Custom Ezines and Email Marketing
Builds Your Business and Boosts Your Brand
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is permission-based electronic marketing that is sent directly to your email inbox once a person, provides permission to contact them in the future, usually by subscribing or opting-in to receive more information, sale reminders, or marketing messages.
An email newsletter or ezine (email magazine) is a very popular form of email marketing. An ezine is an electronic form of communication that is sent out on an ongoing basis and used for business to business or business and consumer companies.
Because email marketing doesn’t require printing or postage, staying connected to your audience via email marketing is a more cost effective alternative to traditional print newsletters.
Why Do I Need to Add Email Marketing to My Business?
Email marketing is an essential tool to growing your business in today’s fast-paced world of Internet business. Offering open, conversational, and interactive communications is quickly becoming a necessity for business marketing. In fact, these days, it seems as if everyone already has, or is currently developing some type of email newsletter or email marketing system.
No matter what type of business you have or what services or products you sell, a value-added ezine can be a great tool to help build your business. Publishing an ezine, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly (if it makes sense) helps you stay in front of your customers and prospects, increase your marketing “touches,” and generate more leads and referrals.
Publishing An Ezine or E-Newsletter Will Also Help You:
- Save valuable budget dollars (and some trees) by going digital. By producing your ezine online, you’ll save on design fees, printing, postage, envelopes and mail handling, not to mention the fact that your ezine will get to your audience much faster than snail mail.
- Increase your brand recognition by getting your image and name in front of your customers and prospects more often. Include your logo, tagline, ezine title, color palette, brand graphics, and photo in every issue.
- Connect with your target market, customers, and prospective customers on a regular basis, keeping you at the top of their minds and the tip of their tongues, ensuring that when your services or products are needed they will buy from you or refer you to their friends, family, and business associates.
- Increase your credibility and gain the trust of your target market, making it easier to sell your product or service.
- Educate your current clients on all of your services, products and talents, enticing them to expand their relationship with you and increase profits from your existing customer base with the “I didn’t know you do that, can you do it for me?” response.
- Attract new opportunities, such as strategic partnerships, joint ventures, media interviews, speaking engagements, and more.
- Create new passive streams of revenue by referring products or services that earn you a commission (affiliate programs), directly selling your products or services, or selling ad space in your ezine.
- Expand your network and build your list by capturing the email addresses of your website visitors with an opt-in box and getting permission to market to them.
- Organize your industry knowledge and package it into products, programs, reports, ebooks, tips lists, articles, and endorsements that can easily be reused and/or repurposed.
- Reach a wider audience and bring in more potential customers by repurposing your ezine content on your blog or submitting your articles to news bureaus, PR websites, and ezine article directories.
What Does Permission-Based Email Marketing Mean?
Email marketing is permission-based marketing, which means you must have permission to add people to your marketing list, and permission to email them information. Every ezine should have a clear, straight-forward unsubscribe or opt-out link, and opt-out requests should be handled immediately.
Email addresses should be obtained only by legitimate means like through opt-in and subscribe boxes on your website, or by specific request. This is why online marketing lists are often called opt-in lists. Valid contact information should be included in every piece of email marketing and a privacy policy should be provided.
Single Opt-In Marketing Lists vs. Double Opt-In Marketing Lists
- Single opt-in emails do not require a confirmation via email. In this case, when a customer subscribes, they are automatically added to your list.
- Double opt-in emails require the subscriber to confirm their subscription and agree they do want to receive your email marketing messages. In this case, when they subscribe, a confirmation email is received in their inbox. They will only be added to your list if they click on the link in the email message.
- NOTE: Just because you meet someone at an event and they trade cards with you doesn’t give you the right to add them to your list. Also, adding everyone you have ever met to your list and justifying it with an unsubscribe link that gives them the option to not receive your ezine is unacceptable. If you use either of these tactics, you will be viewed as a spammer.
Remind Email or Ezine Subscribers How they Joined Your List
Many email marketers will include a 1-2 sentence description of how their list is generated. This short statement reminds the recipient that they did in fact opt-in to the marketing list.
For example: “You are receiving this email message because you made a verbal or written request at an event, opted-in on one of our websites, www.bourncreative.com, www.effortlessentrepreneurezines.com, www.designandprofit.com, or purchased a product from Bourn Creative.”
Provide an Easy Unsubscribe or Opt-Out Option for Your Email Newsletter
Believe it or not, by making is clear that you include unsubscribe and opt-out links in each email message, email newsletter, or ezine, you will actually increase your subscriber count. At some point people who have joined your list may want to leave. By showing them that leaving your list is as easy as joining it, you bypass some of the fear associated with the possibility of receiving spam and unwanted email in their inboxes.
What is List Building?
