Targeted email marketing campaigns take a little bit of time and patience to achieve success. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their email campaigns consists primarily of simply sending out emails. In fact, much of the well-planned marketing campaign should take place before a single message ever goes out to anyone.

You’ll want to begin by thinking about the purpose of your campaign, then the various strategies that you might use to achieve that purpose. This requires that you develop an understanding of your audience, the types of messages that they will be likely to respond positively to, and also the timing of the messages you’re sending out.

Discovering The Purpose of Your Email Campaign

This first step is so deceptively simple that many people forget about it entirely. They assume that sending out an advertisement is better than sending out no advertisement, so why not?

But think about it like this: you are about to send a message to a group of people who were interested enough in you and your products that they agreed to be contacted. What if this is the only message from you that they ever open? If there is no fundamental purpose for the message, then your only chance to connect with a highly qualified lead could be waste.

Don’t misunderstand–this does not mean that every message you send out should push the hard sale. That’s not going to work for most people either. But there has to be a reason for each message, something that it aims to accomplish. In many cases, this may be as simple as building trust. Email marketing campaigns are excellent avenues for building trust prior to asking for the sale, but you won’t build up that trust just by virtue of having sent out 400 words of copy. You need to be active in accomplishing the goal of your mailing, and it helps to have a clear idea of that goal in advance.

Marketing To Your Target Audience

The goals of your message should have a lot to do with the people it is being sent to. This goes above and beyond the standard demographic targeting, to looking at the types of actions that a person on your list has performed. If you are going to send out a sales letter, think about whether or not it will benefit you to send it to people who have already purchased your product. Or whether there is some add-on or up-sell that you could be pitching to them instead.

Imagine what would happen if you created a special list segment containing only people who have mentioned your product or service on their blogs. Now there’s a group of people to pitch a special offer to. Email marketing campaign software is essential for setting up this type of market segmentation in your email campaigns.

What Type Of Message Best Fits Your Email Marketing Campaign?

If people are signing up for your list after buying your product, your messages to them should be somewhat different than messages for people who are signing up from informational pages on your site. For informational subscribers, there is probably no better or more efficient strategy than to use email autoresponders to build up slowly to the call to action. This way you can lovingly hand-craft a series of trust-building sales messages that gently woo the potential customer, and deliver them over a tested period of time. The best part is that you only have to write the email series once, and then once the subscriber buys you can use 1-2-All’s subscriber actions to have them automatically switched over to your ‘relationship management’ list for existing customers.

Timing Your Email Marketing Campaign

I mentioned sending out your email campaign along a tested timetable. This is a really important piece of the email marketing puzzle, and one which will be different for every demographic and every product niche.

Most people just choose an arbitrary frequency to send their newsletters out, and try to stick with that schedule. This can be a good tactic for promoting an air of stability for your company. If this is your campaign strategy, you’ll want to set up a calendar or timetable for yourself so that you’re not rushing to produce sub-par content at the last minute every week or month.

On the other hand, sometimes it can be wiser to consider the natural fluctuations of your market. If you are promoting a seasonal product, no one is going to be interested in reading about it until the season approaches. So if you send out a newsletter every month, people will already be used to ignoring you by the time the appointed season comes around. In this case you will probably actually make more sales by not sending anything out for months at a time.

There are two basic groups of individuals who you will have contact over the course of your marketing efforts: buyers and non-buyers.

Buyers have already made a decision to purchase, they just may not be sure exactly what they want to buy. They tend to be looking for the vendor that can most fully and readily justify that decision.

Non-buyers are psychologically very different because they have not yet made that decision. So even though they are offering you the opportunity to coax them through the decision-making process, your efforts are much less likely to be rewarded and the tactics required are very different.

The focus of this article is right where the focus of your own marketing efforts should be: on the buyers.

You see, a lot of businesspeople run into problems by failing to distinguish between members of these two very different groups. Whether you’re marketing by email, direct mail, over the web, through television and radio advertisements, or face to face, the surest way to make sales is always to appeal to the buyers. You may be able to convince a non-buyer to make a purchasing decision, but that will tend to be a hard-won sale. A buyer has already made that decision. They basically just need a safe place to deposit their money. Actually, what they need is a sense of security.

