Building a Hot Email List Part 2

Jason — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:07:27 +0000

Setting Up a Killer Campaign

Now you’ve got your first data set ready as discussed in part 1 of the email marketing series it is time to set up a new campaign. Most good email marketing software will allow you to segment your data into lists.

Before you send we need to decide who we are targeting. Segmentation is the path to high conversion rates so personalisation and relevancy focused offer targeting are the keys to success.

Segmentation can start right at the point of data capture. For example in our data capture preparation we could have set up two sign up forms on our website, one for software related offers and another for hardware.

So, for your first communication you could either send a separate email to both of these lists targeted at their preference or you could just send a generic email to both of the lists however, the former is more bound to get better results due to the targeted nature of the approach.

Next we will talk about the types of campaigns and how to set them up to get stellar results.

How to Design an Email that Converts

Here are our top 6 tips for creating highly successful campaigns.

1. An effective subject line should be concise preferably under 70 characters and include a strong call to action. You must avoid spammy subject lines and content as being blacklisted by ISP’s will seriously hamper your future efforts.

2. Include a friendly ‘from’ name -this could be the brand name or a well know representative of the company.

3. Design should be consistent with your content and your brand should be clearly visible.

4. Images can increase the click through rates but beware that email clients render emails differently so it is important to choose software that allows for this technicality.

5. Content should be punchy and to the point and offer real value to the recipient – this is vital as most people are tuned into their own desires 95% of the time.

6. have multiple calls to action encourage those valuable click throughs to your site.

7. Try to have a well proportioned number of highly visible links to avoid looking spammy.

8. You should also put as much as possible at the top since most recipients preview emails in preview panes.

9. Viral capability is important so try to choose software that allows you to include a forward to a friend link. Friendship by its nature encourages trust and emails sent from friends have high open rates.
10. Your Landing page should tally up with your offer in terms of design and message. Your landing page is where you want the conversion to happen. It is critical that the offer you made in the email is ready and waiting for your new potential customer.

BONUS TIP. Have a distinct landing page separate from your main website content, this will lessen distractions and encourage conversions.

This concludes part 2 of the Email marketing series.

Thank you for joining us, see you in part 3.

Building a Hot Email List – Part 1 The money is in the list as the mantra goes...

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Keyword Research and Click thru Rate

Jason — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:19:51 +0000

I listened intently to a keyword research video by Dan Thies hosted at the Stompernet site (members area) and he absolutely advocated against looking at the competition before selecting keywords. His approach was to target the most relevant keywords with the highest volumes and ‘be a shark, not a flounder’ – fair advice.

Going after the big numbers is cool but research shows that over 25% of clicks on a page one SERP are distributed among the top 3 results.

Check out this link…

http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm

With these statistics in hand continue with your keyword analysis looking at the competition and if one sees that the top 3 are .gov or .edu or some other high ranking domain then you can run into trouble when trying to rank quickly or even at all in the high echelons.

If you find that you are up against the big guns in your niche you might want to consider this approach.Your primary keyword gets 2000 searchers a month so if you are outside the top 3 results you get an average of 6.5% of the available clicks equaling 130 clicks.

Your secondary keyword gets 600 searchers a month but the competition is less fierce. In this scenario the lower volume searches with weaker competition and the higher click through percentage would yield more clicks than a 2000 search volume keyword and behave at a return of 162.

Not bad and for less effort too!

Dan’s strategy is to go for the higher volume from the outset with the premise that one day you will eventually rank for the higher ranking terms and that makes perfect sense.

If we take Dan’s advice on board and optimise the on site factors for the high volume keyword and use this strategy in conjunction with using link building with anchor text for the secondary term (another of Dan’s tactics) we have a best of both worlds approach.

In fact, by optimising your web site for lots of secondary terms and pointing links with the keywords in your anchor text at your sub pages, when it is time to go for the primary keyword it should be a lot easier.

Chenk out this keyword research video for more tips.

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Brooks Digital Marketing » Click Thru

Building a Hot Email List Part 2

Setting Up a Killer Campaign

How to Design an Email that Converts

Keyword Research and Click thru Rate