How to Maximize Sales and Profits with Ezine Marketing

Learning to build a responsive list is one of the most important skills you could learn as a marketer. Having a list of loyal readers will open a whole new world to you – a world where any product you launch will already have ready buyers, where others with successful businesses will seek out partnerships with you, and where customers will readily refer others to your business with little to no work from you.

A strong list isn’t just the numbers on a screen. It symbolizes the influence you have in a specific industry. The more people reading your emails, the louder your voice in the industry.

Many marketers make the mistake of structuring their business as a one-sale operation. The most successful businesses, however, are those that build an ongoing relationship with their customers and sell to them again and again.

With the increased trust that comes with an ongoing relationship, you can sell more products and higher priced products. You might be able to sell one $40 product to a first-time visitor. However, if you build a solid relationship with a reader by providing valuable content again and again over time, you may very well be able to sell multiple $200, $500 or even $1,000+ products to that customer.

In this report, you’ll learn all the specific steps you need to know to build a highly responsive list. You’ll learn tips that apply when you’re just getting started, when you’re getting some traction but still growing and even tips that apply when you already have a large list.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

=> Selecting Your Topic

It’s usually most effective if your newsletter has a very specific aim or topic that it addresses.

In small niches or industries, you might try to take on the entire scope of the problem. For example, if your niche is about “How to Raise Horses” or “How to Cook Indonesian Food,” then your newsletter could probably address the whole market.

On the other hand, if your market is something like “Parenting,” then a single newsletter probably can’t tackle the whole scope. In that case, it’s better to choose something more specific. For example, “Daily Parenting Tips for Raising Teens” is a much better topic choice than to target the industry as a whole.

The more your readers feel like you’re talking specifically to them, the better. In very broad markets, you’ll rarely be able to address everyone. Instead, aim to address just the people who fit best in your target market.

=> The First Few Messages

The first three to five messages you send to your readers are crucial. They set the expectations and the tone for the rest of their relationship with you.

The very first message you send needs to be informative and start with a “bang!” Readers should immediately be hit by the originality and genuine usefulness of your content. Don’t waste your first email by just welcoming them to your list or by trying to sell. Give content, content, content.

The first message should also carry your voice clearly. Readers should get a sense for the person behind the messages, your personality and what the list stands for. This will help them decide if they want to keep reading your emails in the future.

Finally, the first message should also set their expectations for how often they’ll receive emails from you and what kind of emails they’ll receive.

You’ll want the second to fifth messages to be packed with the best material you can muster. You need to get your readers in the habit of opening your emails. The more positive emotions you can associate with your messages at this point, the better.

Craft your first five messages carefully at first, then review them several times over the course of the next couple months. After that, review your welcome autoresponder every 3 to 4 months.

=> How to Create a Great Opt-In Page

A high converting opt-in page isn’t usually built in one shot, but over time. It involves meticulous testing and creative experimentation combined with the building of your reputation and brand over time.

Here are a few tips for building a great opt-in page.

First, always keep in mind what the “loudest” thing on the page is, as that’s what your visitor’s eyes will first be drawn to. Is it your headline? Is it a photo on the page?

Whatever it is, make sure the loudest thing clearly conveys the benefit of your website. If it doesn’t, either switch it, improve it, or tone it down to bring something else in focus. The moment someone lands on your page, they should immediately know what your page is about.

Test one field versus two field submits. In other words, test whether you get better opt-in rates when you just ask for the email, versus the name and the email. It is usually best to never ask for more than two fields.

Split test like your life depended on the results. Never leave your opt-in page running without a split test also running. If you do, you’re basically wasting valuable traffic and data.

The copy needs to be compelling and well written. When you read the opt-in page, the aim is to feel physically compelled to type in your email address. If you don’t, try rewriting the content, switching out pictures or asking for advice from other copywriters.

Though it’s beyond the scope of this report to go into design principles, you should definitely pay some attention to having clean, professional design on your site. Great design shows care and dedication, while poor design implies that your site was haphazardly put together.

=> The Different Kinds of Content You Can Offer

Once you have people receiving your content, what kind of content can you actually send out?

Here are a few ideas.

* Interviews – Find interesting, talented or experienced people in your industry and feature them in an interview. The interview can be audio, video or a text transcript.

* How to articles – Write articles teaching your readers how to solve a specific problem or a specific skill.

* Personal stories – Tell your readers a story from your life that relates to your industry. Make the stories interesting and emotionally catching. Make sure to always end the story with something useful for your readers.

* Guest content – Have someone else write an article for your list. This can be a powerful way to give your list different perspectives on a topic.

* Videos – Create a video of you teaching a skill, doing something they want to learn, or just talking and sharing. Videos often have a higher perceived value than just text emails.

* Common questions – Answer some of the most common questions in your market. Make sure the answers will apply to most of your audience.

