choose from
to run a successful email marketing strategy.
It’s important to use a variety of email formats in your strategy for two reasons.
First, people respond to different formats in different ways.
For example, many people wait to read an email that looks like a newsletter,
while an email that looks like an urgent announcement is more likely to get
immediate attention.
While getting immediate attention from every email might sound like a good
strategy, the reality is that urgency wears off if you use the same email
formats for all your communications. Which brings me to the second reason to use
a variety of formats.
You need as many formats as you have reasons to communicate.
For example, if you send promotions, event invitations, news, information,
greetings, and appointment confirmations, you should utilize enough email
formats to appropriately categorize your information into logical groupings.
Now, here are the most popular email formats and some tips for making them effective.
Email newsletters are typically focused on information rather than promotion.
Newsletters can have columns to give them the appearance of a paper newsletter
and are great for sending loosely related information in a single email.
Newsletters also should have a periodic frequency, such as weekly or monthly,
rather than an event or date driven frequency.
For best results, minimize the amount of promotional content in your email newsletters.
No more than 20% of your email newsletter content should contain promotions.
If you need to promote more than that, use a promotional email format.
Promotional email should focus on a single promotion, such as a single product,
a group of related products, or a theme such as a sale.
Promotional emails are usually date driven or they are triggered by specific
actions, such as a recent purchase or an inquiry.
When using promotional emails, it’s best to put some but not all of the
details about the promotion in the email itself.
Put the rest of the details on a website to invite a click so that you know how
many people were interested in learning more about the promotion.
Another type of promotion is an event invitation.
Event invitations can focus on one event or a series of events.
Events are highly date driven and usually require a series of emails in similar
formats to get a good overall response.
Make sure you plan out your event invitations on a calendar to avoid
over-communicating.
An email announcement is a format that’s sent when no specific response is
expected on the part of the recipient.
Examples include greetings, thank you messages, press releases, and
order confirmations.
Send these email formats when you want to focus on relationship building as
opposed to generating immediate sales or leads.
Sometimes it’s nice to receive an email that doesn’t ask you to do anything.
Email formats are most effective when your email designs and layouts are a good
match for the formats you choose.
That’s the topic of our next two sections: branding your emails and
creating effective layouts.

Branding consistently

You need to pay attention to the way your emails look, because your audience
pays attention or not depending on the design choices you make in each email.
The first rule of email design is to make sure your email designs are a good
match with your other marketing media.
For example, when someone visits your website and signs up for your email list,
they might not recognize your emails if they look completely different from your website.
To ensure a good match between your email designs and your other marketing
designs, follow these guidelines.
Include your logo in all your emails.
Use colors that match your logo for backgrounds, borders, and fonts.
And when you send a promotion that suggests the use of colors outside your
brand, such as of running a Halloween promotion with black and orange, just make
sure to work the promotional colors into your brand instead of replacing your
brand with the promotion.
Also, use the same type of images in all your emails.
For example, there’s a big difference between the look of stock photography and
the look of graphics and clipart.
Choose the image type that fits the personality of your business and then stick to it.
When choosing email designs, it’s important to brand each type of email
format consistently.
For example, make sure your email newsletter looks similar, but not identical,
to your email promotions.
That way people will recognize your brand and the purpose of each email.
One of the best ways to ensure brand consistency with all your emails is to
design your emails based on similar looking email templates.
What’s an email template?
That’s the topic of our next section.

Creating a layout

Laying out your content in an email usually requires building tables in HTML and
using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS to tell your recipient’s computer how to
display your content.
If you’re not interested in programming your own layouts, you can use
pre-designed email templates that are ready to receive your text, images,
links, and other content.
Email templates are available from email marketing providers.
Many providers include templates that are ready to use as is, as well as
templates that can be highly customized without any knowledge of HTML.
Content that draws the eye to a specific section of your email are called visual
anchors, because the content acts like an anchor that causes the eyes to stop on
that content while scanning through the email.
Visual anchors include the following types of content:
images, headlines, links, icons, divider lines, background colors, and borders.
When laying out your content, the most important content should reside in the
upper-left quadrant of your email, because most people start scanning an
email in the upper-left.
Also, most mobile devices display emails beginning with the upper-left, if the
whole email doesn’t fit on screen.
One word of caution.
It’s important not to place too many visual anchors in all four quadrants.
Doing so makes your email difficult to scan, because the eyes can’t decide what
is the most important section of the email.
Organizing your content into columns is another great way to make your
email easy to scan.
And columns make it easy to organize related groups of content so your audience
can scan each column as if it’s a mini version of your email.
There are three basic choices for laying out columns effectively in your email.
You can use columns of equal width to avoid emphasizing the content in one
column over the other.
You can put a narrow column on the left side of your email to emphasize the
content and a larger column to the right.
You can also put a narrow column on the right side of your email to emphasize
the content in a larger column to the left.
If you feel like you have so much content in a single email that you need to
organize your content into more than two columns, you may want to consider
breaking up your content into multiple shorter emails and sending with a higher frequency.
That way your emails won’t be so daunting when your subscribers receive them.
Speaking of email content, the next few sections of the course show you how to
make your content valuable and effective by including links, information,
offers, and a call to action.