Take a moment to remember the last time you had made a decision that you had a need. You went out looking for a solution, and what did you do? If you are anything like me, you started greedily devouring all the information you could find about the possible solutions to your need. You went out and made yourself an expert.

And what did you end up buying? Probably the product you had the most information about. The one that offered to fulfill aspects of your need that you hadn’t even thought about. The authority product.

Many people make the mistake of keeping their email marketing messages, web pages, and other materials nice and brief in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. They justify this to themselves by imagining that a snappy, bullet-list approach will instantly embed itself into the subconscious minds of passers-by, spurring them to suddenly take the dramatic action of biting into whatever hook you’ve tossed out for them.

In reality, this approach does nothing for the people who matter most: the buyers. These folks come to you with money burning holes in their pockets, and all they want is for you to make them an expert on why your product is so wonderful. If you can sufficiently educate them on the benefits of your product and the needs of the market it serves, they will feel grateful to you for accepting their money.

The use of a good email marketing autoresponder system affords you a tremendous opportunity to communicate with your potential clients in a way that virtually guarantees future sales.

The key to making any kind of sale is trust. At the most basic level, a potential customer has to trust that you will give them what you say you will give them. Beyond that, they have to trust that the product or service you provide them will be high quality. They have to be able to believe that you understand their needs, and are offering them a suitable solution.

Broken down like that, it sounds like it should be very simple to win a sale. However, people are not as trusting as they once were. More and more people have had the experience of being ripped off in one way or another. Particularly when you are dealing with clients over the Internet, it can be difficult to win the kind of personal confidence that is needed to secure a sale. Ultimately, the client has to feel secure before they will take a risk on you. And it is your job to help them feel that way.

The surest way to build that kind of confidence is to trade on your reputation. For example, I find it easier to order from Amazon than from XYZ Online Shop because Amazon has more to gain by maintaining its reputation than by ripping me off. This is essentially what we mean when we talk about authority.  You are an authority when your reputation is worth more than the individual product you sell.

One of the surest ways to establish yourself as an authority is to teach people something they didn’t know before. The more you are able to teach someone, the more knowledgable they assume you are.

Now you can simply put up a lot of useful information on your web site, but that has some drawbacks. For starters, it creates a situation where the client has to seek out the information on their own. The feeling this produces is often closer to being self-taught. One of the ways that companies have gotten around this is by starting blogs.

Because a weblog is time-sensitive and tends to be a little more informal than a traditional static web page, it tends to be more successful for building up your authority with your subscribers. It creates the feeling of a relationship in which you are providing excellent information and they are waiting for more. This is effective, but it is also a lot of work!

A blog is a commitment that only retains its effectiveness through long-term updating. That means creating more and more content. You also never get to assume that a particular visitor has been exposed to your previous work, but you’ll lose long-time subscribers if you rehash too much old information. So a lot of bloggers end up somewhere in the gray area, never really establishing as much authority as they may deserve, simply because they lose the ability to guage their audiences.

With email autoresponders, all of these problems are solved. There is no continued commitment to produce content, because every new subscriber will receive the same sequence of messages. All you need to do is keep your information up-to-date through minor editing. You also have much tighter control over the progress of each subscriber, because you get to design the sequence of messages to offer stages of learning. And unlike a static web site, an autoresponder series can give the recipient the feeling that they are being personally tutored. They receive a personalized message from you every so often, that is custom-tailored to their current knowledge level, and that they can respond to for extra help.

If your autoresponder series makes sense and shows your recipients how to gain the maximum benefit out of your product or service, you will not only have established yourself as an authority. You will have also convinced them that your product is truly useful. And what do you do when a truly useful product is supported by a knowledgable authority? You buy it.

Every successful business fills some type of need. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when it comes to marketing your products and services, because you will be much more likely to make the sale if your potential clients clearly understand why they need to have what you’re offering. If they think your product is something that would be nice, but is ultimately unnecessary, how likely do you think they will be to open up their wallets at a time of economic crisis? In order to succeed, you need to show them why the benefits of your product are absolutely indispensable to them.

Now the reason we say that something is a “need” is because there are strong consequences if the need is not met. You need to eat, because if you don’t eat then you won’t survive. You need to sleep, because if you don’t sleep then a lot of very bad things will happen to you. So in order to demonstrate that your product is not just desirable but necessary, you have to figure out what will happen to a person who fails to buy it from you.

