We recently received a comment that exemplifies a lot of the fears that beginning email marketers have:

Hi,

If I do use software such as 1-2-All, isn’t my IP being shown to my ISP as sending out many, many emails. Won’t I therefore be shut down? I need to send out about 250 per day. I know that legally a spammer must attempt to hide his identity and (not or) be deceptive. I want to do neither, in fact my letterhead includes name, address, phone, email, etc. in every email. I am hardly a spammer. However, the ISP’s think that any email sent out from a hitherto unknown sender is spam. Perhaps socially yes, legally no. Regardless of the legal innocence of my actions, I need to get the word out. How do I do it?

Your response will be greatly appreciated.

Frank

Thank you for your excellent question, Frank. I hope this answer will clear things up for you.

You are correct that many ISPs will assume you are spamming if you start sending out a large volume of emails through your normal SMTP email server. It is generally not recommended, for example, to start sending large volume email advertisements through your Comcast, Time Warner, AOL, or similar email account, because doing so may jeopardize your ability to continue using the account normally for your own personal email. At the very least, you should check the terms of use before even considering using your primary email service for bulk email sending.

By default, ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software will send your messages directly from your web server. Depending on which web hosting company you use, this is often considered more acceptable use of your service. However, there will usually be limitations to the number of messages you can send. Many web hosts will limit you to 250, 500, or 1000 messages per day.

It is important to contact your web host prior to starting an email marketing campaign to find out what the limitations of your service are. You can easily configure our software to throttle its sending rate so that you do not exceed your account limits. The reason you need to do this first is because many servers will not report any error when failing to send messages beyond your quota, so it won’t be possible to go back and determine who did or did not receive your message.

Many web hosts also have additional packages available for purchase which will allow you to send a greater number of emails more quickly. If you are using a quality web host, then this will often be a very solid option for sending out your email campaigns.

Our email marketing software lets you embed subscription forms on other sites by simply copying and pasting HTML code.

To make things even easier, we’ve created a WordPress plugin that lets you display any subscription form on your WordPress site, with just a few clicks.

All of this happens without any copying and pasting. Simply supply your email marketing software URL, and login information, and choose what form you’d like displayed.

The form will then appear in the sidebar of your WordPress site:

It’s that simple!

You can even opt to request the updated form each time the page is loaded, so any changes you make to the form in your email marketing software will always be reflected!

Learn more about this plugin, and let us know if you have questions or suggestions!

Once upon a time, you could target a marketing campaign based solely on geography. Certain types of people lived in certain types of places, and that was it. There was an average American, ‘Joe Consumer,’ who was married and had a couple of kids, and liked mostly the same things that all the other Joe Consumers out there liked.

According to an AdAge whitepaper on the new 2010 census, those times are long gone. There simply is no such thing as an average American anymore. There is no dominant ethnic group, family configuration, or subculture.

Some of the more interesting findings:

• No household type neatly describes even one third of Americans
• Only 22% of American households are classic nuclear familie comprised of a married couple with children
• The single most common type of American household is now the married couple with no children
• The next most common household type is the single individual who lives alone
• “No racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population.”
• The younger generations of Americans are increasingly more diverse than older Americans (and also more responsive to online marketing.)

What this means for marketers is that, if you want your product to have broad appeal, you will likely need to target your messages much more specifically than you ever needed to before. And if you want to do that in a way that is cost-effective, targeted email marketing needs to become a central focus.

Perhaps this is why marketing industry funding is increasingly being taken away from traditional print, radio, television, and billboard marketing. Each of these types of media target huge, disparate segments of the population simultaneously, which means they are simply becoming less effective as the population becomes more diverse. Instead, we are seeing marketing funds diverted to more targeted, individualized advertising media, such as email marketing.

Email marketing most closely approaches the one-to-one model of advertising that is increasingly coveted by savvy marketers. Targeted email marketing software allows you to subdivide your lists based not only on detailed demographic data but also on user actions. You can also use these divisions within your list to provide conditional, targeted content to each subgroup, ensuring that the most relevant and appealing messages are delivered to each individual list subscriber.