1. Making Your Email Content Valuable Including links

A good test of an effective marketing email is whether or not the email
generates immediate sales or moves people closer to a purchase decision.
In short, your email should invite action and decision making.
Actions in emails usually involve clicking on links, which may include text
links, images, buttons, and other graphics.
This section of the course explains how to get the most out of the links in your emails.
Email links come in two varieties,
external web links and internal navigation links.
External links open up a browser window so the person who clicks on the link is
directed to a webpage.
You can also create links to files stored on a server and links can open up an
email program installed on your subscriber’s computer.
Emails received on a mobile device could also interpret a phone number or
an address as a link.
Phone numbers in the text of your email dial the phone number when touched and
addresses can automatically link to an online map or a map application.
There is no need to program these types of links.
Mobile devices can detect them automatically.
Internal links, also known as anchor links, point to content within the email.
Use internal links to help the person reading your emails to skip to content
below the screen from the top of the email and to skip back to the top of the
email from the bottom.
You can also use groups of internal links like a Table of Contents to list the
articles or sections of your email and allow someone to quickly jump to that
section of your email without scrolling.
When creating text links, the best practice is to avoid using the phrase Click
Here as the link. Instead use an action word or a phrase as the link.
For example, a link to add an item to an online shopping cart should say Buy
this item, instead of To buy this item click here.
The more descriptive you can make your text links, the better chance you have
of inviting a click.
For example, a link that reads More information isn’t as descriptive as a link
that reads Download the 50 page catalog.
When creating image links, the best practice is to include some text in the
image inviting the click and explaining what the image link points to.
Some images are intuitive as links so text isn’t necessary.
Examples include pictures of products that link to more information about the
product, company logos pointing to the homepage of a website, audio icons such
as a Play button that looks like a speaker, or screenshots of videos pointing to
a streaming video file.
Speaking of videos in other files, use links to deliver files and videos to
your email subscribers.
Never attach videos, pictures, documents, or other files to your emails, because
email filters and blockers are notorious for stripping attachments, bouncing
emails with attachments, and filtering emails with attachments to a junk folder.
Creating links and including them in your email is an important step toward
making your emails actionable, but links all by themselves won’t be too inviting
to your email subscribers.
That’s why the next section of the course shows you how to include valuable and
relevant email content to go along with the links in your emails.

Creating valuable information

The information you send in an email has to be valuable on a consistent basis or
your subscribers will quickly become un-subscribers.
While it’s great to send offers and incentives to make your emails more
valuable, some of your email content needs to be inherently valuable as well.
That’s because typically only a small portion of your prospects and customers
are ready to buy when they receive one of your emails.
If you limit your email content to promotions and offers, your emails will be
irrelevant to the majority of subscribers.
Now, here are some examples of content that can add to the inherent value of your emails.
Information about products, services, or your company can be valuable,
especially for new prospects or people who are interested in learning about new
products or the latest trends.
Tips and advice can be valuable if buying your products and services involve
research, expertise, or sound reasoning.
Tips and advice can come from you or your employees or you can feature tips and
advice from your satisfied customers or product suppliers.
Instructions and directions can tell your customers how to get the most out of
your products or services before a sale and after a sale.
Instructions and directions can also help your customers feel smarter about the
purchases they make.
Entertaining content can include humor, engaging stories, and even
professional performances.
If you use entertaining content, make sure it has something to do with buying
your products and services; otherwise your email subscribers won’t be as likely
to recall your brand as the source of the content.
Facts and research are a good idea when your audience needs more than an opinion
to make a purchase decision.
Coming up with valuable content can be handled in-house or through external
sources such as copywriters and agencies.
If you decide to use content from other sources in your emails, always ask for
written permission so you don’t violate any copyright laws.
Assume all content is copyright protected and consult a licensed attorney if you
aren’t sure if you have permission to use someone else’s content.
Hopefully the information in this section has been valuable to you, because now
it’s time to explore all of the ways to include valuable offers in your emails,
to help turn your readers into buyers.

