12 Of The Deadliest Mistakes In Email Marketing (FREE Ebook Download)

Copyright © 2010 Jing Zhou, Search Marketing Local

How to Avoid 12 of The Deadliest
Business E-mail Mistakes

Jing Zhou
Search Marketing Local
http://SearchMarketingLocal.net
1-877-618-6284

1


Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................... 4
It’s about reducing costs and increasing profits ............................................. 5
But we’ve got people who deal with that… .................................................... 8
What benefits can you expect? .................................................................... 10
Reduced marketing costs and higher profits ............................................ 10
Long-term business building ..................................................................... 12
The ‘12 deadly sins’ of e-mail marketing! .................................................... 14
1. Keep it on-topic and original ................................................................. 14
2. Give prospects every chance to subscribe….......................................... 15
3. Keep it simple… .................................................................................... 16
4. Let them see what you have to offer… ................................................. 17
5. Everyone hates spam… ......................................................................... 19
6. Help others to help you ........................................................................ 20
7. But they must be useful… ..................................................................... 23
8. You need a landing page ....................................................................... 25
9. Show them the proof ............................................................................ 26
10. Ask them to talk about it… .................................................................. 27
11. Get them to pass the newsletter on ................................................... 28
12. Include an opt-in link .......................................................................... 30
Conclusion ................................................................................................... 32

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3


Introduction

If you own a successful local business (or even one that has been struggling a
bit ), you are no doubt always looking for new marketing channels and
opportunities. If so and assuming that you’re not actively using e-mail
marketing already, you’re going to learn a great deal to your advantage from
this short report.

If on the other hand you are already using e-mail marketing to promote your
business, then I have a question for you.

As far as your current e-mail marketing activities are concerned, have you
ever assessed just how effective e-mail marketing has been for your business
so far? Indeed, is this a question that you can answer or have you never
actually tried to establish whether what you are doing is as successful and
profitable as it could be?

These are important questions because one fact about e-mail marketing that
far too many business owners miss is that whilst it is quite easy to market
effectively, it is also very easy to get it wrong.

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In other words, even if you are using e-mail to market to your prospects and
customers, you might still be leaving thousands of unclaimed profit dollars
simply because your marketing activities are not as effective or efficient as
they should be.

From this guide, you will learn exactly what you should be doing to maximize
your returns on your e-mail marketing efforts and you will be introduced to
many common mistakes that you might fall victim to from time to time.

Avoid these mistakes and your e-mail marketing will become a great deal
more profitable. For this simple reason, take what you read to heart and put
it into practice.

It’s about reducing costs and increasing profits

It’s a given in any business that if you can increase incoming revenue at the
same time as reducing marketing costs, you will increase the ultimate
bottom-line profit that your business enjoys.

The relevance of this is that by using e-mail marketing effectively, you can
‘win’ on both sides of this ‘profit boosting’ equation.

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In other words, used properly, e-mail can reduce your overall marketing
costs by a significant margin whilst also boosting your sales figures at one
and the same time.
What is even more important, if you understand the essentials of effective e-
mail marketing, you can launch a profitable e-mail campaign in an hour or
two and start seeing increased sales in around about the same amount of
time.

Or to put it another way, you could launch and profit from a successful e-
mail marketing campaign in one afternoon as long as you do the whole thing
right.

But of course, it does not stop here because one of the beauties of e-mail
marketing is that you can send out an e-mail to your prospects and
customers which generates a steady stream of sales that continues for days
or even weeks.

After all, you would not expect every customer to open your incoming
message immediately or to take a decision on it instantly either.

6


From this brief description however, you can clearly see the power of
effective e-mail marketing.
However, the watchword throughout is ‘effective’ and without some easy-
to-follow guidelines, it is understandably difficult to become an effective e-
mail marketing success story.

You do after all have a business to run which means that there are a
multitude of daily tasks that have to be dealt with without learning new
skills. It is consequently understandable in a way if you have not had the
chance to master effective e-mail marketing as yet.

Even so, despite the fact that it might be understandable that e-mail
marketing has not yet figured too prominently on your business radar, I am
confident that reducing marketing costs whilst increasing profits certainly
will do.

