Five Ways to Take Your Email Marketing from Good to Great

With a newsletter subscriber list of over 8,000 people, I'm periodically asked what it takes to launch a successful e-newsletter campaign. Rather than explain my techniques over and over again, I decided to teach my techniques in videos which I created and posted on MikePollock.com. Here is an excerpt from my video "The 10 Critical Marketing Strategies of the Rich."

Respecting the Privacy of Your Subscribers

The first step in a successful campaign is to respect the privacy of your subscribers. Only send your newsletters to people who have asked to be on your list - and only send your newsletters as frequently as you say you will. If you send more than people expect, they'll start unsubscribing.

When it comes to privacy, you want to also stress your privacy policy right on your email signup form. This way people know that you will never rent, sell, or share their email address with anyone.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make (and you've seen it!) is that they try to use their everyday email program to send their email newsletters. This is a huge mistake on a lot of levels including privacy. When you try to send your newsletters out with your day-to-day email program, everyone on your list will see everyone elses email address in the TO line. An alternative would be to put their addresses in the BCC line, but that's really a band-aid fix. I talk more about why this is in my 10 Critical Marketing Strategies video.

The HTML / Plain Text Myth

Most people think you can only send your email newsletters out in one of two formats: HTML or Plain Text. With HTML you can include pictures, colors, and text enhancements and with Plain Text your emails only include, well, plain old text. Your recipients email program will only display one or the other. So which format do you choose?

If you use HTML, the people on your list who can only see plain text will not be able to see your emails. If you send out plain text everyone will see your emails, but you will lose out on the benefits of HTML like colors, pictures, and text enhancements. Choosing which format to use is a big dilemma for most email marketers starting out.

Professional email marketers understand that there's a third option called Multipart which sends your emails out in both HTML and Plain Text formats. With Multipart, you send one email with both the HTML and the plain text in it, and your recipients email program will choose which format to display.

So how do you send your emails out in Multipart? Well if you're trying to send your emails out with your day-to-day email program you're out of luck. Most regular email programs like Outlook, Yahoo, GMail, etc. do not allow you to send Multipart emails. To send Multipart, you need a more sophisticated system. I use what's called an Application Service Provider which I talk more about in my 10 Critical Marketing Strategies of the Rich video.

Forget Trying to Sell to Strangers

If you’ve ever taken a business course you’ve probably heard something like “People buy from people they know.” In my experience in business, I have found this to be absolutely true. People do buy from people they know. It’s generally very difficult to get a complete stranger to buy from you.

When you take out an ad with traditional media like TV, radio, and newspapers, you have to turn strangers into customers. This is very difficult to do – especially when your message is only seen by the stranger for a few seconds.

Email is different. In Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing, Seth says that instead of trying to turn strangers into customers, you can use email to turn strangers into friends first and then turn those friends into customers. I completely agree with him – remember, it’s easier to make a customer out of a friend than it is to make a customer out of a stranger.

Get Personal with Your Email Newsletters

Sending out an email newsletter will help you turn strangers into friends who will eventually buy from you. I have found a way to make this process go even quicker – I personalize each email I send out to each individual person on my list. I do this because I want to build a one-on-one relationship with each recipient.

But how do you do that when you have a few hundred or several thousand subscribers? If you try to send your newsletters out with your day-to-day email program, chances are you would have to send your newsletters out one by one to each recipient. This would take days to do. There is an easier way and that’s to do a mail merge.

The service I use to send my newsletters has a mail merge function. When I create my newsletter I simply put [fname] where I want the recipients’ first name to appear. The service will pull the first name of each recipient from my database and input it right where I want it – for each of the 8,000+ people on my list. When I hit send, it does all the work automatically for me!

How powerful is personalization? It is one of the most powerful tools I have to build relationships with my subscribers. I routinely get emails from people who speak to me as if we were old High School buddies – they know me because they receive personalized email messages from me addressed to them specifically.

Another technique is to put the recipients first name in the subject line. This is very powerful. In the past I have used this technique and have seen that the number of people who have opened my emails has increased by as much as 30%.

Keep Learning More Techniques

The secret to my email marketing success so far has been education. I am constantly learning new techniques. I’m finding what doesn’t work, what works, and what works extremely well. I tell people all the time – success comes to those who know the most strategies (and implement them).

You can learn more of my techniques by watching my 10 Critical Marketing Strategies of the Rich Video and other videos at MikePollock.com.

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