Sending valuable offers

In this section of the course I explain which types of valuable offers to send
to your email subscribers.
Valuable offers are incentives that help to overcome purchase hesitation
and decision avoidance.
The first rule of valuable offers is to know your customers, because different
groups of people may respond differently to the same offers.
For example, some people love to know about a discounted product because
they like to save money.
However, some people associate the word discount with words like discontinued,
cheap, or out of style.
These two groups of people require very different offers.
The former may respond positively to an email announcing a sale, while the
latter is more likely to value an email announcing a sneak preview of the newest
and most expensive product line.
For the best results, conduct a survey or watch your email tracking reports to
discover what your subscribers value. Then divide your email list into groups
based on the types of offers that motivate each group.
Here are some of the best forms of valuable offers for emails, along with some
advice for matching the incentive to the type of buyer.
Coupons included in an email can be printed out or shown on a mobile device for
in-store redemption or linked to an item in an online store.
Use coupons when your prospects or customers want to be rewarded with prices
that aren’t available to the general public.
To add a personal touch to your email coupons use a Mail Merge to include your
subscribers name on the coupon.
Giveaways are free products or services offered in exchange for information or a purchase.
Use giveaways in combination with another product purchase when you want to
offer more value without discounting the value of the featured product.
For example, if a car dealer offered a car at 50% off, people might wonder
what’s wrong with the car.
If however the car was offered at full price with a giveaway worth 50% of the
value of the car, the same value is perceived without discounting the car.
If you decide to offer giveaways, make sure to check your local laws to make
sure your giveaway doesn’t qualify as a sweepstakes, contest, or lottery.
If it does, you’ll need to comply with local laws for these types of promotions.
Loss leaders are another form of giveaway.
A loss leader is a promotional price that results in a loss to the business when
the product is purchased.
Why would you offer a product in an email at a price that loses money? Because
you want to acquire a new customer with an extremely low price so you can
realize profits through repeat sales generated by additional emails after the
initial loss leader purchase.
Use loss leaders when you want to attract new customers to your business and
away from the competition.
Once you have an offer that gets people to respond, it’s time to help them take
the next step by suggesting one or more actions.
That’s called a call to action and it’s the subject of our next movie.

Writing an effective call to action

A call to action is a statement that prompts your audience to take one or more
specific actions in favor of your objectives.
Calling for action isn’t as simple as including a phone number in your emails or
giving people lots of links to click on, you need to give people a few hints so
they know exactly what you want them to do.
Contrary to what you see in a lot of emails, “click here” is not the best way to
call for action in an email.
Instead of click here, begin your call to action with a word that describes the action.
Examples include visit, call, download, read, or print.
You can turn your call to action statements into links or combined them
with phone numbers or specific instructions to make the next steps as clear as possible.
Sometimes the main reason to call for action is to ask for an immediate
purchase, but there are lots of other reasons to include a call to action in your email.
For example, you can use a call to action to ask people to read your email,
by beginning your email with a statement like “Read this email before you buy online.”
You can also use a call to action to highlight a specific portion of your email
as in the statement “scroll down for a valuable coupon.”
Sometimes it’s appropriate to ask people to save your email for later instead of
deleting it if they aren’t ready to take advantage of an offer in your email.
You can also ask people to show the email by printing it out or showing the
email on a mobile device.
And don’t forget to ask people to share your email with a friend or colleague
when they find the content to be of value to someone they care about.
You may decide to focus on one call to action in your email, but sometimes
including multiple calls to action in one email can actually increase the number
of responses you get.
One of the best ways to increase responses using multiple calls to action is to
ask for three different levels of commitment from your readers.
For example, a chocolate company might send an email promoting a new gift basket
with the following three calls to action:
order this gift basket today, download our gift basket catalogue, and like this
gift basket on Facebook.
Each of these calls to action result in a positive action, but two of them are
still options even if the person reading the email isn’t interested in making a
purchase right away.
Of course, every email requires the act of opening the email in the first place.
Next I’ll show you how to get more emails opened by including a familiar from line.

