{"id":178,"date":"2007-05-16T13:09:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-16T13:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/officeondemand.ca\/blog\/?p=167"},"modified":"2009-10-27T07:48:09","modified_gmt":"2009-10-27T12:48:09","slug":"the-1-email-marketing-sales-killer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/email-marketing\/the-1-email-marketing-sales-killer\/","title":{"rendered":"The #1 Email Marketing Sales Killer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

What’s the number one email marketing problem that few people talk about?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What was going on? Why weren’t my email marketing efforts working as well as they had been?<\/p>\n

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%.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Why did I decide to change to a new email broadcast service?<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Last week I began to make the switch. This week I ran a simple test.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Obviously it wasn’t the emails that were the problem but the service sending them.<\/p>\n

Want to know who I signed up with? Use this link >> https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/email.html<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Should you change to a different email broadcast service?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s the top quality service for serious online marketers who want to use email marketing to grow their business >>
\nhttps:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/email.html<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

– Charlie<\/p>\n

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