Useful Products: Email Subject Lines Report

Email marketing is a worthwhile but often frustrating process. You can send all the emails you want but even if people are opening them you don’t know if they are reading them. And that’s even if they are opening them, which all too often isn’t the case. Hey, we’re all busy, and few of us can honestly say that we read every email we get – so a few are going to get skipped over and to avoid that happening to you, you need to get people’s attention pretty quickly.

This is why this 17-page downloadable PDF report is such a clever idea. You know how it is when you’re scrolling through your email and there’s about 75 of them there. If something doesn’t look important or entertaining, the chances are it will end up deleted before very long. So to get right into the crux of the matter right there in the subject line is something that will make a huge difference, and with these bulletproof subject lines to hand you can make that happen.

Grabbing the attention and the confidence of your customer before they have even read your email creates a powerful knock-on effect which gives your every word more weight. This provides you with an excellent chance to drive the sale, and makes this guide a must-have. It’s one of those little difference-makers that comes around every once in a while and can change the way you do business for good. It’s certainly worth checking it out.

Why not try it for yourself?

99 Good Email Subject Lines

How To Use Your Email List

Customer retention is a big deal for any company. Your return customers are the ones who will keep the business ticking over, and should be your most prized customers. It is, after all, the return customers, the loyal customers, who will give you some of the most important publicity that any company could ask for – the word-of-mouth publicity that is the lifeblood of any successful business. People are, after all, more likely to believe a friend who tells them that a company is great than a company that tells them it is great.

It is this personal touch that is at the heart of any business improvement strategy. You will build an email list that can be used to keep in contact with the customers that you pick up over time. How you then address those customers is vitally important. Talking to the customers on their level is essential. There is always a danger inherent in constantly talking – or writing – as though there is a very firm dividing line between you, the business and them, the customer. If someone feels that they are simply being sold to, that they are a unit to be treated as a reliable cash machine, they will not even read your email.

Writing an email to a customer presents a lot of challenges. There is a question as to how much you acknowledge that you are a salesperson and the person receiving it is a customer. It is natural to want to be the customer’s friend. To an extent, it is possible to keep this up but you still need to keep the sale at the core of your message. It is not about how much of a salesperson you are, or how much of a friend. Rather it is about keeping a natural voice. You are writing to a customer, but it is a customer that you like. The customer can be happy to hear from you, and ready to make a purchase too.

It is not just about how you use your email list, but also when you do. Too many emails will lead to a customer becoming frustrated and irritated, and therefore less likely to remain a customer. There is a balance to be struck between keeping yourself in the customer’s mind and “spamming”. The golden rule is to have a good reason for sending a message to your email list. The best way to do this, in fact, is to have some “email only” offers that are available only to people on your email list. You can have better offers for your mailing list because they are a select bunch, and it will make them more likely to read your email.

The core message to keep in mind when using an email list for direct marketing is that people need a reason to act. Even if that action is something as simple as opening and replying to an email, you as a business individual need to make it more likely that your customers will become, and continue to be, return customers.

Updating Your Mailing List

Building a strong mailing list is a vitally important element of direct marketing, and requires a marketer to have a very pro-active approach if it is to succeed. One of the key elements of building the best mailing list is to never treat it like a job that is done. The best results in direct marketing will come when you keep your mailing list constantly updated, adding new contacts to it on a regular basis. A long mailing list with a lot of customers is a great thing to have, but is not as important as the mailing list being up to date.

How often you update your mailing list is really up to you, however considering the importance of regularity, it is worth scheduling it. It all depends on your turnover of customers and the frequency with which you want to send out marketing emails. Once a week is not a bad idea – it can be the last thing you do in a business week, or the first thing you do at the start of a new one. This aspect of regularity makes the updating of the mailing list a routine, and gives you the impetus you will need to keep it current. The longer it is current, the more valuable it is.

Updating a mailing list is not simply a matter of adding the new customers, of course. If, for example, it is an email list, you will find that there are email addresses that bounce back any mail sent to them. Now, this is not to say that you should immediately delete from your mailing list any email addresses that bounce back an email. In actual fact, there are a lot of reasons why an email might bounce back. It is not a sure sign that mail from your address has been blocked, or that the email address is no longer functioning. It could be bouncing back for another reason, so do not delete the address from your contacts immediately.

If you receive contact from a customer, or potential customer, who makes very clear that they are not willing to receive any more contact from you then it is time to delete their details from your mailing list. There is nothing to be gained by continually contacting people who have made it clear that they do not wish to hear from you. All that will happen is that you will harden their opposition to you.