1. Creating Effective “From” Addresses and Subject Lines Setting up the “From” address

Creating a familiar from line is critical to getting your emails opened and
read, because people don’t like to receive emails unless they know the sender,
especially when the email comes from a business.
Unfamiliar email from lines can also result in spam complaints, even when people
have explicitly signed up for your email list, just because they don’t know you.
To make your from lines familiar, ask your customers how they know you and
include that information in your from lines.
If you or your employees have personal relationships with your customers, use
your first and last names in your from lines.
If your business is a local branch of a larger organization, make sure your from
line includes your location to differentiate your emails from the other branches
and the main corporate emails.
If your business uses an acronym, such as ABC Company, make sure your
customers also know you by your acronym. Otherwise it’s best to use your full business name.
It’s also important to make your address familiar.
For example, the ABC Company could send their newsletters from the email address
[email protected].
Once you decide on a from line strategy, stay consistent. Then get to work on
your subject line strategy by watching the next section of the course.

Writing effective subject lines

Your subject line is the part of your email that prompts your recipients to
hopefully open your email and start reading immediately.
Subject lines get cut off after about 40 or 50 characters, so the best way to
utilize the subject line in an email is to describe the immediate benefit of
opening your email with the fewest words possible.
Subject lines such as July newsletter or News from ABC Company may be too
generic and they’re not strong enough to prompt an immediate open.
Instead of generic words, choose value words for your subject lines.
Value words are words or phrases that describe the benefit your readers will
receive by opening the email.
Here are a few examples.
If the benefit of your email is financial savings, you can use the word savings
as the value word in your subject line, as in over $50 in savings in this email.
If the benefit of your email is valuable information, you should use words
in your subject line that describe the immediate benefit of reading your information.
For example, if your information helps someone to compare the competition, your
subject line may read “compare the competition in under two minutes.”
If the benefit of opening your emails is basically the same in a series of
emails, you can work off of a theme by creating a brand for your emails and
including that brand name as the subject line.
For example, instead of using the word newsletter in the subject line for
every newsletter you send, you can create a name for your newsletter, such as
Smart Shopper Weekly if you’re a retail store or 5-Minute Sales Tips,if you
offer sales consulting.
Coming up with good subject lines consistently isn’t easy.
If you’re unsure about whether a particular idea for a subject line will work,
try testing one idea for a subject line against another idea using a small
sample of your email list.
Remember also to avoid subject lines that look like spam.
Using all capital letters, excessive punctuation, or extreme urgency can be
off-putting and cause spam complaints.
Take a few minutes to periodically check your own junk or spam folder to see
what the spammers are using in their subject lines and then avoid copying their techniques.
I hope this section of the course helps you to create a lot of profitable
subject lines for many emails to come.
And now it’s time to move on to deepening your relationships with the people who
open your emails by adding social media features to your emails.

1. Combining Email with Social Media and Mobile Devices Adding social features

In this section of the course I show you how to combine email and social media
to increase the number of social interactions your emails receive.
Emails can be forwarded, shared, liked, tweeted, rated, and reviewed.
You can use basic social media features to promote your social media content
to your email subscribers and you can use more advanced social media features
to allow your social media followers to view your emails without receiving
them in an email inbox.
Here’s how it works.
To promote your social media content to your email subscribers, simply include
links to your social media sites in the body of your emails.
For example, you may want to add a Facebook icon to your email linked to your
business page on Facebook.
Posting your emails to social sites is easy with email marketing providers,
because they can automatically send your emails to inboxes, Facebook walls, and
Twitter pages when you schedule your email to go out.
That way you can create the email content once and publish it everywhere as one campaign.
When it comes to publishing your emails to multiple places, don’t forget to
include mobile devices.
To learn how to optimize your emails for mobile devices, watch the next movie,
“Creating a mobile friendly email.”

