May I speak frankly? I’ve been on crutches for three weeks now and have come to one, simple conclusion: There’s nothing very convenient about it.

You can’t carry anything; you can’t find a good place to put the crutches when you’re sitting in a restaurant, or a movie theater, or an airplane; and you may as well not even bother trying to take care of business in a public restroom.

No, my friend, I’m sorry to say that crutches add nothing to your overall speed and mobility, a fact that explains why so few land mammals have evolved to the point where they are born with these appendages already attached. Read More »

With all the examples of modern technology surrounding us today – e-mail, iPods, toaster waffles, etc. – I have to say that the one I find most amazing is the cell phone.

It’s incredible enough that you can make a call from any place at any time to anyone else in the world. But to me, what’s most remarkable is that someone can dial your number, and no matter where you are, the system instantly finds you and puts the call through. (Unless of course, you’re in the supermarket and your wife is calling, in which case it waits until just after you’ve gone through the checkout line.) Read More »

“I write to find out what I am writing about.”

— Henry Miller

One question that comes up often when I speak to business people about E-Newsletters is, “How important is it for us to write original content?” I’ve been fielding this particular question long enough to know that what’s really being asked is, “Can we just get somebody else to write this for us?”

Much to the disappointment of the questioners, my answer has always been a resounding, “No!” Read More »

Back when we were fresh out of college, my friend Tom told me his theory about picking up women: The better looking you are, the more time you have to make a good impression on a stranger.

If you’re average looking, Tom concluded, you have about two minutes. A little better than average, a little more time. A little worse than average, a little less time. In my case unfortunately, this worked out to negative time, which essentially meant that I had to make a good impression on a woman about 30 seconds before I arrived.

In any case, and while I’m not sure about the numerical accuracy of Tom’s conclusions, I do think that he had a valid point in general: First impressions matter, and the more intriguing something is at the beginning — for whatever reason — the more willing we are to give it a chance to prove itself. Read More »

One newsletter I wrote posed several questions regarding unsolicited e-mail, and concluded with a request for your views on what was appropriate and what was not when it comes to interacting with newsletter subscribers.

The response was amazing! Not only did I get a ton of replies, but the range of feelings and points of view was all over the map. Some examples from either end of the continuum: Read More »

What is email capture and why is it important? When visitors come to your site, they’re generally not ready to throw down their credit card. If someone comes to your site who is not ready to make a purchase at that moment, you must have email capture in place to ensure you don’t lose them forever.

Email capture just means a way for your website to “capture” a visitor’s email address, instead of letting them leave your site without providing any information that would allow you to contact them in the future.

So, how do you get people to give up their email address? Read More »

What’s the one problem that can kill your email marketing efforts? No matter how clever your emails, or how big your mailing list is you can see your sales die if this happens to you.

What’s the number one email marketing problem that few people talk about?

Over the last two months I’ve continued to email to my growing list of over 30,000 opt-in subscribers weekly and seen my sales volume decrease each week. At first I thought maybe it was a seasonal issue, people were taking advantage of the spring weather and not spending as much time shopping for advice online. But the continued decline in sales just didn’t make sense in comparison to the 5-10% monthly growth I’d seen the previous year.

What was going on? Why weren’t my email marketing efforts working as well as they had been?

When I looked further into the problem, I noticed that not only were sales down but the number of people who were opening the emails with my weekly marketing tip was down. Previously 20% of the people I mailed to opened my weekly email. Recently this had dropped to less than 10%.

Now that made sense. Fewer people opening and reading my emails equaled fewer sales. But why were fewer and fewer people opening my top marketing ideas and tips?

I had an idea. Was it that my emails weren’t getting through? My email broadcast service assured me that 92-98% of my emails were getting through, though now I seriously question their data.

Then two weeks ago, it got even worse! I noticed that I wasn’t receiving new order notices from my email broadcast and shopping cart system even though people were still buying.

It turned out that my email broadcast service had gotten their email servers listed as the sources of spam and blocked by the AOLs, GMails, AT&Ts and other services which provide email to consumers. How did this happen? I wasn’t sending email that was spam.

One bad apple does it. What had happened was that despite my efforts to be squeaky clean with my email marketing, one or two of my email broadcast services customers were flagrantly violating all the guidelines and using the service to send unwanted email. The result.

My email broadcast service had it’s servers blacklisted – which meant everyone of its thousands of customers emails were blocked. (Not the first time this had happened either.) Within a couple of days they had booted up new servers and were sending email broadcasts again but – I decided it was time to make a switch.

Why did I decide to change to a new email broadcast service?

First, the day, my email provider service got blacklisted, I received an email from a friendly competitor of mine who also runs a popular small business marketing site. Obviously he wasn’t using the same blacklisted broadcast service I was. He was using one I’d considered a while back. He was using > https://www.marketingforsuccess.com/email.html

Secondly, when I wrote my friend I asked him about his experience with his email broadcast service and most importantly what his open rate was, i.e. what percent of people he mailed to opened his emails. He wrote back to say his open rate was 35%, which is good and was more than three times what mine had declined to.

Last week I began to make the switch. This week I ran a simple test.

I sent the same email to different sets of subscribers via my previous service and the one I’d decided to try out. The result. My open rate was 50+% via the new service versus 9% at the old.

Obviously it wasn’t the emails that were the problem but the service sending them.

Want to know who I signed up with? Use this link >> https://www.marketingforsuccess.com/email.html

Should you change to a different email broadcast service?

Send your emails in html format so you can determine the open rate. A couple of days after you send out your next email check to see how many people opened it. If it’s less than 20+%, chances are you have a problem. The solution is to signup with an email marketing service that strictly prohibits the sending of unwanted emails and whose email servers aren’t listed as sources of spam.

Here’s the top quality service for serious online marketers who want to use email marketing to grow their business >>
https://www.marketingforsuccess.com/email.html

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to increase sales, but to make it work you need to make sure people get your emails.

– Charlie

Do a search on popular web site marketing topics and “List Building” comes up as one of the most popular. If you don’t have a large in-house qualified list to mail to then, you should.

A few tactics to use are a free giveaway to motivate people to fill in a simple form on your site and give you their contact information. The best ways to get people to your site to fill in the form is top search engine placement, articles, links from other sites and Google Ads. But just building your list is only the start to making your online marketing work…

The key to online marketing success isn’t just having a big list of qualified prospects, it’s using it correctly to convert prospects to clients. Here are a couple of key things to remember.

Unless your prospects receive and open the emails you send them you’re wasting your time. Many email broadcast services happily charge you to send your mailings, but only a few actually deliver.

That’s right. You could have list of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospects but when most email broadcast services send your emails, only a very small percentage receive them much less open them. More important than a great subject line to get them to open your email, or great copy to get them to read it is how many people actually receive your email.

Want to know if your email campaigns are working?

Send your email in html and then check the open rates. If only a couple of percent of people are reading it you’ve got a problem. With a top quality email broadcast service 20-30% of your audience should at least open your emails.

What’s more important than building your list?

The number of people who actually get your email and open it.

– Charlie
Small Business Marketing – Time Tested and Proven Ideas