by Brandon Cox

Tips On How To Make Money Online From Affiliate Marketing – Part 4

Email marketing is also an effective way of staying in communication with your customers. You can achieve outstanding results with email marketing by investing a small amount of time and  momey. Email marketing is inexpensive, as there are no production costs, materials or postage costs, apart from email marketing software programs.  Using your opt in list of email addresses of customers and/or subscribers that have agreed for you to can send emails to them, you can use email as a channel to send communications incorporating promotions, brochures, new product announcements, and other aspects of your marketing campaign.

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?

Email Marketing is simply using email to distribute your business’ marketing messages to communicate with your prospects and customers. Email Marketing makes it easy to put the right information in front of the right people at the right time. For ver a decade, email marketing has proven to be an effective marketing, lead generation and sales strategy.  Being instantaneous, average responses to these types of email occur within 48 hours of being sent. The most popular form of email marketing is growing your own list, for example a newsletter, and sending emails to the list containing tips along with things subscribers might be interested in buying. 

Email Marketing can also cover advertising on email newsletters or follow up emails to existing customers. While you could include these other wider definitions in email communications, a lot of people discussing email marketing mainly use the term to describe the process of building a list with a view to growing ader loyalty and making sales.

IS EMAIL MARKETING DYING?

With the advent of new marketing techniques such as social media, video and mobile marketing, and a host of other new  communication channels, one might assume email marketing is a thing of the past.  However email marketing is not on the decline, if anything the reverse is true.  Don’t assume that email is yesterday’s news, and has little chance of keeping up with the other marketing methods now available.  The numbers say this assumption is incorrect, with email usage being remarkably steady, even in the face of new competition. Research shows that email is still the preferred method for receiving commercial messages of 74% of adults.

This perhaps surprising statistic explains the continued proliferation of e-zines and other email marketing today by small and large businesses. There are good reasons to conduct email marketing campaigns in 2011.  Campaigner recently surveyed its users about e-mail marketing, resulting in 33% indicating they were going to continue with their e-mail programs in 2011, and 61% responded that plans were underway to increase the use of e-mail in their marketing programs.  Almost 100 percent planned to continue or expand their e-mail marketing programs to gain new prospects. 

WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING USED FOR?

Email marketing can be used for branding, lead generation or networking, or sales. Many businesses see th value of e-mail marketing as part of their overall marketing and sales process  because of its return-on-investment (ROI).

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU USE EMAIL MARKETING FOR A NEWSLETTER?

Twelve e-newsletters evenly spaced out across the calendar delivers consistency without being overwhelming for you or your prospects.  It’s a great way to show your knowledge and experience in the industry and your community. Take a few minutes each month to subscribe to newsletters from other businesses with similar customers to see how they use email marketing for newsletters.and brainstorm great ideas for topics. You will derive value from listening to others involved in the conversation and keep the pulse of your prospects. 

SHOULD YOU OUTSOURCE YOUR EMAIL MARKETING TO A THIRD PARTY SERVICE

Whilst there are a number of excellent email marketing software services such as aWeber, it is always a good idea to have your needs handled by a third party service provider. There are other benefits of having an off-site service. There are many options to choose from, ranging from self-serve programs to ones that completely managed by an outside vendor. Choices are often dictated by the level of expertise and resources available internally, your expertise and available time.

EMAIL MARKETING MISTAKES IN AFFILIATE MARKETING

Many small businesses succumb to similar mistakes when formulating and executing an email marketing campaign. One of these is bland and/or misleading subject lines. Before a recipient opens an email, the subject line is the only point of contact between your business and them. The subject line must be compelling. so inject creativity and imagination into the subject phrasing. Dull subject lines like ‘May Newsletter’ result in lower open rates compared to teasers written in an ad headline style.  Each subject line needs to promise the reader will gain something by opening the email, so the value proposition needs to be obvious, and  communicated it in as few characters as possible.  Displaying who the email is from has an impact on open rates, so ensure the recipient knows the email has come from your business and the ‘From’ field of the form hasn’t been filled out so it looks like spam. 

Make sure your email marketing consists of emails that read like little more than heap sales pitches, as whilst it might be your purpose to increase sales, subscribers won’t appreciate this viewpoint when reading such an email. Don’t conflate your priorities with your recipient’s desires and interests. Expect mediocre results if the email doesn’t address the reader’s needs. Its a mistake for email marketers to think the size of a campaign’s database is the most important thing rather than the level of engagement and comprehension of people’s preferences and behaviours, namely the breadth of information in the database. A database of 2 million people, only 10% of whom are active is far less impressive than a database of half a million with 75% active which comprises information as to the recipients’ preferences.

Resist the temptation to be over-inclusive in the information you put in the body of your email. as the immediate objective is to get the recipient to follow through on a call to action. The email content must elaborate on the subject heading line, and withhold the desirable information in the body copy, in addition to including a call to action, which is the most crucial functional aspect of the email. It is a brief imperative issued to persuade recipients to pursue the value proposition of the email, whether clicking through to a landing page on your site, picking up the phone, or visiting a store to buy a product.

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Avoid excessive design flourishes like animation and other visual design elements in email marketing which are more time consuming than email templates, and can put a barrier between your reader and your business,  either rendering the navigation to the key message difficult or obscuring the value proposition. It can also delay email loading times and formatting for mobile readers.  It is a mistake to send each recipient the same email without regard to segmentation, and the different interests and concerns of recipients gleaned from your past interaction with them and how they responded to past marketing campaigns. Segment your database according to interests, and  craft emails that catering to each group to enhance receptivity. 

Be careful not to break the law, as recipients have to have supplied their email addresses  with either express or implied consent for you to legally send them marketing information. Express consent entails that they have filled in their email address or ticked a box for the explicit purpose of receiving more information. Implied consent is when you have received their email address by some other means with the expectation of some further form of email contact, be it marketing or otherwise.

If you aren’t using analytics to track the performance of your email marketing campaigns you have no way of knowing whether your strategies are effective. Ensure you have access to a good quality email analytics package, to discern which features of your campaign are working and which are in need of tweaking. One of the key benefits of email marketing is its ability to track and measure performance in a timely fashion. so you should be testing all components of your email marketing, including subject lines,  imagery, call to actions, send times, layout and so on. Testing can be as simple as conducting an A/B split test where you create two versions of the same email with only a single variation between them, so that after sending each version to 50% of customers you can compare the performance of each to see which worked best.

GENERAL TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR  AFFILIATE MARKETING CAMPAIGN WITH EMAIL MARKETING

The most significant way of improving your email marketing is to give subscribers what they want, sending relevant and interesting emails. When subscribers know  there is something valuable in your email, your open rates and conversion rates dramatically increase. Offer something of value in every email you send, such as industry research, tips and tricks, discounts etc. This helps establish your credibility and credentials and helps you become acquainted with your readers, which you need to do in order to deliver relevant content,

You won’t always know or understand what your subscribers care about, but you can work hard on finding this out by conducting online surveys requesting specific information on your