Creating a mobile-friendly design

Lots of people check and read their emails on mobile devices such as
smartphones and tablet devices, so it’s important to consider these devices
when creating marketing emails.
Specifically, there are three things to consider when you send emails to people
who are likely to read them on mobile devices.
First is the fact that most people access the same email inbox with smartphones,
tablets, and computers, so you shouldn’t design emails for smartphones without
thinking about how the designs will work on computers and tablets.
Second is the usefulness of your email content to a person on a mobile device.
When people are using mobile devices to read email, they are more likely to be
sorting through emails and deciding what to open now, what to save for later,
and what to delete immediately.
The more useful your email is in a mobile context, the more likely your email
will be opened immediately or saved for later use.
For example, if your email contains a coupon that the recipient can show in a
store to receive a discount, it’s more useful in a mobile context than an email
that asks your recipient to go through an online order process that involves a
lot of typing. That may be easier on a computer keyboard.
The third thing to consider is how the email will look and function on a mobile device.
Smartphones have much smaller screens than computers and it’s often frustrating
for people to scroll around to find links, text, and images.
The most effective mobile email designs take advantage of the upper-left
portion of the email.
That’s because most mobile devices either display emails beginning with the
upper-left portion of the email, or they display the whole width of the email
on the screen, requiring the recipient to zoom and scroll to specific sections of the email.
When people zoom and scroll, they often start in the upper-left of the email, at
least in countries where people read from left to right.
Here are some examples of the types of content that can be effective when
positioned in the upper-left of your email.
You can place your logo or the name of your business in the upper-left.
You can begin your email message with the main headline at the top of your email.
Images in the upper-left can be effective too, but you might want to make
sure it’s small enough for some text to fit next to it or below it to
encourage people to scroll.
You can place navigation links in the upper-left so people can quickly scroll
and click to the content in your email or onto a website.
Remember that navigation links are necessary only when your email has lots of
content that your audience has to scroll to view.
If you decide you need a table of contents because the amount of content in your
email is so large, then take a moment to think about whether you’re sending too
much information in a single email in the first place.
Cutting down your content and increasing your frequency might be a better
solution to making your emails easier to navigate on a mobile screen.
Hopefully your email content drives people to take action and when they have a
mobile device in hand, those actions need to be as mobile friendly as possible.
I hope you’d join me for the next section of the course where I show you how to
create mobile friendly calls to action for your mobile friendly emails.

Including a mobile call to action

When people read your emails on mobile devices, they are more likely to respond
if you include a call to action that makes it easier or more interesting for
people to take action using the device.
Here are some of the capabilities that give mobile email so much potential.
Smartphones allow people to touch or click on a phone number to immediately dial the number.
So you may want to include your phone number in your emails to make it easy for
people to contact you.
Some smartphones and other mobile devices also allow an address to automatically
link to maps and directions.
So include your physical address in your emails if you have one or more
physical locations.
Before including links to your website in an email meant for mobile devices, you
may want to optimize your website pages.
Mobile webpages have simplified navigation and content that’s easier to read
on smaller screens.
A good web designer can help you to detect mobile device visitors and serve up a
version of your website that’s friendly to each type of device.
Links to videos also work well in smartphones and mobile devices.
For the best results, post your videos to a public site, such as YouTube, to
make sure your videos will play on all types of devices.
In addition to links in your email content, you can also use your email content
to suggest mobile friendly actions such as taking a picture and attaching it
when replying to your email,
visiting a social media site to follow your business or write a review,
checking into a location on a check- in site like Foursquare or Gowalla or
Facebook, or showing the email to someone else.
Showing the email works great for coupons and other offers in your email if you
have a retail store, because you can tell people to show the email to a company
representative to receive the discount or the offer mentioned in the email.
Mobile technology is rapidly advancing, so the future is sure to unveil even
more exciting mobile email potential.
Until then, I hope this section of the course has helped you to develop an email
strategy that really mobilizes your email subscribers.

1. Maximizing Your Email Campaign Results Managing bounced and blocked email

Email isn’t delivered a 100% of the time, but undelivered email isn’t
necessarily void of opportunity.
This section of the course shows you how to deal with bounced and blocked email
so you can turn as many negative results into future positives.
Bounced and blocked emails are returned to the email sender’s email address with
code that tells you why the email was blocked or bounced.
Of course, email servers don’t exactly have a way with words, so I recommend
using an email service provider that can categorize your bounced and blocked
emails into reports that are easier for humans to interpret.
Bounced reports show you which emails bounced and why they bounced so that you
can take the appropriate action.
Emails that are permanently undeliverable are called hard bounces.
A hard bounce means that the email address does not exist, so it’s either
misspelled, the email address has been changed, or it’s been abandoned by the owner.
When you see a hard bounce on your bounce report, you should either contact your
subscribers via another method to obtain a new email address or simply delete
them from your database.
When your email bounce report shows an email return as mailbox full, temporarily
undeliverable, or blocked, these situations are known as soft bounces.
Soft bounces may be temporary or permanent, so check your bounce report to see
how often a particular email is bouncing.
If you notice three or more consecutive soft bounces for an email address, you
should treat it just like a hard bounce.
If you notice irregular soft bounces, you can try resending your email at a later date.
Remember, the best way to reduce blocked emails is to make sure your email list
stays up-to-date in the first place.
Send an email once every three months or so, reminding your subscribers to
notify you or update their subscription profile if they change email addresses.
That way you have a better chance of catching some of the email address changes
before they show up on a bounce report.
Another preventative measure is avoiding email filters that deliver your email
to junk and spam folders instead of bouncing the emails back as undeliverable.
In the next section of the course I show you how to reduce filtered email and
get more email delivered to inboxes.