These are just some of the possible things you can email out about. The actual format you send your content out in isn’t nearly as important as the content itself. When you’re coming up with content ideas, ask yourself: “What do I know that my audience would most benefit from knowing?”

=> How Often Should You “Sell”?

Once you have a list, how often should you sell?

The answer really depends on how long term you’re thinking. If your goal is just to make as much money in as short a period of time as possible, then you might just blast your list with sales pitches. Some marketers are able to make a decent amount of money using this technique.

However, if you want to build a truly profitable long-term business, then you’ll want to put more attention on cultivating your relationship with your list than on short-term sales and profit. Only then will you be able to sell to your readers again and again in the long run.

If you over sell, you’ll burn out your list. Readers will start unsubscribing or stop reading your emails.

So how often should you sell if you want to cultivate a strong list? A good rule of thumb is to sell no more than 10% to 20% of the time.

In other words, spend the first 80% to 90% of your email delivering content, then just 10% to 20% selling. Alternatively, send five to ten pure content emails out before sending one pure sales message.

=> Length and Frequency of Emails

How long should your emails be?

As a rule of thumb, an email shouldn’t be so long that people can’t read it in under 15 minutes. That’s about the maximum length of anyone’s attention span online. An email should also never be so short that people feel like they wasted their time or effort in opening it.

Never try to sell a product directly in the email. Instead, sell the click to a sales page where they’ll learn more about the product. A rookie mistake is to send out extremely long sales letters in emails, which almost never get read.

How often should you email?

There are successful lists that only mail out once a month, while there are also successful lists that mail out every single day. The most important thing is to tune your frequency to your market and to your own capability to produce content.

Make sure to set your reader’s expectations early on and stick to it. Tell your readers in your first few emails how often you’ll mail them, then follow through on those promises. Never email more often or less often than you promised.

=> Create Your Swipe File

One tool recommended to every email marketer is the swipe file.

The swipe file is a collection of well-written emails by other marketers that you use as a model to write your own emails.

To set up your swipe file, first register for another email account. Then, anytime you come across a site that seems to have their marketing together, enter this email address into the opt-in box to receive their emails.

Review this mailbox at least one a month. Go through and star or favorite all the emails that have killer headlines, sales pitches or content ideas.

Any time you need ideas for headlines or sales tactics, just go back to your swipe file for ideas.

=> Writing Subject Lines

Your subject line needs to encapsulate everything the email is about, with an added punch. The subject should always be written to catch attention.

Remember that the average person gets dozens of emails every day. The average person also sees over 200 advertisements in a day. In order to succeed, your subject lines have to be able to reach out from the clutter and capture your reader’s attention.

When you’re writing your subject line, start by writing a simple one – perhaps just a title for the content in the email.

Then write one that’s more sales-ey. More compelling. More interesting.

Keep writing subjects from different angles. Then either pick the one that feels the most “on,” or let them sit and then pick the best one after leaving it aside for a few hours to a couple days.

=> Tracking: Open Rates and Conversion Rates

There are a few things you’ll need to be tracking regularly.

First of all, look at your opt-in rates and subscriber numbers constantly. That goes without saying.

Also pay cursory attention to unsubscribe rates and spam complaint rates. Generally they don’t fluctuate much, but if you see a sudden spike you might want to look into it, or analyze whether or not you did something to alienate your readers.

Those aside, two important numbers you’ll want to be tracking are your open rates and your conversion rates.

Your open rate is the percentage of your list that opens your emails. The two things to track are: 1) The days of the week that get the highest open rates and 2) The subject lines or topics that give you the highest open rates.

By tracking the former, you’ll get a sense for the best days to send content or sales emails. By tracking the latter, you’ll get a sense for what topics or “angles” work best for attracting your reader’s attention.

Keep in mind that open rate tracking is not exact. Email opens are tracked by placing a transparent 1×1 pixel image in an email. Every time an email opens that image, the server the image is hosted on counts that as an open. Unfortunately, many email clients don’t show images by default. This will skew your data.

That said, open rate tracking will give you a good relative sense of which emails work better than others. For example, if Tuesday always gets an 8% higher open rate than Thursdays, you’ll know that Tuesday gets more readership, even if you don’t know exactly how many of your emails are getting opened.

Along with open rates, you’ll also want to track your sales or conversions from each email.

Again, track what days of the week work best for your list. That way you can time the most important sales emails on the days of the week that convert best.

You should of course track what angles, topics and sales pitches work best for your list. Often times during a sales push it’s a good idea to send out two different emails to a part of your list, track the results, then send out the winning email to the rest of your list.

By carefully watching what kinds of emails get the best conversion rates, over time you’ll get a much better sense of what converts and doesn’t convert for your list.

=> Specific Tactics for Increasing Your List

What are a few effective ways of increasing your list size?