Assuming this to be the case, this is a report that you definitely need to keep
reading.

7


But we’ve got people who deal with that…

From my experience of dealing with a lot local business owners, I know that
an increasingly large number of local businesses do have ‘people’ that they
rely on to deal with anything to do with computers related.

For example, many business owners have used local website designers to
create an attractive site for them and they may have someone on the staff
who deals with minor technical problems as well.

Granted, these people undoubtedly know their business but to a large
extent, that is the exact point. They know their business and unfortunately,
their business is nothing to do with direct response marketing on the
internet.

Asking a web designer (as one example) about running an effective e-mail
marketing campaign is a little bit like asking a hospital cleaner their advice
about brain surgery.
They are kind-of involved in the same business but the differences between
the two roles are far greater (and a lot more important, especially if you are
booked in for brain surgery) than the similarities.

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Whilst there are of course exceptions, effective online marketing is not
something with which most designers or IT people are familiar.

They do not get involved in the mechanics of online marketing every day and
they have no need to keep up with all of the latest and most effective
marketing developments either.

In short, these are not the people to guide your e-mail marketing efforts.
Nevertheless, without the most appropriate guidance, it is extremely easy to
make some basic, fundamental errors that can seriously damage the
effectiveness of your e-mail marketing efforts.

A large portion of this report focuses on highlighting many of these errors
and providing straightforward, expert solutions.

9


What benefits can you expect?

Once you put in place a system for efficient and effective e-mail marketing
and overcome any mistakes you might currently be making, there are several
benefits that your business should start to enjoy almost immediately.

The first major benefit has already been hinted at but it is not the only one.

Reduced marketing costs and higher profits

When you market effectively using e-mail, the
most obvious benefit is that you almost instantly
reduce your marketing costs.

To begin with, sending information about your
products or services to your prospects and
customers using e-mail costs almost nothing.

There are no postal or delivery charges involved in getting your information
to the prospect or customer nor do you need to print flyers with the
associated printing and material costs involved.

10


Instead, you create digital documents which can be delivered instantly via e-
mail so the only cost is the labor charge incurred by someone having to
create the document and pressing a button to deliver it.

From your customer’s point of view, this information is delivered almost
instantly and directly. You send it knowing that it will be in their hands within
the next 30 seconds to a minute.
This suggests that you have mastered e-mail marketing. This simple fact will
almost always enhance the image, reputation and credibility of your business
far more powerfully than you might ever imagine.

It makes it appear like your business is on the cutting edge of technology
even though (in truth) there is nothing particularly high-tech about e-mail
marketing.

Nevertheless, because utilizing e-mail marketing as opposed to more old-
fashioned marketing channels improves the reputation and credibility of
your business, it also tends to increase sales as well.

Hence, as was suggested previously, effective e-mail marketing reduces your
costs whilst also increasing your income.

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It therefore increases the all-important bottom-line profits, all with little or
no extra work or effort involved.

Long-term business building

It has long been accepted by experienced online marketing professionals
that building a mailing list is one of the most effective ways of laying strong
foundations for any business that wants to remain profitable in the long
term.

This happens because once a prospect becomes a customer after buying
from you, the fact that you can almost instantaneously provide all of the
services they need makes it very easy for you to retain their loyalty.

Compare for example a situation where a customer has a service query that
takes a week to respond to by snail mail or where you reply to the same
query within 15 minutes by e-mail. It doesn’t take a genius to work out
which of these two customers would be the happier.

Happy customers are almost always your most profitable customers (as they
buy from you time after time) and they are the most likely to recommend
your products or services to others as well.

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Thus, a mailing list of responsive,
happy customers is an asset from
which you can generate profits
almost at will.

For example, if you have a special
offer available and a list of customers who have bought exactly the same
kind of products in the past, you can generate sales and profits simply by
sending information about your new offer to them.

All of these benefits do however rely on the fact that your e-mail marketing
efforts must be both efficient and effective.

You therefore need to avoid the common mistakes that you will begin to
read of in the next chapter.

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The ‘12 Deadly Sins’ of E-mail Marketing!