Avoiding getting caught by filters

In this section of the course I explain email filters and how to avoid them
as often as possible.
Actually, email filters aren’t always negative.
Some people set up filters to sort emails into different folders to keep
their emails organized.
The filters you want to avoid are the types that sort emails into a junk or spam folder.
Some junk filters are set by users who want to block attachments, profanity,
or specific senders.
But most filters are set by email companies that want to protect their customers
from malicious content, spam, and other unwanted emails.
To steer clear of as many automatic spam filters as possible, you should
first check your email content for anything that shares the characteristics
of a typical spam email.
Examples include subject lines with all capital letters, attachments, and
profanity, or certain words that are common in spam emails.
Spam emails and legitimate emails often share similar characteristics, so I
recommend using an email service provider with a spam check feature that scans
the content of your email for spam-like content.
If you don’t use an email service provider with a spam check feature, check
your junk or spam folder once in a while to see what techniques the spammers
are using to get their emails delivered and then avoid copying those tactics in your own emails.
Avoiding spam like content is an important part of avoiding filters, but it’s
even more important to make sure you establish a good sender reputation with
email companies like Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL.
Your sender reputation is made up of three things:
the length of time you’ve been sending email from a particular server, the
number of emails you’ve sent from a particular server, and the number of spam
complaints you’ve received from your subscribers.
One of the best ways to make sure your sender reputation is well-established
is to use a well-established email service provider to send your emails on your behalf.
Email service providers with established reputations have earned their
reputations through close working relationships with the email companies and by
sending high volumes of emails to permission-based lists.
When you sign-up for an email service, you also sign-up to adhere to their best
practices and permission policies.
So make sure your email list is permission-based and compliant with all of the
email service provider’s policies before you sign up and pay for a subscription
or a software package.
Now that you know a bit more about maximizing your email delivery, it’s time to
take a look at maximizing the responses you receive from your emails, namely
opens and click-through responses.

Evaluating click-through data

Email marketing doesn’t end when your email gets delivered.
In fact, that’s when things really start to get interesting.
In this section of the course I explain how to know who is opening and clicking
on your emails and how to use the data to improve your email marketing results.
Email tracking requires some serious HTML programming, or you can just use an
email marketing provider with built-in tracking and reporting to show you who is
opening and clicking on your emails.
Once you have tracking capabilities in your emails, you need to understand what
it means when your reports show opens and clicks.
An opened email, according to an email tracking report, means that the person
who received the email enabled the images in the email to display or clicked
a link in the email.
No images? No open counted on the tracking report.
This is important to understand, because a lot of people read emails without
enabling the images or clicking on any links.
Use your open right as a guide to see how many people were interested enough in
a particular email to enable the images or click a link, and then assume the
people who are not listed in your open report noticed your email and just chose
to scan the email content without clicking or enabling any images.
When it comes to your click report, things are a lot more straightforward.
Your click report shows who clicked on which links and how many people
clicked on each link.
Your click report gives you two great insights.
First, clicks are indications of interest on the part of your email subscribers.
For example, if 20 people click on a link to watch a video about dogs and 20
people click a link to watch a video about cats, you can determine which people
are interested in dogs and which are interested in cats.
That way the next series of emails you send can be customized for either the dog
people or the cat people.
Second, your click report also tells you whether your email content is valuable
and interesting to your readers.
When people click to view a web site, read an article, watch a video, or download
a picture, they are engaging and that helps them to remember your business and
your message when they’re ready to buy.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to leave some of your email content out of
your email and link it instead.
That way you can tell who is interested and who is not.
When analyzing your click reports, it’s also a good idea to compare your email
data with your website visitor data.
If your email drives a lot of traffic to your website but nobody takes any
action from there, it’s an indication that your website content or your user
experience may be in need of attention.
Of course clicks and opens aren’t the only email actions worth tracking.
It’s also possible to track non- click responses, and I’ll cover those in the next movie.