Marketing is one of the main areas where small business owners falter. Many business owners wind up taking no action at all, because they either aren’t sure what they should do or they are afraid that their ideas will lead to failure. Email marketing can be an extraordinarily cost-effective solution. It allows marketers to take quick action, assess their results, and improve their campaign’s performance over time, all with very little resource investment.

In this article we’ll look at some of the common problems that plague business owners and managers, and the ways that they can easily be solved through the use of ActiveCampaign’s email marketing solution.

Problem: Difficulty Identifying Target Markets

Too many new business owners get so excited about their vision that they forget to really consider who it is for. And even if you do remember to take the time to try and identify your target market, it can really be a lot easier said than done. Often you’ll find that your highest-converting market segments will be ones you never even considered when you are starting out. And sometimes the markets you push for the hardest turn out to be duds.

Skillful use of email marketing can help you to overcome this problem with an impressive degree of dexterity. The key is to collect the right sorts of information right from the beginning. Put a little time and thought into what types of information will help you to know your customers better. This can pay off big in the long run because you will later be able to compare these personal details to the types of actions that your subscribers are taking.

Problem: Strained Advertising Budget

Email marketing is a natural fit for these poor economic conditions, because the barriers to entrance are very low. All you need to get started is the email software, a $10 shared web hosting account, and maybe an extra email account. That’s it! Compare that to the cost of placing a single (notoriously low conversion) ad in your local newspaper and it’s clear that email marketing presents a fantastic opportunity.

In addition to being a great marketing platform all by itself, the ability to better identify your target markets also makes your more traditional forms of marketing more cost effective. By using your email marketing solution’s statistics to mine the results of your existing online marketing campaign, you will be much better prepared to invest in more costly forms of advertising. You will be able to target the specific demographics that you know already like and want your product.

Problem: Poor Conversion Rates

Different markets work differently, and an effective marketing campaign will often require a lot more trial and error than you wish it would. Email marketing gives you an opportunity to engage your audience over the long term, to gain an understanding of what types of copywriting techniques work well in your particular market.

Some products require a little more finesse and personalization than others, while others are looking for a strong authoritative voice to tell them what to do. An ongoing email campaign allows you to test different methods against one another even during a single mailing, so that you can maximize your results as you go.

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.

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.

Often when you hear people talk about email marketing, you will find that attention is focused exclusively on hosted services. Even though it is actually a much more traditional approach to email list management, many people are not even aware that they have the option to use a self-hosted software package instead. In this post I will explore the pros and cons of each approach to help you decide which method will ultimately be more profitable for your needs.

First, it is important to know exactly what we’re talking about when we say “hosted” versus “self-hosted.” A hosted solution is a service that you sign up for and pay a recurring fee. The software that runs the service is invisible to you, and you will usually just go to the provider’s web site and log in to manage your mailing lists. A self-hosted mailing list manager works much the same way, except that the software is installed on your own web site. You essentially are providing the service to yourself.

The benefits of using a hosted email marketing service

The obvious advantage to using a hosted package is that it doesn’t require any kind of technical knowledge or maintenance. You won’t have to install any software or worry about upgrades and patches. All you ever have to do is to log in, create your e-mail lists, and send your mailings. This can be very enticing to people who are intimidated by the idea of having to set things up with their web host, upload files, and make backups.

Why a hosted service may not be the best choice

The major downside to this approach is that you will have to continually pay to use the system. Most email marketing services charge a monthly fee, and that fee tends to scale up along with your number of subscribers. The basic plans tend to start at around $20 a month, and that usually allows you up to 500 subscribers. While that may seem like a lot when you’re first starting out, you may be surprised at how quickly your list will grow if you are actively promoting it to your customers and web visitors. To get your account upgraded to the point where it can handle 2,500 subscribers, you’ll expect to pay about $30 each month.