One powerful tactic is JV partnerships. Instead of just sending emails to your partner’s list, have everyone that comes from your partner’s list opt into a new list specifically about your promotion. They’ll also be added to your main list.

Let’s say you’re teaching a course about email marketing. You have a friend who runs a general marketing email list. If you do a JV together, you’ll send 2-3 emails to his list, promoting your course.

Instead of sending them to a sales page, have them land on an opt-in page where they’ll have the chance to receive a free report in exchange for their email address. Now you’ve not only increased your list, but likely increased your conversion rate because you have the chance to follow up.

Another popular method for increasing list size is to use paid traffic. In order to do this, you absolutely need to know what an email address is worth to you.

For example, if 5% of your email sign-ups convert to a sale on a $20 product and 10% of your customers will buy a $100 upsell, each email address would be worth $11 to you. If you’re getting a 10% opt-in rate, that means you can afford to pay up to $1.10 per click to break even. Any clicks cheaper than that and you’re in the black.

In order to pay for traffic to increase your list size, you have to know what an email address and a click is worth to you. Only then can you profitably buy traffic. Of course, you need to always be tracking each source carefully to make sure you’re truly profitable.

Finally, don’t underestimate the list-building power of offline marketing. If you’re meeting people offline, collect their business card and offer to have them added to your list. Any time you’re speaking, have a sign-in form and add people to your list.

Often times your best leads will come from offline encounters, from people who’ve met you face to face and like what you’re doing.

=> List System Management 101

In the beginning, the most cost-efficient way of running an email list is generally to use an autoresponder service. Well known services include AWeber, iContact, Constant Contact and GetResponse.

AWeber has a very strong reputation for high deliverability, but doesn’t allow list imports. IContact and Constant Contact do allow list imports and also have a good reputation.

In general, don’t use your shopping cart’s email system for sending emails as they have a notorious reputation for poor deliverability.

At a certain point, when your list gets above 10,000 subscribers, you’ll usually have to take your email system in house. There are several systems that can manage this process for you. Infusionsoft has a strong reputation among direct response marketers.

Alternatively, you can construct your own in-house email system. There are many pitfalls with that route, though it does provide the most flexibility. The best way to ensure this gets done well is to hire someone with solid experience in setting up these systems.

No matter what stage your list development is, keeping track of your deliverability is crucial. Subscribe to a service that’ll send your emails to accounts on AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, etc. and send you reports of deliverability. That way you’ll know exactly when your emails are and aren’t landing in spam boxes or not getting delivered.

Marketers often underestimate the danger of not having mail delivered. Unfortunately, even with opt-in emails your emails can often get blocked.

=> Should You Use Double Opt-In?

It is not recommended that you use double opt-in. There is almost no benefit to you as a marketer and it will drastically cut down on your subscriber rate.

A lot of people will forget to click on the double opt-in link, even if they wanted to be on your list. At much as 60% of your list could get dropped simply because of double opt-in.

Email services often try to convince marketers to use double opt-in by saying that it’ll “lower your spam rate.” Unless your spam rate is above 2%, however, that really shouldn’t be your main concern. Your main concern is getting subscribers, and single opt-in is the best way to do that.

In short, there is really no benefit for you as a marketer to use double opt-in.

=> What You Need to Know About CAN SPAM

There are two things you’ll want to know to stay CAN SPAM complaint:

1) Never, ever email people who didn’t explicitly opt in to receive emails from you. The only exceptions are people that bought a product from you. If you start emailing people that have no pre-existing relationship with you, you’ll almost certainly have your email shut down.

2) Always have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email. If you don’t give people a clear way to unsubscribe, you’re in violation of CAN SPAM and can get blacklisted. This is primarily a concern if you’re running your own email server.

You also need to be aware that certain words tend to trigger spam filters: “sex”, “money”, “free”, etc. all have varying degrees of “spaminess.” If you use these words a lot, you risk getting spam filtered.

=> Wrapping Up – Maximizing Sales and Profits with Email Marketing

There’s a reason that almost every successful online business, from Tony Robbins to Amazon.com, uses email lists. They consistently and significantly increase earnings over time.

Start by choosing a list management system that matches your needs. The size of your list, where your leads come from and the kinds of email you send all go into making the decision.

Select a great niche, a great topic and a frequency of mailing. Then write your first few autoresponder messages.

Construct a killer opt-in page and start driving traffic to it. Watch your conversion rates carefully and split test.

Build a relationship with your list and focus on cultivating trust and credibility, rather than trying to make sales right away.

Finally, write compelling sales copy for the 10% to 20% of the time that you’re selling.

Follow this formula and you’ll find yourself pulling far ahead of your competition. Few marketers really get email marketing right. When you really nail this skill, you’ll find not only your profits increasing, but your reputation in the industry as well.