“Your PayPal payment of $xxxx!”

“You’re APPROVED…”

“Re: Your $100 guarantee…”

Have you come across these sentences ever?

I am sure you have seen emails with these subjects in your inbox, if you had ever shared your name and email addresses on any of the self-proclaimed GURU’s websites promising a free download of some information.

What was your first reaction?

It is increasingly becoming a trend to use these kind of subject lines in marketing emails that are delivered to you inbox. Does it really work?

The first couple of times it might work. But in the second instance you will surely unsubscribe from the list unless you are too lazy to do it. What people using such subject lines forget is the fact that email marketing is about building relationships and not spamming your prospects mailboxes.

One of the very important things to keep in mind in email marketing is the importance of a subject.

A subject sets the tone of your email. If your email should be read or, not, is determined by your subject. If the subject of your email is truthful and appealing your email opens will increase.

Constituents of a Good Subject Line -

What is a good subject line? What are the things that you should keep in mind when writing a subject line for your emails?

1. Keep it short – Follow the principle of KISS while writing your headlines. Keep it short and Simple. About 3 – 4 words is the ideal length. That comes to about 50 characters.
2. Summary – The subject should be a summarization of your email, yet should not reveal the complete secret.
3. WIIFM – You should always keep in mind the needs of your reader when you write your subject line. The WIIFM is one of the most important aspects of your email subject. This is the reason why your readers would read your email.
4. Urgency – Your email subject line should create a sense of urgency in the reader. They should not defer reading your email. Instead it should be the first thing to do on their priority list.
5. Teaser – The subject line should be a teaser. It should immediately catch your reader’s attention and should pique their curiosity.

It is extremely important to emphasize the benefits of reading your email. So your email should read out a benefit and create a curiosity in the minds of your readers. Don’t spam them. Instead give them quality content to read and tell them the actual reason for the email in the subject. If you are able to write a subject that can tell them the benefits of reading the email, they are sure to open it.

Photograph courtesy Luca Pedrotti

This is a guest post by Susan White. If you too wish to guest post at DKSpeaks, you can read the guidelines here.

It’s the most powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal, but when wielded badly, it could turn out to be a boomerang that comes back to hit you in the face instead. Email marketing is one of the most widely used, and most misunderstood Internet marketing tool there is today. To be of any real use to a company, an email marketing campaign it has to be carried out effectively. It should be opened by the customer and perceived to be of value instead of being relegated to the Trash folder unseen, or worse, labeled as Junk or Spam. When you’re marked as a spammer by most people you send out email to, you risk being blacklisted and losing your reputation. To avoid such a situation, here’s what you need to do:

• Avoid sending out mass mails to random people: You may think you’re getting the maximum reach by sending out mass mailings to a number of email ids that you purchased from a third party. But if you knew the normal mentality of people, you would desist from such an action. Most people set their spam filters so that any email from people not in their address book goes directly to the Spam folder which is emptied automatically on a periodic basis. And even people who see such mail in their Inbox mark it as spam once they realize that it is part of a marketing campaign. Perhaps just 1 percent of the mail you sent out is opened, and an even smaller percentage of people respond the way you want them to. It is not worth being labeled as spam for this tiny amount of return on your efforts.
• Use retention emails rather than direct email: Direct email is seen as an in-your-face marketing method, especially if your mail pops up at inopportune moments and intrudes into the busy lives of people. Rather, allow both existing and potential customers to sign up for your newsletters and use these to provide them with the latest news and information about your products and services. When they’ve already interacted with you, they feel comfortable opening emails from you, especially if they’re intrigued by the subject line. If you are sending out direct marketing email however, ensure that you allow people to opt out with a link at the bottom of the page. This prevents them from labeling your email as spam.
• Ensure that your subject line matches the rest of the email: The biggest grouse I have against marketers is that they con you into opening their emails and clicking on the links in them. For example, an email I received from a national magazine (which I was subscribed to) announced that I had won free merchandise and that all I had to do to claim it was follow the link. And when I did so, I was taken to an online store where I could “buy” the merchandise, using a discount voucher. So in effect, I had to spend money on something I did not really need just because I was being given a discount voucher. Needless to say, I marked all emails from the marketer as spam after that. Email marketers must ensure that their subject line is true to what’s inside the email, because while they may con people once, they’re definitely going to get labeled as spam after that.