That means that if you have one mailing list with fewer than 500 subscribers, your yearly e-mail marketing costs will sit at about $240. Once your list goes over 500 subscribers, you’ll be paying $360 a year to maintain it. If you want to send to more than 2,500 subscribers, you will be spending anywhere from $600 to $2400 every year just to maintain your single e-mail list.

The pricing issue gets a lot dicier if you start wanting to have more than one mailing list, because you will often be paying double for every single additional mailing list you want to add. So if you maintain three web businesses and need to maintain separate mailing lists in order to deliver targeted content to different types of customers, just go ahead and multiply all of these numbers by three. Some of the major services also charge you additional monthly fees for the types of features you will expect to see for free in a standalone software package. So if you want to be able to have an archive of your past mailings viewable on the web and to keep a library of images to use in your messages, it may cost you an extra $120 each year.

There is also the problem of vendor lock-in. If you begin using a hosted email marketing service with the idea that you will switch to a standalone email marketing software solution once your subscriber base has grown, you may be surprised to learn that there is usually no way to transfer all of your past messages from the hosted account to your own software. That means that you may be looking at losing years worth of invaluable statistical information about what has worked or not worked in the past. And, of course, once you stop paying, you lose access to everything.

Email marketing software tips the cost/benefit scale

By contrast, you take a look at a self-hosted email marketing software package like ActiveCampaign Email Marketing. It seems more expensive because you pay $229 up front to start when you buy the lite version. But also consider that that price includes up to four separate mailing lists, as well as archiving and statistical features, and image management. So even if you kept all four lists below 500 subscribers, you would still end up paying over $1000 a year to do the same thing on one of the major hosted services. A major benefit of hosting your own email marketing is that you can go over 500 subscribers, over 2,500 subscribers,  over 25,000 or even 250,000 subscribers without paying another dime.

Also, with a software package like ActiveCampaign Email Marketing you get a lot more flexibility for managing your data. If you maintain a forum or a content management system that has been collecting your clients’ contact information for years, you might not like the idea of having to completely scrap that system and replace its forms with proprietary forms generated by your email marketing solution. If you use an email broadcast service, that is what you will have to do. On the other hand, ActiveCampaign Email Marketing lets you sync up your mailing list to an external data source, so that you can keep your web site running the same way it has always run, and it will automatically stay up-to-date with the new information being added there.

It comes down to analyzing your individual needs

So ultimately you really have to look at the way you’re going to use email marketing in your business. If you have a small mailing list, and you just want to send out a mailing or two and then cancel your account, then you will save a lot of money and probably some time as well by simply signing up for a hosted email marketing service. On the other hand, if you plan to use email marketing on an ongoing basis to grow your business, improve client relationships, and increase conversion rates, then you’re going to want to think longer term than that. That means that a dedicated, self-hosted email marketing software package is probably a better choice for you.

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!

If you’re like me, you probably check your e-mail right after you sit down at your desk. If there are no new messages, you probably go ahead and hit the button again “just to be sure.”

You probably interrupt your work every 10 minutes or so to check for new messages, even though you are completely aware that the computer will tell you as soon as a new message has arrived. You might leave the window open in the background for a while, so that the next time you have to check for mail it will take less time to load.

And if you do decide to close the window, you probably click the refresh button just one more time before you do.

My name is David, and I’m an Email Addict.

Most of the time, I just can’t seem to help myself. The good news is that this is now pretty much normal. Nearly everyone you know is doing the same thing, compulsively checking their e-mail every few minutes.

Now that we’re all getting smart phones, we can take our e-mail addiction with us everywhere we go. Got a free minute in between point A and point B? Time enough for a quick e-mail check. The other day I saw someone checking his Blackberry in a public restroom.

Most of the e-mails we receive aren’t even anything good. Most of them get deleted right away, and half of the time we decide to mark the messages unread and “save them for later.” So why should we be so obsessed with checking to see if there are any new messages?

Because sometimes you get one that’s really good.

Like a lab rat, you hit the button over and over and over again until you get a reward. And, like a lab rat, the conditioning is most effective when you don’t always get the reward.