Your “list” is your database of people you can contact with your marketing messages and communications. Email marketing is the most common form of permission-based marketing, which means you must have permission to add people to your email marketing list, and permission to email them information. Email addresses should be obtained only by legitimate means like through opt-in and subscribe boxes on your website, or by specific request. This is why online marketing lists are often called opt-in lists.
It is difficult to talk about email marketing and not talk about list building. In fact, many experts make it seem as if building a big list is the only thing Internet entrepreneurs need to worry about. But when it comes to your list, does size really matter?
Yes and no. At several of the conferences I have attended, experts say that the tipping point for a truly successful ezine is 1,000 subscribers. But I am here to tell you that HUGE results can come from small lists, as long as your readers are engaged and you are actively working to build long-lasting relationships.
Tips for Building Your Email Marketing Opt-in List
Give Them Something Free! We live in the holy land of the “free gift with purchase.” This sales technique repeatedly draw hundreds shoppers to retail establishments daily and it is just as effective when used online. While retail stores provide a gift in exchange for a sale, online marketers provide a free gift in exchange for an email address.
In Internet marketing, giving away something that is relevant and valuable to your prospects and customers not only helps you build your list, but it gives people a sample of the caliber of products and services you and your company offer and a feel for what it would be like doing business with you.
Here are some ideas of the type of items you could give away:
- Special Reports
- A teleseminar or teleclass
- Audio Recordings
- Ebooks
- A Coaching Session
- Monthly Newsletter
- Product Reviews
- Prizes
- Rebrandable Reports
- Physical Products
- Coupons and Discounts
- Trial Memberships
- Tips, Tricks and Strategies
- Checklists
- And more!
Are you interested in learning more strategic list building tips? Check out the email marketing blog posts listed below for ten more marketing savvy list building tips.
Top Ten Email Marketing List Building Tips – Part 1.
Top Ten Email Marketing List Building Tips – Part 2.
Why Should I Use an Email Marketing Service Provider
to Send My Ezine or Email Newsletter?
Way back when, at the start of my career, I periodically sent out HTML email marketing messages to a big list of my clients and prospects about a service or new opportunity. At the time HTML email marketing was fairly new to the marketing world, and wasn’t yet widely adopted.
I made the mistake, as did many others, of sending these messages right from Outlook like I did with all of my other email messages. Why not, right? Wrong!
In fact, one day some people stopped receiving email from me completely!
I went into panic mode pretty quickly because my whole business used email as its main form of communication, and this was a disaster. I did some research and quickly found out I was flagged as a spammer by one large email company because I was sending several email messages with the same subject line and messages to very large groups of people!
It took a lot of work to get back into that provider’s good graces, including tons of phone calls, emails, applications and even some begging. After that, I made it my mission to learn everything I could about email marketing, HTML email, spam laws, and service providers — one of which became my best new email asset.
Can You Recommend Some Email Marketing Service Providers?
To do any type of email marketing, you have to set up an account with an email marketing service provider. These service providers enforce strict email rules, work tirelessly to keep their servers white-listed (liked) by the internet service providers / email providers, provide you the ability to track and measure your email marketing campaign results, and manage your email marketing list subscribes and unsubscribes.
There are a lot of email marketing service providers available for you to use online and I am often asked, “Which is the right one for me and my business?”
The key to answer that question is knowing what you intend to do with your list, what size your list is, how often you will be sending emails to your list, and how you plan to use your list. Then you can compare that information with the features of each individual provider. The features vary from provider to provider, but one area where they vary greatly is how the service is paid for.
For example:
- Some services providers charge you an account setup fee and some do not.
- Some service providers charge you a specified fee to send an unlimited number of emails, while others charge only when a message is sent.
- Some service provider’s determine fees by the size of your list or how often you send email marketing messages to your list.
When evaluating service providers, be sure to look at the features they offer and verify they offer services you want to use or add-on in the future. Find out if they offer only one auto responder message or the capability to send an entire auto responder campaign, if you can have multiple lists with separate opt-ins, and learn how you can customize your email templates and what tracking options are available.
How Can You Help Me With My Email Marketing?
Today my team and I work day in and day out to help entrepreneurs and small business owners just like you add effective, professional, beautiful, email marketing and custom designed HTML ezines to their online marketing toolbox.
I can work with you to design a custom, branded email marketing template for your communications and to program it in HTML and get it ready for your to use.
My team can help you set up an account with an email marketing service provider, load your email newsletter or special announcement template into your account, set up your list(s), and grab the list opt-in code needed for your website.
Bourn Creative can also work with you to develop:
- Email marketing management with the service provider of your choice
- A three, six, or twelve month content plan with optimized article headlines
- Ezine article copywriting and content re-purposing
- Custom HTML email newsletter, ezines, or email blast template design
- Email marketing account setup and opt-in form integration
- Ezine issue coordination and implementation
- Thank you, landing and squeeze page creation
- Auto responder setup and management
- Hands-on training