Direct marketing has been the leading form of advertisement ever since the invention of the printing press. It is more effective and efficient than any other type of marketing because it allows marketers to connect directly with their audience. By targeting specific demographics and studying the habits of your customers, you can open a direct window into the needs of your market. And, of course, the success of any business hinges on finding and filling a specific need for a specific group of people.

So by contacting each individual personally, you have a much greater opportunity to engage them in a discussion about what it is that they need and how it is that you can help them with that. And the more closely you are able to follow along with the nuances of each subgroup within your target market, the better you’ll be able to convince them that you have a solution for exactly what ails them.

There has never been a more powerful tool for achieving this type of direct dialog with massive amounts of people than through direct e-mail marketing.

That is one of the reasons why email marketing is far and away the fastest growing segment of the direct marketing industry. The latest Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) Communications Industry Forecast estimates the total 2008 spending for email marketing communications at $11.8 billion. When you take into account the incredibly low material costs for e-mail marketing, that is a staggering figure. Even more impressive is the 18.5% estimated growth rate for this segment over the next 5 years.

VSS Executive Vice President Eric Buhler states that email marketing “will be bigger than catalogs and comparable to telesales spending,” largely because it is just so cost effective. Compared to traditional brand management and mass advertising efforts, email marketing also provides a much shorter and easier path to measuring return on investment. The marketer can measure response at every step of the way, even going so far as to split test your most effective messages against each other in order to squeeze every last drop of consumer response out of your email campaign.

Return on investment is everything in this economy. More than ever, business owners are having to pay very close attention to how much money is going out and the rate at which it is returning. Even when it comes to a medium as efficient as email marketing, there are still difficult decisions to be made.

For example, the choice between using a hosted email marketing service versus a standalone email marketing software product. In a better economic climate, the choice to use a hosted service can amount to just a small slice of your marketing budget. But at a time when total advertising spending is down nearly 8%, the extra expense of using a service instead of an in-house direct email marketing solution is money that could be more effectively spent on a high-powered copywriter.

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!

The holiday season means many things to many people. For some its a time for family and tradition. For others, the end of the year brings with it the promise of renewal, redemption, and rejuvenation.

Its a time for looking back at the past while keeping an eye towards the future.

Whatever your background or traditions we hope that this time of year holds special meaning for you too.

Holiday Office Hours

Our office will be closed from December 24th through December 28th.

We will be providing limited web based sales & support during this time.

On behalf of the entire ActiveCampaign staff I would like to take this time to wish everyone a safe, happy holiday and a prosperous new year. As always we wish you the best. Thank you.

Effective email marketing writing is persuasive to your subscribers, enhances your image and credibility, and adds clarity to the message in your newsletter. Even the most eye popping email design graphics and layouts will lose their appeal if subscribers are presented with email copywriting that is shoddy or substandard. In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin bellows the following advice to his hapless sales team; “A-B-C. A-Always, B – Be, C-Closing! Always be closing!! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action.” AIDA is an acronym used in marketing that is short for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.  This can be applied to email marketing as well.

Attention – Grab your subscriber’s attention with an engaging subject line so they open your mailing. This is your invitation to your subscriber to hear what you have to say. Once your newsletter is opened you can also get your subscriber’s attention with the appearance of the newsletter as well as the headlines and lead sentences. You may want to think of this as your pick up line or your “hook”.

Interest - If you are meeting someone for the first time and all you do is talk about yourself then you shouldn’t be surprised if that person gets up and walks away. This could be the point where your subscriber quits reading your newsletter or they opt out of your list altogether. However, if you include a person in your conversation then they are going to want to stick around. Focus on advantages and benefits as they relate to the substance of your communication.

Desire – Strong interest yields to desire. Use the power of persuasion in your conversation now that you have your subscriber’s interest. The better you can relate to someone in your conversation, the more they will want to hear. Use the body of your newsletter to convince your subscriber that you have what they want and they will feel a need for what you are offering. You are writing to build up motivation for your subscriber for what you are offering with your newsletter.

Action – Your newsletter should have a purpose and your writing should lead your subscriber to a clear call to action. You’ve now convinced your listener that you have what they want. Make it easy for them to do something about it! This action could be clicking on a link, purchasing a product, or even replying to your newsletter. You should structure your mailing in a way that is likely to generate a direct response from your reader.

Now, a word about subject lines or what we have noted as your all important hook. While you want to make this interesting enough for your subscriber to have a reason for opening your mailing you are going to want to exhibit caution. Think of the subject lines that you see in your spam box. You are going to want to be weary of using dollar signs, too much punctuation, or appearing needy as these are often techniques used by spammers. The subject line is important because you do not want to ruin the integrity of your list by being seen as spam. If you google top 10 spam subject lines you will get a good idea of what you want to stay away from.

A good rule of thumb is to keep your subject lines consistent and familiar to your subscribers. You can start with the same words so that your recipients recognize you. For example, “ActiveCampaign Newsletter: Name of the Newsletter” as a lot of email clients will cut off the end of the subject line. Try to keep the length of your subject line below 50 characters. Some internal testing may come in handy to see the maximum number of characters you can use before the subject line is cropped. You need not worry about this too much as you want to use as many characters as is necessary to get your subject across. The trick to writing a good subject line is to appeal to your subscriber’s interest which should be some combination of your target audience and relating the purpose of the newsletter to their needs.