About the Author:

This article is contributed by Susan White, who regularly writes on the subject of High Speed Internet Service.  She invites your questions, comments at her email address: susan.white33@gmail.com

You have come a long way from the first days of building your home Internet business.  You know how to host your own website and have fantastic products or services, and you are finally ready to send out your first newsletter, telling all of your customers about the special offers and incentives that will keep them coming back for more. The time has come for you to learn how to run a successful email campaign ? One that will increase your customer lists and continue earning you money.

Email campaigns have proven to be one of the best forms of direct marketing.  With all of the people online these days, this comes as no surprise.  Emails can reach massive amounts of people in very little time.

If you are sending out a newsletter, then it is likely that you have already generated a respectable contact list ? A list of those customers who have signed up to hear from you and who are expecting you send them information.  You need to make sure that you send them emails that will immediately seize their attention.  To do this means first giving them a reason to open your email and then giving them a reason to actually read it, click through to your site, and of course, make a purchase.

Given that the statistics show most people will not read your email, much less buy something, in order to overcome the odds, you need to have as many email addresses as possible.  If your website is attracting visitors, then you can increase your email lists by getting as many of those visitors as possible to sign up to receive information from you.  You can get people do this by offering them an incentive to do so.  You can do simple, cost-free things like offer a discount coupon for anyone that signs up.  You can also offer incentives for those same people to get other people to sign up.  Use your imagination and think about what would encourage you to sign up.

Once you get people to sign up to receive your emails, you have already made it over one of the biggest barriers in the market ? You have actually generated some interest.  And not only that, these are voluntary customers who want to hear from you!  Take your email contacts seriously and treat them with respect.  Don’t start spamming them with anything you can think of.

The trick is targeting the right people with the right emails. One of the best ways to ensure that you maintain your current customers is by sending them emails only about services and products that are relevant to them – sending out irrelevant emails will more than likely result in deleted emails.  Send out enough irrelevant emails and you are sure to get unsubscribe notices!

Your automatic e-mail marketing responder software can take care of target marketing for you.  Your autoresponder keeps your customer lists organized based on their interests and past purchases.  All you have to do is craft the effective email copy that will compel your customers to action.  For this you can use one of many target marketing templates designed to catch the attention of your reader. Always make sure that you provide an obvious website-link in your emails.  Don’t make people search for them.

Another great method for increasing your email list is by getting involved in affiliate marketing programs.  Once you team up with associated businesses, you have an opportunity to take advantage of their customer lists.  Affiliate marketing helps to ensure that you are connected only with those customers whose interests match your products and services, giving you a greater chance of making a sale.

Lena Morrish & Dima Nikolayenko are founders of Bridge To Success Co and can help you if you are wondering how to start your own Internet business the right way. Their website, InternetBusinessBTS.com provides you with useful, updated information on not only such technical issues like ‘how to host my website‘, but also on such vital aspects of successfully managing your home internet business like running email campaigns using automatic e-mail marketing responder software, and other ways to attract visitors to your website.

This is the 3rd post in the series on List Building and Email Marketing. You can read the rest two posts here -

1. Post – 1 : Picking your Email Marketing Vendor.
2. Post – 2 : Email Broadcasting.

The success of your Email Marketing campaigns depend largely on whether you emails are being opened or, not. What good is an email if the intended readers don’t open it?

But what is it that makes somebody click on your emails to open it?

The answer has to be obvious – a catchy subject line!! Right?

Will you click to open and email that has a subject line, “You have won $1,00,000″. Of course, not. That email subject line itself shows that it is a spam and has nothing worthy inside it. So what goes into a catchy subject line?

Email Marketing is all about building relationships. Hence it is also important that your subject line reflect this intent and does not look like an attempt to draw your prospects hard-earned money for nothing. Writing catchy and good email subject lines is not a rocket science. All that it requires is a bit of patience and willingness to understand the psyche of your email readers.

Writing Effective Subject Lines :

A few important things that you need to bear in mind when writing email subject line are -

1). The choice of including the “Firstname” – Including the name of the prospect in the subject line catches the attention of the prospect. This is not something new. Even Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” talks about using names to address people to build relationships.

2). Using keywords in your subject line – Why would you want to use a keyword in your subject line? It is a normal practice to include long tail keyword in subject lines. But it is not an advisable practice if you want a better open rate.