A mailing list is only as good as it is up to date. The up-to-date mailing list will ensure that the right people are receiving your email – or their paper mail – and are getting back to you in order to make purchases or retain your services. Ensuring that you are contacting the right people, though challenging, will ensure that you have an ongoing strategy for customer retention which will keep your business ticking over. A constantly updated mailing list is a vital part of a company’s marketing strategy and is worth all the time that you put into it.

Business Marketing – Maximize Your Worth

Any business wants to keep and augment its market share, and the tactics it uses to achieve that are important. Most companies start out the same way – spotting a need and fulfilling that need by advertising to potential customers using any means necessary. Your first few meetings with customers probably were, or will be, face-to-face consultations that either developed into a regular appointment or solved a problem within the initial few meetings. As a business grows, though, an increasing amount of its custom starts to come from other businesses.

Whether your work is chiefly consultative or supply-based, business to business marketing is something that you should think about early on in the life of your business. There are various reasons for this. Companies outsource a lot of work so that they can concentrate on applying themselves to their area of expertise. They want to get someone – for a reasonable price – who will have the same level of expertise in a different area. Also, companies have by their nature larger budgets than individuals, can write off consultative work as tax-deductible and are larger entities (therefore having more needs).

Business to business marketing is also more conducive to direct mailing by its nature. A personal email address is, for many people, where they receive updates from their family and friends, or what they use to keep track of blogs or forum memberships. Receiving business emails to those addresses can be somewhat jarring, and sending to them can put in place some tricky questions about how “businesslike” you can be in your approach. Working between businesses can be liberating in this respect, as it is all the more clear that you are in a financial transaction, a quid pro quo.

Business marketing is also free from the ethical question of “cold marketing”. There can be few of us who have not hung up on a telemarketer once or twice, particularly when they call us at home. Our home address is where we live, eat and are ourselves. In the office, it is right to talk about business. Getting a phone call trying to sell you anti-virus software at 7:30 pm is another thing entirely. So it is with email and direct mail through the postal service. A lot of people feel put out by receiving marketing copy with their daily postal delivery – but if they are a business it is part of the process and less of a problem.

Whatever else you do in terms of business marketing, this does make the entire process a lot more straightforward. You can be more direct, and can be more honest about the fact that you are selling something. This is a weight off any direct marketer’s mind. If you stop and talk to someone who works as a telemarketer it is not rare to hear them say that, as this is the only job they can get, they have to simply grin and bear it when a customer is rude to them. In direct business marketing this is much less of a hazard, and this clarity is extremely welcome for any business.

Should You Buy Mailing Lists?

There is an increasing market in business for contact information that could be useful to marketers. this is visible in the sale of mailing lists by various companies – some with good reputations and others which have a tinge of the disreputable about them. For the small business looking to reach out to a wider audience, the idea of having ready access to a brand new list of potential leads can sound like a gift from the Heavens. But is that the whole story, and are pre-collated mailing lists the business boost they are sold as?

The truth lies somewhere in the middle of it all, it should not surprise you to learn. What any marketer wants more than anything – short of a guaranteed sale, which is rarely offered for sale and usually has to be created by the business itself – is a qualified lead, and there is a great deal of difference between a cold lead and one which is already half-sold. It is not especially common to find lists of qualified leads for sale. It helps then to think of the Cold-Qualified-Sold question as a matter of scale, with an entirely unqualified lead at 0% and a sale at 100%.

Some companies will simply harvest email addresses, place the information on a CD-Rom and sell that data for a price. It is important to look beyond the promises and think about whether the information on the disc will actually be of genuine use to your business. It may be the case that the leads on the disc have been qualified to a certain extent, but they will only ever have been qualified on the product or service area in which you operate – not your business specifically, and the upshot of using this contact information can be mixed – with some people asking you to stop sending them email and others flat out ignoring your messages.

The only way to guarantee a pre-sold customer – or at least a qualified lead for your company – is to set about compiling your own mailing lists. The best way of doing this is to offer the opportunity to sign up for further information, something which can be done in a few ways. If you ask straight out for someone to sign up to receive email, they probably won’t do it. If, however, you offer an email contact service whereby you answer questions and deal with customers one-to-one in the first instance, they are more likely to have an interest in email that you send them.

Be cautious about buying mailing lists from anyone. If you have a trusted business contact who has a list that he or she either has no further use for – because he or she is leaving the business – and they want to sell it to you, it is fair to be interested. If the information on offer to you comes to someone in the same sector as you, but in a different niche, then it may be of use. But generalized, cookie-cutter mailing lists are of no use to you.