The online marketing world moves in waves, with the majority of businesses following a trend not because it is fashionable but out of commercial necessity. Going online, just to be online. SEO was king for many years. Then it was Adwords. Blogging came next. Now it is Social Media that is gaining all the attention. In the past competitiveness and innovation played the largest part, but I have no doubt worries about the global economy are driving the most recent moves. Although … [Read more...]

Check your Twitter Follower Count and compare it against your Blog Subscriber Count. Which is the bigger number? Which of those counts is growing faster? I asked my Twitter followers this question, and overwhelmingly the answer came back that you have more Twitter followers or Twitter is catching up fast and likely to overtake. The folks who have far fewer Twitter followers than blog subscribers are those who I would call "Well Established". Their audience has been subscribed for a long … [Read more...]

For just over a week now I have been testing the Aweber "lightbox" popup email subscription form. I wrote about the experiment here, and now I wanted to share some results. As you can see when I placed the form up I actually got a small dip in subscriptions before it corrected to become an increase to eventually settling down to a 5.9% conversion rate, up from 2.4%. A client is trying it also and is getting a 5.5% conversion. Why the dip? There is a weekend lull, but I looked at my … [Read more...]

The most common question I have been sent lately about this series has been I know I need a list but what do I send? What should I write about? How can I get people to buy? An email list is just a delivery mechanism. What you send to people is up to you. That is both a liberating and scary thing, because it is a blank canvas, but a very public one. Put yourself in the role of the subscriber. What do they expect from you? Why did they enter their email address? When you put your subscription … [Read more...]

In the last article of this Email Marketing tutorial series we looked at email copywriting and the goal of each element of your emails. We also looked at the importance of your subject lines in getting your emails opened. Let's look at this aspect in detail. As previously discussed, your email subject line has one main priority; get the recipient to open the email. A Word of Warning First of all, we have to keep in mind the risk of being flagged as spam. While there are plenty of ways … [Read more...]

Sales objections do not only cost you sales, but they can increase your sales too. This might seem paradoxical, but consider a market where you are selling the same product or a very similar product to competitors. Whoever does the best job of addressing objections can sell more. Overcoming sales objections is essential in making sales, but it also makes you more competitive, or can even give you an entry into a market that would otherwise be closed. As proof you can take a look at a … [Read more...]

Email copywriting is probably the one aspect of actually doing email marketing that people either fuss over or neglect. People either doubt their abilities in this area, don't think about it or over estimate. Bloggers, being writers, would expect to be ahead of the game, but sadly that is not always the case. While a couple of years ago it was common to see newsletter writers brag that they write 50 or so articles a year, a blogger today probably writes as many in a couple of months or … [Read more...]

Testing, experimenting and tweaking are essential if you are going to be effective in your email efforts. In the previous entry of this Email Marketing Tips for Bloggers series we looked at email effectiveness tracking metrics. While looking at the stats tells you a lot, it is not going to give you the whole story and they will not make the improvements for you. You need to actively pursue and encourage the results you hope for. Our last look at emails was to work out which worked best and … [Read more...]

Email Marketing advice usually targets attracting more new email subscribers and email copywriting, but there is an aspect of email marketing that is just as powerful but much overlooked. Email Marketing Metrics! Any decent email service like Aweber will give you a wealth of email metric reports. This is valuable information because it tells you how well you are doing, the health of your list. I know why it is overlooked, it feels like math, and not many of us are good at math. Good news … [Read more...]

Growing an email list is a critical part of email marketing success. The more people you have to talk to, the more chance you have of getting a good number of people to do what you want them to do, be that click, comment or buy. In the previous article of this email marketing series we looked at getting started in email marketing, now we will look at how you can grow your list from a few to thousands of subscribers. Size Is Not Everything First a some caution is necessary. Size is not the main … [Read more...]