3). The KISS formula – Always Keep it Simple and Short. So is the case with email subject lines as well. Why would you want to write long subject lines when a short subject line can do the job for you.

There are many more such useful and handy tips to get a better open rate for your emails. Codrut Turcanu is an email follow-up specialist and has released a handy report called “99 Good Email subject Lines”. You will find many more such useful tips in this report.

You can download your copy of the report here.

It is meant only for e-mail marketers who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their open rates
- and can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong!

So if you are one who is extremely focused on building a huge list but are not quite satisfied with the open rates you see for your emails, then this report can turn things around for you.

Download your copy of the report today itself.

It is meant only for e-mail marketers who are almost
(but not quite) satisfied with their open rates
- and can't figure out what they're doing wrong!

One of the most important aspects of deciding on an auto responder is the availability of a broadcasting facility.

For people who do not know what a broadcasting facility is, I will first explain it in a bit detail.

Auto responders provide you with the option of lining up pre-set messages to be sent to your subscribers. These messages could be sales letters, news feeds or, even informative articles that you want to send to your subscribers. This means that every subscriber in your list will get the messages in the order that you have set it in.

For e.g:- If you have set up a sequence of messages in such a way that message-1 goes after 2 days of the subscriber signing up, followed by message-2 on day-4 of signing up and so on, these messages will be sent in the sequence that you set-it up in on the date that you had scheduled it to be sent.

Now, let’s assume a scenario. You have been looking out for joint ventures with partners who are launching newer products and have finally managed to partner with an Internet Marketer who is just about to launch a new product. He has given you a set of 4 email newsletters that you have to start sending from today on, so that you get your subscribers to visit the pre-launch sales pages and sign up and ready themselves up for the product launch. You want to start promoting the product today itself so that you are amongst the first few who can cash in on the sales of the product.

But…. There is a problem.

You have queued up all the messages in you auto-responder and cannot interfere with the sequence. Wondering why?

1. Most importantly, you will have to mess with the entire  sequence of messages so that you can get these emails to go in between the already scheduled messages.
2. The product launch emails are ones that prepare a subscriber for a launch. Once the product is launched, you don’t want these emails to be still sent out to the newer subscribers who join your list.

This is where “Broadcasting” can help you.

What is Broadcasting?

In a crude definition, broadcasting would mean -

Broadcasting is an instant communication or, transmission that is sent out at a specified time, usually only once, and targeting a wider audience.

The term makes itself pretty much clear from the meaning. This is the same when applied to an auto responder as well. Auto responder services offer you the option of “broadcasting”, so that you can send out adhoc or, unplanned messages to your subscribers.

In the example that we discussed above, if the auto-responder service gives you an option of “broadcasting”, you could easily send out these messages to your subscribers.

If you are thinking that you will have to login and send the messages every specified day, then let me correct you. You don’t have to. Auto-responder services give you an option of scheduling you broadcasts as well. That way you can set it up and forget it. Your subscribers will get the emails on the scheduled time.

When you choose your auto-responder service, check these things about broadcasting -

1. If they offer you a broadcasting service?
2. If they have an option of scheduling broadcasts?
3. If they give you an option of copying existing broadcasts?
4. That there are no limits to broadcasts.

Aweber, is a market leader in auto-responder services. They offer all the above features as well and that too at an affordable price. You can check out Aweber here.

“The Money is in the list” is a useless and worthless statement.

This statement has been professed by the Internet Marketing Gurus over the past so many years and every newbie internet marketer jumping onto the “make money online” bandwagon comes in with a subscription to an autoresponder and a squeeze page, hoping that people will come and sign up at this squeeze page and he will straight away start making lots and lots of money online.

I have seen only a handful of them succeed online. The rest simple fade away from the internet and go back to their 9-5 treadmills with the belief that Internet Marketing and Email marketing does not work.

My beginning too was like this. When I started internet marketing I did not have too much of money to invest. In fact the  only reason why I started the Internet Marketing business was because it was the only low investment option that I had. I was desperate for success and had my plans in place. I bought my domains and a hosting account. I was left with just enough money to buy and autoresponder account and start off with my internet marketing business. I shopped around to find a low cost auto responder and based on the numerous reviews that I read, I signed up with an auto responder company and set up my squeeze page. I started writing articles like crazy under different pen names and directed all of the traffic coming from it to my squeeze page.

Until this, for all of you who would have read about the internet marketing tips written by the Gurus, I am absolutely on track. Ain’t I?