It might sound like an impossible task, making your product sound as essential as food or rest. In fact, you really don’t have to go to that kind of extreme. And if you were to try, it would be pretty difficult to sound convincing. But the scary part is that our world is full of twists and turns, and we’ve all had the experience of thinking we had something completely taken care of, only to find out that we had missed some crucial ingredient.

Here’s a great example: everybody eats because they know they have to, and they even enjoy it. But up until a few years ago no one had ever heard of Omega 3 fatty acids. Your brain is made of them, and your mood and immune system go wonky if you don’t get enough of them, but nobody ever knew the difference. Until suddenly, some ingenious vitamin marketer caught wind of the discovery and went around explaining to journalists and magazine writers that the food everyone had been eating wasn’t enough. We all needed more of these mysterious and elusive Omega 3s that we’d never heard of before. We call this creating a market.

And what happened as a consequence of this publicity? Supplements like Omega 3 fats are now driving the continued growth of a 25 billion dollar a year industry, even while the rest of the economy is tanking! So you see, the real meat and potatoes of remaining profitable is explaining what is missing from the meat and potatoes that people already have.

All of this is leading up to the real practical application, and that has to do with email marketing. If you set your mind to it, email marketing can be a really outstanding way to spread just the right kind of fear. In fact, if you do it right, your likely to increase your subscribers’ level of engagement with your newsletter. Because every company has some handy dandy product or service that would make life easier, and most of them send out “newsletters”full of product updates and sales information and the like. But very few of them ever contain any real “news.” And, coincidentally, very few of them ever get read.

Think about it: what kinds of things do you see on the front page of a newspaper? Mostly scary things. And why do you see them there? Because they sell newspapers! People are always drawn to scary information, because we know that we have this tendency to overlook things. I was sure something was missing from my diet, and so I listened when all the bloggers and TV doctors started telling me I needed Omega 3s. And I’m still listening! I’m waiting for someone to tell me what else I’m overlooking. Everyone is. And we’ve got 25 billion dollars to spend just on supplements that we never knew we needed before!

So if you’re sending sending out a newsletter, why not make it less about your product and more about the “news.” Point out some recent tragedy that could have been cleverly avoided through the judicious use of your product. Highlight some failing market that is plagued by a dramatic underuse of your product. Share a case study about some customer who almost didn’t make it because they weren’t using your product. Create your market.

And if you’re not sending out a regular email newsletter, in this economy? Good luck!

In my last post I discussed some ways that you can use email marketing to build up positive feelings so that people will look forward to receiving your messages and feel relieved when they arrive. Rewards, even small rewards, play a huge role in shaping our motivation and determining the types of actions we will take in the future.

However, as important as positive reinforcements are for successful marketing, they are only a part of what it takes to motivate people to take action. And this is doubly true when you are trying to market your products or build your brand during a slow economy. When fragile markets and shrinking budgets are making people more and more hesitant to invest their resources, you have to develop an understanding of their hesitation.

People hesitate because they are afraid of making the wrong decision. They are afraid of wasting their time, their money, and their manpower, and they are ultimately afraid of failing. There are two ways that you can work with this fear: by defusing it, or by turning it to your advantage.

Email marketing offers an ideal platform for defusing fear, because it allows you to portray your company as a solid and reliable performer. You can emphasize your commitment by developing a regular schedule of mailing that go out just like clockwork. Over a long period of time, you become as familiar and comfortable as an old pair of sneakers. People come to feel at ease relying on you because they find that you stay with them in good times and in bad times.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being old faithful. But there are plenty of ways that you implicitly and explicity build the perception of reliability into your mailings. If you’ve been around a long time, you can celebrate the anniversaries of important dates in your company’s history. But if you haven’t, you can build the sense of reliability into the very fabric of your company by sending out company timelines that stretch out years into the future.

Above all, you want to position yourself as someone who can help with the problems that your potential clients are inevitably experiencing. And the best way to do that is to talk knowledgeably about those problems. Try building your newsletter around the idea that you are in the business of solving the problems that your clients experience.  Then your actual product or service is reframed–it is just another way that you’ve come up with to help people overcome the problems that you seem to know so much about. There’s something very comforting about that.