In this chapter, I am going to detail common mistakes that I have seen local
business owners make over and over again.

You must do whatever you can to eradicate or avoid these mistakes if you
want to optimize your e-mail marketing results and profitability.

1. Keep it on-topic and original

From the very beginning of your relationship with a new prospect, it is vital
that everything you present them with is on-topic and original.

They need valuable content from the off because if you don’t provide it, then
your nascent relationship with them will never get off the ground.

To begin with, you have to convince the prospect to subscribe to your
mailing list from your website. If the information on the page where you
feature your subscription form is irrelevant, boring or completely unoriginal,
they will not subscribe in the first place.
However, even if they get past the first stage, the content of your outgoing
e-mail messages must also satisfy the same criteria.

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If for example they open the first one or two messages to find information
that is completely irrelevant to their business or totally unrelated to the
information they expected to receive from what they read on your
subscription page, you can be certain that they won’t open too many more
messages.

The simple solution to this is to make sure that everything you supply to your
prospects or customers is bang-on-target relevant, useful and up-to-date.
The page that they sign up for should focus on one particular topic and as it
is this topic that has encouraged them to subscribe, everything that you send
thereafter must focus on the same topic. If they subscribe to get more
information about blue widgets, you send information about blue widgets as
an example.

2. Give prospects every chance to subscribe…

If you want prospects to subscribe to your mailing list (and you most
definitely do), you must make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

The quickest and simplest way of doing this is to make sure that there is an
attractive list subscription form on every page of your website.

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If however you feature your sign up form on a single hard-to-find page
buried deep somewhere in the bowels of your website, well, guess what?

You are not going to have many prospects subscribing to your list which is as
good as leaving money on the table.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem is as simple as it probably appears.
Make sure that you have an attractive signup form on every page, preferably
in the top left-hand corner because statistically, this is the first place on any
webpage that a visitor looks at.

3. Keep it simple…

To an extent, the amount of information that you would like to collect from
your new prospect will depend on your business and the products or services
that you supply to customers.
For example, if you need to deliver products physically, you need their
delivery address whilst having a contact telephone number would also be
valuable in this situation.
Even so, although this information will eventually be needed, keep the initial
subscription process as simple as possible.

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By doing so, you encourage more visitors to become prospects by
subscribing. If on the other hand you ask for their name, e-mail address,
postal address, telephone number and so on, you will naturally dissuade
many visitors from subscribing.

To begin with and as a way of starting the ball rolling, ask for nothing more
than a first name and e-mail address.

Once you have this information, you can ask for everything else you need
later as and when it becomes necessary.

For example, you don’t need the delivery address until you actually need to
deliver something.

Consequently, collecting this information can wait, particularly when asking
for it at the beginning is likely to throw away a lot of potential business.

4. Let them see what you have to offer…

When you are trying to encourage visitors to
your site to subscribe to your list, it is common

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to offer some form of ‘free gift’ as an incentive to do so.

As a way of staying in contact with prospects and customers, many
businesses publish regular newsletters that would in the past have been
delivered by postal mail.
Nowadays however, e-mail is the perfect Method of delivering a digital
version of your newsletter to your prospects and customers. Many
businesses therefore use this as the incentive with which they try to
encourage (some would say ‘bribe’) visitors to sign up.

Perhaps not surprisingly, if you offer a free newsletter subscription, many of
your site visitors probably want to see whether it is worth reading before
making their decision about subscribing to get it.

You should therefore feature a back issue of your newsletter on your
website so that the visitor has something to base this decision on.

You should obviously make certain that the newsletter edition that is
published on your site is one of the better ones and that it showcases your
business in the best light.

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Remember, this newsletter sample is there to sell your service and it
therefore makes sense to the certain that you present the visitor with your
most effective digital ‘sales person’ (i.e. a top quality past edition).

5. Everyone hates spam…

It’s an inevitable fact of modern online life that if you have an e-mail
account, you have a spam problem to a greater or lesser extent.

Anyone who subscribes to your list has exactly the same problem and you
can be totally certain that they do not want to exacerbate the problem any
more than is absolutely necessary.

