WolfTrust.com
Online Marketing with Jacob Wolfsheimer
7 Must-Do Opt-in Email Marketing Techniques.
1. Don’t be verbose. If it takes you 8 kilobytes of email text to try and sell me something, you’ve taken too long. If your autoresponder emails are regularly this long, you’ve likely lost my attention. Enhance your emails by taking some copywriting courses, or just reading what feels influential to you, and then shorten your emails. Let your sales letter be long, but keep your emails short.
2. Repeat yourself. It’s okay to hit me over the head with one offer, especially if it’s good, and you can discuss the benefits in a clear, concise fashion. The CMSInfusion content management system offered as part of the MarketingMainEvent3 had a great “Advanced Notice Subscribers” email list. They hit me over the head with the MME3 event and CMSInfusion for about three weeks, every single day! But those emails drilled into me the benefits, and the original video was quite fantastic, in my opinion. While I didn’t buy, it’s one of the only times in over two years of receiving autoresponder messages, that I recognized why you, me, and everyone should have bought CMSInfusion at the introductory price.
3. Put the unsubscribe options at the bottom. Don’t tell me upfront that I “can easily unsubscribe from a link at the bottom of this email!” I know it’s easy to unsubscribe, don’t make it too easy. I don’t even know what you’re about to say, and my time is limited, so don’t give me a reason to unsubscribe by inadvertently telling me that you don’t think your content is worthy of my staying on your list.
4. Give me free information that I may not have thought of. You can still promote products and services, especially if you tie them into the free information. Just remember, the free information should be able to stand on its own. A recent email I received said, “8 Ways to Increase the Perceived Value of your Freebies.” It was a great read because it took just a minute, and mentioned things I hadn’t already written down in my internet marketing notes. Brian Simpson regularly emails “feature articles” that are worth far more than a million internet marketing products out there.
5. Update your autoresponder emails. It’s easy to get caught up selling new products, writing up new autoresponder messages for them, and broadcasting messages to old list members who have exhausted the autoresponder, but don’t tell me 2006 is the year of video when we’re halfway through 2007!
6. Cloak your affiliate links. Aweber, and many other autoresponder systems automatically cloak your affiliate links and give you statistics to how many people clicked through. But just because aweber creates links for you doesn’t mean they’re the best links to get clicks. Which looks better to you? clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/54378q5433fd3 or hopurl.com/45332 or http://www.wolftrust.com/recommends/adwordsmiracle/?
7. Know what you’re talking about, and clarify. If you’re not sure how to set up an AdWords campaign, or what can be set in the process, but you’re going to tell potential customers to set up a campaign, do everyone a favor and triple check the setup process so you give accurate information. A recent email told me to set up an AdWords campaign with my budget and click rates. If you could set click rates, don’t you think I’d set it to 100%? So they probably meant setting max CPCs on keywords. Don’t make your potential customer’s guess.
Check out 4 more opt-in email list marketing tips.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Great comments. In addition to high quality content, opt in forms are so critical to the survival of a business. One of my mentors said that “if you are not going to create an opt in opportunity, it’s like building a business on a foundation of sand, so why then are people on the internet trying to earn a living without one?”
February 12th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Aweber links ARE some of the ugliest things to see in an email. In fact, I would go out on a limb to say that Aweber links are probable the first to hit the trash bi, even before public emails. Everyone seems to cloak their affiliate links, but what could say affiliate marketer more than to send an uncloaked aweber email? Not much, thanks for all the great info.
Tim