In my next post, I’ll explore the flipside of this equation: ways that you can turn your clients’ fears to your advantage, by placing the emphasis on what will happen if they fail to fully utilize your products and services.

Imagine you’re sitting around a poker table, staring down a handful of straight-faced players. Your cards are okay, but not great. You think they might be good enough to win if no one else has anything spectacular, but you probably would only be willing to bet a few chips. As luck would have it, the first round of betting takes place with only a small raise, so you go match the bet without a second thought.A second round of betting begins, with another small raise. Since it’s only a small amount, you match that bet as well. And another, and another, and another. Soon there’s a large pile of chips in the middle of the table, and many of them came from you. Looking over your cards, you realize that the situation has not improved much–your hand is still passable, but mediocre. Finally, someone places a bet that is larger than you are comfortable matching without a better hand.

You know you should cut your losses and fold, but you’ve already invested so much. You feel that you have a right to win, even without the cards to back that feeling up. And so, with some hesitation, you push your chips into the center even as you lament your poor chances at getting the chips back. What happened?

In the past I’ve written at some length about the value of cultivating a feeling of familiarity among your clients. Frequent contact by email is, of course, a highly efficient way to go about that. You put together a single newsletter every so often, add a little personality and a healthy serving of reassuring stability, and hit send. All at once, you’ve reached out to every person that has ever been interested enough in you to sign up for your mailing list. At this point you’ve done more to build your business than 95% of small business owners. But if your plan ends with the client merely receiving your message, you may still have missed out on a tremendous opportunity.

You see, it takes a lot of energy for a person to make a decision, to reach out and take action. So once you’ve taken an action, you tend to want to protect the energy you spent. You’ll be much more willing to take additional actions to protect your initial investment. This is how a lot of those internet scams work:  they draw people in by getting them to take small but significant actions in order to induce a commitment to seeing those actions through. Just like the skillful poker player who bets just as much as you’re willing to match… at least the first time around.

So how does all of this relate to email marketing? Well, you’re probably maintaining your mailing list because you hope that your subscribers will eventually take some sort of action. But too often that desired action will be a one-off, major purchase of products or services. A huge commitment, all at once! No wonder it takes clients so long to make their final decision!

But you can help the process along, by breaking the process down into smaller, more digestible chunks. It’s not much of an investment to accept something free, so you can offer a free report, free trial of your product, free training module… anything that is naturally connected to the product or service you hope your client will become committed to. You could e-mail it to them, but why not instead send a download link? It’s not much of a committment to click a download link. Maybe while they’re on the download page, you could ask them to provide a quick idea of why they’re interested, just so you’ll know what people want.

By now they’ve taken a few actions: signed up to receive the free item, click through to a download link, thought about what made the offer interesting to them, described it for you… Do you think they’ll be more, or less likely to open up the free trial and give it a spin? And once they’ve done that, wouldn’t it be much easier to just buy a serial number to activate the trial, rather than getting mixed up in a whole other product?

You can break this down even further. What if every newsletter you sent out offered a small reward for taking a small action, with no strings attached? Take our quick survey and we’ll give you a widget just for playing. Click the link to our blog and we’ll give you a funny video to watch. Tit for tat. Easy.

You can build a relationship with your subscribers, but it’s going to take more than just shouting in one direction. A real relationship goes both ways. So let’s brainstorm. What are some simple actions you could ask your subscribers to take that would benefit you both? What small incentives could you offer to build up your clients’ commitment to their relationship with you?

As we near the general beta release of 5.0 we are have setup a 1-2-All Beta blog.  You can view screenshots, read about the new features, and let us know what you think.  The download will be available shortly as internal and alpha testing is nearly complete.

Click here to view the 1-2-All Beta Blog (Current 1-2-All clients only)

I recently noticed an advertisement for an email marketing solution… The ad copy went something like this:

“Flash improves your email marketing campaigns effectiveness”

I am not sure who on earth came up with that – OR – if it was automatically generated, but it most definitely does not.  On that topic, here are a couple of things you should avoid when creating your email campaigns.