There are many stylistic ways of holding your subscribers interest. Be succinct in your writing. This means giving your subscriber relevant information in as few words as possible. The more succinct your writing is the more weight your words will carry.

Include the most important parts of your newsletter in the beginning. Subscribers will read the introduction first before they decide whether the rest is worth their time. Many subscribers are going to scan through rather than read everything you write in your newsletter so arrange your text accordingly. This may include using dashes and bullet points as well as blocks of text rather than chunky paragraphs. You would write a newsletter differently than you would write a term paper or a thesis.

You can also engage your subscriber’s interest by using the active voice in your writing. This conveys a powerful message because when the verb of a sentence uses the active voice, the subject is doing the acting. When you use the passive voice the subject is being acted upon which can make your writing sound weak.

Keep your newsletter personal. Make your subscriber feel as though you are talking directly to them. One obvious way to do this is through using personalization tags such as the subscriber’s name.

Write to your audience. You can find out more about your subscribers demographic by using a tool such as A/B split to find out what your subscribers respond to. You do not have to be overly formal as in traditional business or marketing writing. It is perfectly alright to be irreverent at times so long as you are not overly casual and risk setting the wrong tone for your audience. It is important to know who your subscribers are before setting a tone for your audience. Remember you can set up separate mailings that target specific market and customize each campaign accordingly.

You’ll need to take in a few more technical suggestions into considerations with your newsletter. It’s best to avoid URLs altogether in your links. If you do use URLs in your mailing make sure that is reduced in length and that it fits on a single line. If you must use two lines for your URL then tell the subscriber how to piece the composite URL in their window. Also along those same lines, be sure to wrap all text at 68 characters per line. Although all email clients vary, all email applications will correctly display text at 68 characters or less per line. Also many email readers will only read ASCII characters. Be sure to avoid the use of “smart quotes.” Use a text editor and not a word processor when composing your messages.

It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days like we do with our own web software, just to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.

Since we started giving away fully-functional, free versions of our most popular software products with no strings attached, we’ve been fielding some phone calls from disgruntled users of other people’s services.

You see, if you download and install a free copy of our Help Desk Software, for example, the bottom of each page of your support center will have a tasteful “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” message with a link back to our site. To be honest, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how few disreputable vendors have ended up using our free software. For the most part our clients tend to be extremely upstanding members of the web community. But there are a few companies using free versions of our products who have failed to meet their clients’ expectations and have been generally unreachable.

So these hapless clients follow our “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” link in hopes of finding anyone who might be affiliated with the company that is ruining their day. By the time they do that, they tend to be pretty upset, and so it can be difficult to help them understand that we really don’t have any affiliation with sites that use free versions of our products. After all, we only use full versions.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. If you follow this simple principle, you can reasonably expect that 99% of the people you speak with will love you by the end--especially the ones who start out by feeling and acting upset.

The secret is that people are not barbarians; people genuinely want to be reasonable. The only time that people behave unreasonably is in the face of a situation that they experience as unreasonable. So, let them know that their experience and their reaction both basically make sense. Empathize. Tell them you know how they feel. Say, “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

That’s it! That’s all you have to do, and everyone you talk to will feel comforted and taken care of, and they may even keep you in mind for when they need some web software of their own!

Here is a short list of reasons why I would unsubscribe from a newsletter. No particular importance on the order…

1. You send me a mailing more often than needed.
   Rarely I stay subscribed to a weekly mailing list. It better be quite good to keep that frequency going.
2. Non-stop promotion.
   I like to know about your new products and services. But give me something other than a standard sales pitch.
3. Duplicates.
   I subscribed once. I only need one copy.
4. Your content is bad.
   Boring content will encourage me to find the unsubscribe link.
5. I lose interest.
   People will lose interest in your subject. Nothing you can do about this one.
6. Grammatical issues.
   Take some time to edit & review your newsletter and I will take some time to read it.
7. Ugly email design.
   Whether it is HTML or TEXT take some time to design a professional and easy to read layout.
8. Excessive advertising.
   Advertising is fine and is required for some business models. However, I subscribed for your content. Not a 600×300 ad that covers the majority of my message preview.
9. Paid “special” newsletters.
   There are a couple popular newsletters that send out “special” advertiser mailings in addition to their newsletter. So not only is their newsletter cluttered with ads – but subscribers also have the joy of receiving full email advertisements frequently.
10. Copied or low quality content.
    If I subscribed for informational content I want quality and useful content. A free republished article or generic piece of content will not encourage me to be a subscriber for much longer.

What makes you unsubscribe from newsletters?

A common sales question we receive goes something like “How does your product compare with product X?”

And it is a fair question. Some may say it is an easy question. When asked we will reply that our company policy is to not do direct product comparisons. While this does surprise some users, it does not hurt our sales process in any substantial way. Rather than doing a direct product comparison we take the opportunity to give the benefits of our products and will help explain why our products are as popular and successful as they truly are.

A product comparison is a murky type of marketing and in some cases it is simply unethical and even illegal. A product comparison from a company (not a third party) allows the company to choose the features to be compared. And even more difficult is how particular features act and are at the risk of varied interpretation. I could distort any feature in our products to be just enough different to say a competitor doesn’t have it. But I won’t. Due to these facts product comparisons often contain a useless and rather cheesy sales message.

So the next time you see a product comparison take a second and ask yourself if it helps you or turns you away…