In other words, everyone who is considering subscribing to your list is also
considering the security implications of doing so.
You must therefore put their mind at rest by stating clearly and
unequivocally that you respect their privacy and that you will not give away
their e-mail contact information to anyone else.

It also makes sense to have a Privacy Policy page on your site to which you
can refer your visitor should they have any further privacy worries or
concerns.

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This is simple professionalism so it is surprising how many businesses do not
feature such a page on their site. It is even more so when there are free
Privacy Policy page generators to be found on many websites including this
one.

People want to know that it is safe to subscribe to your list before they do
so. Make sure that you put their mind at rest if you want to attract as many
list subscribers as possible.

6. Help others to help you

One way that you can increase the profitability of your e-mail marketing
activities is to expand your subscriber base in any way you can. One very
effective tactic for doing this is to leverage your local business contacts.

To explain, in the same way that you are building a mailing list of prospects
and customers, there will be hundreds of other local business owners doing
exactly the same.
Every one of these businesses is building up a valuable asset in exactly the
same way as you are, a database of subscriber information from which they
can make money in the same way that you can from your own list.

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There is therefore a tremendous opportunity open to you (and to them) to
expand your mutual businesses as long as you are not in direct competition
with them.
An example will make clear how this kind of arrangement might work.
Say that you running a plumbing business. Because of the services that you
provide, you will come into contact with customers who need additional
household services such as electricians, painters and decorators, window
cleaners and the like.

If therefore you can get together with a like-minded local painting and
decorating company owner, it is a simple matter of sending information
about their services to your list subscribers in return for which they do the
same to their list members on your behalf.
There is no breach of confidentiality concerns here because you send
information to your list members whilst they do the same to theirs.

However, you are both introducing a complementary service that some of
your prospects and customers will need from time to time.

From this simple arrangement, it is nevertheless likely that you will expand
your prospect and customers whilst they will do the same.

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This simple form of joint-venture partnership can be extremely effective for
expanding your business without having to spend any money on advertising
or external market promotion.

All you do instead is leverage the existing assets of other business owners in
return for which you allow them to do the same with your assets.

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7. But they must be useful…

As highlighted earlier, one strategy that many businesses adopt for
expanding their list is to give away a free newsletter to encourage people to
subscribe.

This is all very well and can be extremely effective, as can giving away other
forms of ‘freebies’ like product samples.

It is however extremely important to appreciate that if you are going to give
anything away for free, it must be something that is valuable and usable
from the perspective of your prospects and customers.

As examples, your newsletter must contain top-quality information or
content of value whereas the free gifts must be stuff that they can use as
well.

The point is that you cannot afford to give anything away for free if the free
materials or goods are of no use, do not achieve anything or are useless.

If you do this, you will find masses of list members unsubscribing which can
ruin weeks or even months of hard work in one fell swoop.

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The simple answer here is, you know what your prospects and customers
want or need.
If therefore you are going to supply anything to them for free, be absolutely
certain that doing so will improve your relationship with them or don’t do it.
People love free stuff, but free garbage has no value to anyone.

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8. You need a landing page

In addition to having a list subscription form on every page of your site, you
should also have a page on your site which does nothing else other than
encourage the visitor to sign up for your list.

This is known as a landing page, a page that features a powerful headline, a
few (bullet pointed) benefits of becoming a list subscriber and a signup form
above which there is a strong call to action.

This should remind the subscriber of the main benefit of subscribing to your
list before telling them that they need to add their first name and e-mail
address to the form below before clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button.

The importance of having a landing page in addition to a subscription form
on every other page of your site is that whereas other pages feature content
that distracts from the subscription form, a landing page is 100% focused on
this form alone.

This is therefore the page at which you would point some of your external
promotional activities when you are focused on building your mailing list
rather than on other aspects of your business.

25


Many local businesses do not feature a landing page on their site and they
therefore miss out on hundreds of potential subscribers.

Whereas a subscription form on a ‘standard’ web page will attract some new
list signups, landing page conversion (success) rates are usually 3, 4 or even 5
times higher.

9. Show them the proof

Whether it is on a product or service sales page or on the landing page of
your site, visitors want to see social proof that what you claim is the truth.