• Flash
  You will experience compatibility issues along with security warning issues.  If you want to include a movie you can include a screen capture of the movie and then have the movie launch in their browser once they click on the image.
• Javascript
  You will experience compatibility issues along with security warning issues.
• Forms
  I realize some people may disagree with this – but forms are not fully compatible and they can trigger some security warnings.
• Background Images
  Background images are very tricky if you wish to get maximum compatibility.  Outside of placing a background image in the body tag you will experience a number of issues.
• Setting a background color without using a wrapping div
  Many web based email clients will not show your body background color.  Thus if you are requiring a background color we suggest to also include a wrapping div around your content that is also set to have the same background color that your body tag has.

These are just a couple of the things you should keep in mind when creating your next email campaign.

This is part of a series of email design articles.  Subscribe to our blog to be notified as we release additional email design tips.

A while back we released a feature that allows certain ActiveCampaign products to authenticate users with an external login source. This feature is currently supported in KnowledgeBuilder 3.x and SupportTrio 2.x, and will soon be included in every ActiveCampaign product.

I wanted to share how dead simple it is to get started creating a new login source using your own authentication system. We’ve included some of the more popular applications like Joomla, PHPBB3, and vBulletin, as default external login sources, which can be enabled at any time.

But you may have your own custom authentication system that you’d like to use. In order to do this, you’ll need familiarity with editing PHP files, as well as a programmatic understanding of how to use PHP to speak to your authentication system.

To get started, open up the ac_global/loginsource/ directory contained within your KnowledgeBuilder 3.x or SupportTrio 2.x installation:

You’ll see a number of individual .php files, each corresponding to a separate login source configuration. For this example, I’ve added the last file, zencart.php, as we will be creating an external login source for Zen Cart.

Set up .php file

Once you create the new .php file in this directory, edit the contents of the file with this:

<?php

$loginident = "zencart";
$loginvars = "host,dbname,user,pass";

?>

Here we specify the name of our new external login source (the $loginident variable), as well as the settings you’d like to specify when setting up this login source (the $loginvars variable).

The $loginident variable will correspond with the name you see listed under the available login sources within the application:

The $loginvars variable will correspond with the available fields that allow you to input specific information pertaining to this login source:

Once you have included those two variables in the new .php file, you should be able to access the login source directly within the application:

Enable and further configure .php file

Once you’ve saved your new login source settings, using the above application pages, you are ready to configure the .php file to speak to your authentication system.

The easiest way to set up the rest of the .php file is to copy an existing source. For example, if you open vbulletin.php, you’ll see the necessary functions that need to reside within the class:

class vBulletinLoginSource extends AC_LoginSource {
....
}

Modify names to match your new login source. For example, vBulletinLoginSource would become zencartLoginSource.

Keep the five core functions in place:

Modify these functions to extract and authenticate a given username/password combination. For more information on what each of these functions should return, please view our detailed help documentation article.

We can also set this up for you, if you provide us the database structure that houses your external user credentials, as well as any specific PHP authentication/validation functions.

Testing out your new login source

If you feel confident that you’ve modified the .php file correctly, the only thing left is to test it out!

Make sure you’ve enabled your new login source, set User Type to Public or Admin, and promote it to be the first login source the system tries to use for authentication:

Then, log out of the application, and try logging in as a user from your external system. If everything is working, you should be able to log straight in to the application as normal!

Anyone who has done a lot of work with email templates/email design will tell you that there are a number of “gotchas” and inconsistencies between email clients.  Email design is certainly not the easiest or the most logical type of work you can do…  One area where I find people commonly making mistakes is in regards to table cell padding.

Test Example: Applying padding to a single cell in a row

It is easy to get used to the idea that tables work across clients and would be a logical thing to use in our HTML emails.  The unfortunate truth is that it really is not that simple.  Cell padding works fine across most clients except in Outlook where it can produce some non-logical results.

Most email clients:

Outlook:

As you can see – Outlook (or rather the word rendering engine in outlook 2007) will take the padding from any cell in a row and apply it to all of the cells in the row.  This could result in some visual changes that you do not want.  You should try to either apply the same padding for all cells in a row OR place an inner div or table (that has padding) within the cell that you would like to have padding.

You should also watch your set width on cells when using padding on any cell in your tables row.  As always I would definitely suggest to test your templates in multiple clients before sending.  Your template can make or break your campaign.