I started getting a trickle of traffic to my squeeze page and after about 43 days of tweaking and analysis, I got my first subscriber. I was happy. Slowly traffic increased and my subscriber sign-up also went up. I was even more happier. When I had about 100 subscribers in my auto responder account, I decided it was time to set up my auto responder series. I set up my auto responder series and the mails started going out. By the time the 4th email had gone out ( that was after the 10th day of the first email), I found that I had about 79 subscribers in my account including the ones who had joined newly. I assumed the rest had un-subscribed from my subscription list. I was zapped. I had no clue why they opted out. My auto responder company had no statistics which could give me a clear picture of what was happening. Everything was working on assumptions. I inferred that the subscribers might not have been prospective buyers and consequently they unsubscribed.

It went on for a few months and I kept getting subscribers and a lot people unsubscribed as well. Since the number of unsubscribers were much more than the subscribers that I acquired, my subscriber list never really grew sharply. I was still content with the results. In the meantime there were a few sales that I got, but since I had no ways of checking if the sales were from my auto responder emails, I had no clue where they came from. My auto responder emails had grown over a period of time. Since my auto responder account gave me an option of creating only a limited number of lists, I had to manage multiple offers and websites with the same list. Everything was still working fine for me, but there was one challenge that I faced. I used to receive adhoc offers to promote certain products that were not there in my list but still sounded lucrative. I wanted to send out a few emails but I had no choice to send them out instantly. I had to set them up in my series and had to wait until those emails would go out. I was still satisfied with my auto responder and the results (though there was nothing to be called results except that I had earned about $4873.00 in about 6 months) –

Then came that eventful day in March when everything changed. If you are expecting a fairytale end to the long and dragging story that I composed above, then that was not what it was. In the morning of that day I tried to log in to my auto responder account and I saw a “temporarily unavailable due to maintenance” message. While I was checking my email account, I found a mail from the auroresponder service providers that they were upgrading and that hey would be unavailable for about 12 hours. I was happy and knew there was some pleasant changes going to happen. After about 14 hours I tried logging and found the same message. I was a little annoyed. I decided I will try the next. The next day when I tried logging in, the message was still the same. I was frustrated. I wrote to their support as there was no support phone # to call. I received no response and the status remained the same. That was the last glimpse that I saw of my auto responder account. Since then whenever I try to login to my account I see a page mentioning, “this domain is up for sale”. After 6 months of list building I found that my list was gone and I was back to square one.

Does that seem to be your story? It might be the story of a lot of us.

That made me infer, that list building and email marketing cannot make me any money……If I do the wrong things.

Everything about list building does not end at the term “List Building”. There is a lot more to it that meets the eye. You need to do a lot of things right and avoid quite a few common mistakes in order for your list to produce money.

These series of posts will be about list-building and everything that your need to do right in order to benefit from it.

Let’s start with the most important thing here.

Get a Professional Auto Responder Company – somebody who has been in the business for some time and knows how to do it. A company who can provide your a restriction less auto responder account with all the features. A company that will not vanish one day. Get Aweber. It is the most reliable auto responder company.

You might want to take their $1.00 test drive today.

Photograph courtesy Sigurd Decroos

“The Money is in the List” – How many times have you heard this? Innumerable times! Is there frustration in your voice when you answered? You sound like me. It is the same frustration that I saw months ago when I was reading some good blog post on list-building, like you are doing today.

Read any blog authored by the gurus, buy any e-book on affiliate marketing tips or, Internet marketing, there is one common statement that you will find in all of those – THE LIST. That is where you start getting frustrated because you know that a list is important but, how would you build a list? When I first started my affiliate marketing business, I was so frustrated with the results that I almost quit. The reason – My sales were so low that my PPC expenses were also not being recovered. In fact I was spending almost 3 times of what I was earning.

If you are facing a problem with building your list, then don’t panic. You are not the only one. Everybody starting off on the internet marketing arena faces the same problem. So let’s understand the ways in which you can build a huge list.

