Mobilize Mail Opinion

Now that you have defined a reason as to why you are emailing people you need to work out a mail-out frequency and stick to it!

We recommend for commercial emails not to have a weekly mail-out frequency. If you do then be prepared to see your mailing list quickly dry up. Ask yourself if you would like to hear from a business every week.

A fortnightly mail-out frequency is risky but if you have great content that your subscribers love more than their family pet then go for it.

However based on our experience a monthly mail-out frequency is standard and generally the expected norm. This does not let you off the hook in terms of providing great content – that is still very much expected from your subscribers.

When you setup a mailing list within your account make sure you add in the “List Description” field the mail-out frequency so your subscribers know what they are letting themselves in for. The “List Description” field is mentioned in the confirmation emails the subscriber receives.

Great news – according to Adotas and Emarketer – email & interactive marketing is increasing in popularity and getting more of the spend than other channels.

EMarketer notes that budgets were more likely to be cut than increased for traditional media such as TV, radio and direct mail, but more respondents said they would up their investments in e-mail marketing, search and interactive than said spending would be reduced

With confidence running high and spending up for email and interactive marketing – I’d like to introduce you to our new ‘Interactive” marketing channel – BusinessBlogs. We have created this NEW marketing channel for you!

“Click to read our Story” and learn more about the progressive move from Outbound to Inbound Marketing.

While currently print media still has the largest slice of the pie, email marketing is increasing in popularity and will continue to erode the large segments of the pie held by print, and the other traditional media channel for advertising.

Check out our new Interactive Marketing Solution for you – “Reach more quality NZ Eyeballs” click here

It is important that you put some effort into creating a clear and effective email marketing strategy as it can make the difference between a rapidly growing mailing list (that helps increase your sales and build stronger relationship with your subscribers) or result in the potential of losing your subscribers and getting your messages blocked before they reach your subscribers inbox.

When you send an email from your business to your subscribers you are in fact presenting your business officially to each subscriber. How the subscriber views your email will decide how the subscriber also views your business. An email that contains sloppy formatting, poor or irrelevant content could set a negative perception in the subscribers mind about your business.

Subscribers now expect a well designed email message with informative content that adds value to them. Competition is fierce these days especially with globalization. The subscriber knows they are in control of the relationship. So it is vital to your business to only send well formatted and informative emails.

In this series we will cover the basics of good ethical email marketing.

Step 1: The Reason

Have you ever asked yourself this question?

“What do I want to achieve from emailing my clients and prospects?”

This may sound very Zen but in order to build a solid house one must first have a solid plan.

We asked some of our clients this very question and here are some of their replies:

“I want to be able to alert my customers to new products and services as soon as they come online.”

“I want to provide fantastic educational content to my subscribers so they have a great feeling about my business and end up wanting to buy my products!”

“We see email as providing a quick and efficient way of staying in touch with our seminar attendees after the event. By creating a mailing list of attendees we will not lose touch with them but in fact continue our relationship with them through email. This will enable our company to alert people to new events without having to do too much cold calling!”

“I want to be able to create autoresponders that automatically email them each month so I stay in touch with my subscribers without much effort.”

If you define a reason or two as to why you are emailing your clients and prospects then the rest of the work in creating your email marketing strategy becomes far easier and more enjoyable.

Another point to remember is subscribers are very smart and it won’t take them long to ignore your emails and your business if they learn you have a motive similar to:

“I want to bombard my subscribers with endless emails about how fantastic and vital my business is to their lives. I also want to sell my list to my mates so they can send information about their businesses as well!”

The next step in our series will focus on the frequency of sending emails to your subscribers.

We have recently applied the following enhancements to the auto-responder feature available in your account:

1. An auto-responder message can now be delivered to a subscriber instantaneously after that person joins the mailing list associated with the auto responder rule and,
2. A group of auto-responder messages can be pre-scheduled to activate on selected mailing list(s). For example you could schedule the delivery of a series of messages to release extracts of an e-book. Each time a new subscriber is added to the mailing list the schedule of auto responder messages would commence.

We are continuing to enhance our system with more user-friendly features. Watch this space for an update on our built-in survey feature.