The best form of social proof is a raft of testimonials from satisfied
customers who are willing to go public with their endorsement.
The more testimonials you can add to your sales and landing pages, the
more money and subscribers your site will pop into your ‘bank’, 24/7.

On the basis that you have plenty of satisfied customers, don’t be hesitant
about asking some of them to help you by providing testimonials.

26


At the very least, ask them for two or three lines of endorsement, although if
you can get them to agree to add a photo to the testimonial, it becomes far
more believable.

This is even truer if you can convince a few of your satisfied customers to
provide video testimonial materials that you can publish on your sales and
landing pages.

10. Ask them to talk about it…

If you have satisfied customers who are willing to provide
you with testimonials for publication on your website,
have you ever thought about asking them to spread the
word about your products and services to other people
that might need the kind of things that you supply?

You might for example have a business where your customers tend to
socialize with others whose interests also correspond with your business
activities.

For instance, if you ran a dog grooming parlor, many of your customers will
be friendly with other dog owners. In this case, something as simple as giving

27


them a few of your business cards and asking them to pass them round
might work.

A similar concept applies in e-mail marketing terms as well.
Why not ask your subscribers to pass on information about your list to
others who might have similar interests, encouraging them to visit your
landing page to subscribe to your list themselves?

As long as the content and information that you are currently supplying to
your subscribers keeps them happy, there is no logical reason why they
wouldn’t be willing to do this for you.

They are after all helping a friend out by pointing them in the direction of a
top-quality service or product range.

11. Get them to pass your newsletter on

Another way of harnessing the viral power of list building is to ask your
current list members to pass on your newsletter to others that they know
would be interested in the contents.

28


Allow them to print it out as well so that they can pass on hard copies as and
when appropriate.

You can then take this concept one stage further still by making your
newsletter and its contents available to others outside your mailing list in as
many different ways as you can.

For example, the first thing that you should do is make printed copies
available so that you don’t restrict your marketing activities to those who are
active net users.

This is important because some of the people who pick up printed copies are
likely to be e-mail users even though they are not particularly active. There
are not after all many people nowadays in developed Western nations who
do not have an e-mail address.
Hence, these people could be good mailing list prospects even though they
have not come across your list previously.

In addition, you can contact other newsletter publishers to offer them your
articles for inclusion in their own newsletters as long as they agree to include
your landing page URL alongside your content.

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There are even professional online newsletter publishers who are always on
the hunt for fresh new newsletters and content.

You can therefore extend the reach of your newsletter by a significant
margin by contacting these people so that they can issue your newsletter to
their subscribers.
The important thing to understand is that a quality newsletter is a valuable
asset which you can distribute in many different ways to attract new list
subscribers who want to receive a regular copy as easily and conveniently as
possible. The more widely you distribute your newsletter, the more likely
this is to happen.

12. Include an opt-in link

There is little sense in making lots of effort to ensure that your newsletter
gets distributed as widely as possible if it does not contain a link from which
people can subscribe to your mailing list.

You must therefore make sure that the newsletter features the URL of your
landing page. The text surrounding the link must make it crystal clear that
this is the link from which the reader can obtain their own copy of your
newsletter completely free and explain the benefits of doing so.

30


Again, this is one of those factors that sound so obvious but it is one that
many local business owners miss.

They are therefore missing out on dozens of new subscribers who could have
put hundreds of dollars of profit in their bank account.

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Conclusion

I have seen local business owners make all of the e-mail marketing mistakes
that you have read of in this guide, so trust me, they happen.

Perhaps you already know this because you recognize some mistakes from
this ‘collection of horrors’ that you have made yourself in the past. That’s
fine, these things happen.

But as long as the mistakes remain in the past and you make sure that your
e-mail marketing is as efficient and effective as possible in the future, you’re
well on your way to maximizing your e-mail marketing profits.

There is nothing very complicated and difficult about optimizing your e-mail
marketing efforts. Indeed, a lot of the information in this guide might seem
like common sense if you have any experience of marketing on the net.

There are however millions of local business owners who are not so au fait
with e-mail and online marketing success. If you follow the guidance in this
manner, this could be about to change.

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