Tracking non-click responses

Email links that drive traffic to a website can be tracked electronically,
but non-click responses have to be tracked with a little human interaction and creativity.
Here are some common non-click responses that are worth tracking.
First, it’s a good idea to track in- store purchases resulting from your emails
if you have a physical store.
To track in-store purchases, you can ask people to show your email either by
printing it out or showing it on a mobile device screen.
You can also track in-store purchases by including a special promotion that
isn’t advertised anywhere except your emails.
That way, when someone asks for the special promotion, you know the only way
they found out about it was through one of your emails.
Including a special promotion also works well if you want to track phone calls
generated from your emails, because you can attribute any callers who mentioned
a special offer to your emails.
You can take that concept one step further by including a unique phone number
in your emails, so that anyone who calls the number is identified as someone
who received an email.
Another non-click response worth tracking is event attendance.
Of course you can track event registrations electronically, but sometimes it’s
good to know how many reminder and invitation emails contributed to increasing
actual physical attendance, especially if your events are free.
In the case of events, you can use your emails as tickets, and you can ask
people to show or print the emails for admission. Or you can include offers in
your reminder emails that people can show or mention at the door.
If the fact that tracking non-click responses require some manual intervention
has you worried about spending too much time, don’t worry. The next section of
the course shows you how to automate the most mundane components of your email
marketing program, so you have more time to keep track of all those happy
customer interactions.

Automating your email marketing

One of the best features of email marketing is the ability to automate your
marketing communications.
This section of the course shows you two ways to send automated emails to
prospects and customers.
You need an email marketing provider or a really good programmer to help you
with email automation.
Some automation scenarios are simple and some are simple conceptually, but
they’re very sophisticated technically.
After viewing this section of the course, you’ll know what type of automation
features you need from a provider to run the automation programs most helpful to your business.
The first type of email automation is called an autoresponder.
An autoresponder is a single email sent automatically in response to a
specific event or action.
Examples include an email triggered by a specific date such as a birthday,
holiday, or calendar date, an email triggered by a specific time such as
lunchtime, or a few hours before an event, an email sent in response to filling
out a form such as ordering something online, or joining an email list, or an
email sent in response to a click such as a click on a link to a website page or a video.
To set up an autoresponder, you need to create an email with content that will
be the same for everyone who triggers the autoresponder email.
Once you’ve created the email, you can use your email marketing provider to
assign it to one or more triggers or events.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to send multiple emails automatically in response
to an action or event.
An automated series of multiple emails is called a sequence.
Sequence is perfect for targeting email content to individuals with different
behaviors, interests, or contexts.
For example, when a new prospect joins your email list, you may want to set up a
sequence that automatically responds with the following four emails:
a welcome email thanking the person for joining the email list sent immediately
after joining; a follow up email with links to a product catalog, company
information, or other helpful resources sent three days after the welcome email;
an email newsletter with the best articles and advice sent one week after the
follow up email; and a promotional email offering a special discount as a thank
you for joining the email list sent two weeks after the email newsletter.
Sequences make your emails more relevant, because you can base them on a variety
of relevant events and triggers such as clicks, dates, and periods of time since
a prior action or event.
When it comes to planning more sophisticated email sequences, you’ll need an
email marketing provider that has the ability to automatically stop or change a
sequence based on multiple triggers or events.
For example, you create a sequence for new prospects and one of those new
prospects becomes a customer in the middle of your new prospect sequence,
you may want to switch that person to a new customer sequence and stop the
new prospect sequence.
To automate sequence changes, your email marketing provider needs to integrate
with your database and link tracking to identify changes in a customer profile.
So switching someone from one sequence to another may be as simple as
allowing the system to track someone’s clicks or purchases and adjust each
sequence accordingly.
You can also manually add someone to a sequence or stop a sequence by changing
the data in someone’s database record.
Email automation takes a little extra time to set up, but I hope you see the
potential for making things more productive in the long run and I hope this
email marketing course has helped to make your email marketing strategy more
productive than ever.

Conclusion
Goodbye