Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

 

Don’t Make This Fatal Email Marketing Mistake

Author: Charlie Cook   |   March 26th, 2010

If you’ve worked hard to build your list of qualified prospects, email is a great way to stay in touch with interested buyers and prompt them to visit your site or call so you can sell your products. Once you’ve built your list, send out a weekly idea, tip or case study and you should instantly see a surge in sales.

Often, though, online businesses that take all the right steps to build a sizable list of prospects suddenly stop seeing results. After companies work hard to stay in contact with potential buyers, fewer and fewer respond. It even happened to me! Why?email marketing tips

Email marketing should work like hooking your house up to a water line. As long as your reservoir or well is full of water, all you need to do is turn the tap and you should have all the water you can drink.

With email marketing, as long as you’ve maintained your list of contacts, you simply need to send out a small prompt to attract buyers. But imagine if someone shut off your water supply without your knowledge. You’d be left high and dry or with a trickle at best, wondering why the flow had stopped.

Here’s what happened to me. I signed up with a full service shopping cart and email broadcast service. Everything went great for a while, but then I noticed that sales were slowing. It made no sense. I was offering new and updated products, but the number of sales per week had started to dwindle.

I investigated and discovered that fewer people were opening my emails. Based on some testing, I identified the problem.

My email broadcast service had taken on other clients who were using their system to send out spam. The result was that more and more email delivery services like AOL, AT&T, Comcast, and others were blocking emails sent by my service provider.

Even though I follow the rules religiously and only send to people who request information from me, my emails were getting blocked. And it was killing my sales.

I’d thought about changing broadcast services before, but I’d hesitated. The fact is, it’s a lot of work to make the switch. First, I would have to change all the sign-up forms on my site so they pointed to my new service. Then, I’d have to convince my subscribers to make the change. I knew some wouldn’t. For some, having to reconfirm their subscription is too much effort.

But when it means the difference between reaching qualified prospects and losing contact with potential buyers, it has to be done. So a couple of weeks ago, I made the switch to an email broadcast provider with the best reputation in the business. Loyal subscribers like you switched with me and now 5 times as many people open each email I send. Sales have taken off.

If you use email broadcasts to stay in touch with prospects and clients, make sure your readers are actually getting your emails. I can tell you from experience there is a good chance many aren’t.

To make sure you’re able to reach all of your contacts, choose a trustworthy broadcast service. Here are the two services that I use and recommend:

My email broadcast service
This squeaky clean service won’t let spammers in and will ensure that your readers get the emails you send. Send broadcast emails and auto response emails with confidence >>

My shopping – ecommerce service
This service handles all of my online orders and manages the delivery of my digital products. They do a great job, and their ad-tracking system makes it easy to split test sales pages and fine-tune your site. They’re the best; just don’t use their email broadcast service. Get the details >>

Don’t let someone shut off the flow of leads and sales to your business and be left high and dry. Keep the pipeline open with an email broadcast service you can trust and a shopping system that delivers.

Charlie


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