1. Squeeze Page – When I started affiliate marketing, I had no method of capturing email addresses on my landing page. In the beginning there was no landing page at all and all the traffic from my PPC ads were being re-directed directly to the seller’s website. So I got a lot of clicks on my PPC ads but they would all got directly to the seller’s website who would then capture these emails. So it is important that you have a good squeeze page in place where you can capture the details of visitors to your website.
2. Optin on Blog – A blog is one the best ways to capture subscribers. Yaro, quite authoritatively emphasizes the need for a subscriber optin form above the fold in his Blog Profit Blueprint e-book. This works wonders if done right. I saw a jump in susbcriber optins by almost 35% after I put my optin form above the fold.
3. Autoresponder – I used to get at least 10 emails on a daily basis recommending one or, the other autoresponder. Cost-effectiveness was something that I was bothered about. Consequently, I joined at autoresponder that would only charge me about a $10.00 a month. I built a list of about 700 subscribers with the help of this autoresponder and one find day, when I try to login to my account, I find that the company is gone. No autoresponder and no website. I had a backup of the list, so I thought I would use it with a new autoresponder. I joined AWEBER and imported this list into it. But I could only get about 10% of the subscribers to confirm their subscription. I lost the rest 90%. So it is important that you choose the best autoresponder around. Go for Aweber, who has a known presence in the market. Their reputation itself speaks for them.
4. Valuable Content – Provide value to your visitors and they will become subscribers. Buy a good and valuable MRR product, which you can giveaway to your visitors in return for them subscribing to your list. Spending $39 – $40 will not hurt you when you see your list growing by thousands. So don’t compromise on the quality for the price of the product.
5. Treat with respect – Treat your subscribers with respect. I was so annoyyed with the mails that I used to get that I stopped opening the emails after some time and I would delete them, unread. Treat your subscribers with the same respect that you expect from anybody. They would then stay as subscribers and would look upto your advices and would buy from you.

I still remember the days when I read posts full of ideas and suggestions like the one above. After reading through the post I would wonder – All said and done, where would I get the traffic from?

The difficult part in all of these is actually getting a few people to visit your website. How will your build your list, if there are not enough visitors to your website?

You can still build a huge list. Wondering how? The following are a few of them, which if followed judisciously can help you build your list.

1. Giveaways – Giveaways are an effective method to build your list. Sign up for as many giveaways as possible and upgrade your subscriptions whereever possible so that you can about 3-4 gifts. You will get quite a few subscriptions. I built almost 75% of my list from giveaways. There are a lot of people who feel that the list built through giveaways are not worthy of it because it is made of peopel expecting things for free. I  disagree with this, because people who look for something for free are actually people who are on the lookout for something. If you can sell well to such people, you would be able to sell a few products. You can sign up in the form in the top-right corner to keep up on the latest giveaways.
2. Traffic Exchanges – This is again another controversial method of traffic generation. The debate here is that people using traffic exchanges normally surf websites for getting credits and hence their stay is for only a few seconds. But I still prefer this form of traffic generation. Even if a visitor spends about 10-12 seconds on your website and if you website or, squeeze page is catchy enough to hold attention, there would be some action that the visitor would take when he visits your page. Also when there is some traffic flowing to your website, it helps your website in generating more traffic because of the reputation it builds.

Two very good traffic exchanges are Clickthru and Hitsafari. You can join one or, both of them and upgrade as per your plans, in order to get a good amount of traffic.

A little bit of effort is all that is required and these simple techniques can help you generate a good amount of traffic and can help you build a huge list.

Photograph courtesy morgantepsic used under Creatives Common License

One tool that helped me then in building a strong list was “Optin Page Generator”. This is the tool that I am giving away today. All that you have to do to get this free tool is as follows:

1. Retweet this exact message on Twitter. All that you need to do is copy the text below and pasteit in to twitter text box. In case you don’t have a twitter account (which is unlikely), then get one at http://www.twitter.com.
2. Follow me on Twitter. You can follow me by visiting the link below and clicking on the follow button below my picture: http://www.twitter.com/rdilipk1, or even by clicking the twitter icon towards the left of this page.

That’s it. As soon as you complete these two steps, you will get the download link in a direct message. So don’t forget to check your direct messages folder at Twitter.

The message to re-tweet is as follows:

RT @rdilipk1 helps you build list easily by giving away a free copy of OptinPageGenerator. Learn how to get one: http://tinyurl.com/c3tuon

Wait for an interesting post from me on list building and how I built a huge list of 5000 people in about 15 days after spending frustrating weeks with nobody in my list.

In the meantime, Happy list building and Enjoy the tool!!

And don’t forget to tweet my other blog posts.

Photograph courtesy sunshinecity used under Creatives Commons License