Behavioral psychologists refer to this process as operant conditioning. When you receive a reward (or “reinforcement,”) you become more likely to repeat the behavior that got you the reward. But if you receive a reward every single time you enact the behavior, then you either get tired of the reward, or you give up as soon as the reward stops. So the most effective conditioning takes place when you are only rewarded intermittently.

While many are understandably looking for ways to become less addicted to the technologies they use, business owners and marketers can make it work to their advantage. Because when you understand that everyone is as addicted to their e-mail as you are, and that everyone is waiting for that one rewarding e-mail that will let them stop checking their e-mail for 15 minutes, then there is really only one question to ask:

How can I make my own email campaigns feel like a reward?

That’s the one question that can get your messages opened, read, and enjoyed again and again. It is easy to think about what you stand to gain by sending out a mass mailing, but often more difficult to think of reasons why your clients might want to open up another newsletter pitching your same old tired products and services.

What would you send out if your entire goal was to make the recipient look forward to your next message? Would you send them an amusing or inspirational story? A link to an obscure but hilarious YouTube video? Some kind of special gift just for being a subscriber?

Why not give it a try? The next time you launch an email marketing campaign, why not begin with an e-mail whose sole purpose is to make the reader feel rewarded, so that they’ll look forward to your next message? Or throw in something just for fun, a little treat just to let them know you care and to share a little of your personality and warmth.

It’s an accepted wisdom that maintaining an e-mail list and sending out regular e-mail updates is a good idea for your business. But let’s think about why this should be.

Of course, it’s a good idea to have an open channel of communication with your clients, because it keeps them from forgetting about you. A professional newsletter can also increase recipients’ perception that you are familiar and established, and so makes it easier for them to buy from you. But in the end, like everything else in business, it comes down to the payoff. What is the final objective of your email campaign? Better yet, what is the objective of the very next e-mail you’re going to send out?

If the objective is to win a sale, then you’ll already be very clear on this. But often, maintaining a mailing list involves sending out a number of messages with less decisive agendas. You can improve your e-mail marketing campaigns immensely by doing three simple things:

1. Set a goal for every message you send out.

What would you like for this particular newsletter to accomplish for your business? Do you want to inspire your recipients to click through to your web site? Are you hoping to get them to forward your newsletter to their friends so you can grow your membership? Do you want them to fill out a survey? Do you simply want them to trust you more?

2. Think of a couple of different ways you might accomplish this.

If you’re trying to get your message recipients to trust you, then your job is very easy. All you have to do is give them information that is both authoritative and immediately useful to them, and ask for nothing in return. Of course, you’ll have to have this type of information first, so this type of goal is excellent if you are an authority on the topping of your newsletter.

If you’re aiming to induce a specific action, your strategy will be similarly rational: in most cases, you’ll just ask them to do what you want them to do. That isn’t really as simple as it seems, of course. Is it better to ask at the beginning of a message or at the end? In the middle? Should you give them a whole paragraph to pitch the action or just set it aside in a colored box apart from your content? These variables will be different for every newsletter based on the preferences of your demographic and the nature of the information you’re sending out. How do you determine which is best for your purposes?

3. Test them against each other.

Just set up your A/B Split test in our Email Marketing software and send out your mailing. Then pay attention to the results and note them for future mailings. See how easy that was? Now you know something about your client base that you never knew before–you’ve learned a little something about how to induce them to perform a specific action. In your next newsletters, you can keep right on putting that technique to work, or (and here’s the real secret) keep testing. Do a split test every single time you send out a message, and your email copywriting style will just keep getting better and better. It’s just a little more work, and the results can scale exponentially. Use the insights of all of your previous tests to design each of your next tests, so that your knowledge of your customers snowballs into… dare I say… absolute power. Or, at the very least, you can get more people to forward your messages to their friends

Don’t think small with these insights either. Everything you learn about getting someone to click through to your site is also an insight that can potentially be used to win a sale. Knowledge is money.