Good Email Marketing From Newegg

I needed a wireless router for my garage so naturally I head to Newegg – everyone’s favorite geek store – and ordered one a couple days ago.

(Ironically it’s being delivered as I write this)

The day after I ordered – I got this email from Newegg…

Click To Enlarge

Why Is This Good?

1. It’s highly relevant – both the timing and content
2. It’s an easy upsell – maybe I forgot to order an adapter!
3. It adds value beyond the product I purchased

Do you have examples of good email marketing? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

Good Email Marketing Example – Ace Hardware

Here is a good email marketing example from Ace Hardware

Why does this work? It’s seasonal and it’s good, informative content that shows you why you need their products. They didn’t just send a promo for me to by grass seed and fertilizer – they are telling me why I need it through informative content.

Email Marketing – Moving Beyond Spam

When you first hear email marketing, most people think of the spam that infiltrates their inbox daily. This bombardment of solicitations has led to its decreased effectiveness. While some of these messages make it through the spam filter and are actually read, it is not the best way to utilize this marketing tool. This is not to say that mass emailing should necessarily be thrown out altogether. As e-mailing one-thousand people takes about as much time as emailing ten people, it can still be worth it to do so. However, even within the realm of mass emailing, there are ways to optimize your efforts.

One of the best methods for getting the most out of your general email marketing efforts is to offer exclusive deals and discounts. Doing so makes it much more likely to generate interest than does a message simply advertising a specific product. Specials and coupons generate a sense of immediacy that has a higher chance of resulting in a webpage viewing and, thus, a purchase. Everyone wants a good deal and this technique uses that fact to its full advantage while still benefiting the customer.

Nonetheless, moving beyond mass email marketing will undoubtedly benefit you the most. One effective way to build a targeted contact list is through squeeze pages. These one-page websites provide an offer for the customer in exchange for their name and email address. Once they have filled out the form, a message will be sent immediately to their mailbox that contains their bonus information along with details about your company and direction to your main website. By providing something of use to the client, it begins to build a trusting and loyal relationship. Also, as they took action and showed interest by filling out the form, they are much more likely to make a purchase than would someone who received an unsolicited email.

This opt-in structure is the best way to avoid your message being sent straight to the trash. What results from these lead capture pages is a list of people that you can now continue to build a relationship with. When there is a new product or business advancement, you now have a group of people who are interested in hearing about it. Although it is important to make sure you do not contact them too often, an update here and there is a great way to keep your company fresh in their minds. By using one or all of these techniques, your email marketing efforts can now be more effective than ever.

Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing With Flowtown

Got questions about Flowtown? Ask us in the comments or jump into the forums!

AWeber’s New Form Creator

We use AWeber for just about everything email marketing and lead generation related at our web strategy consulting company and for all of our sites like this one. All of our mini courses use the AWeber forms and autoresponders. And our email newsletters rely on this service as well.

Today they’ve released a brand new form creator for users to design lead capture and subscription forms for AWeber.

Check it out!

Need an email marketing, autoresponder, or lead capturing system? Check out AWeber today for a $1 Trial Offer.

Have a Look at the New Web Form Generator

5 Ways To Not Be an Internet Marketing Spammer

There’s a fine line between trying to gain maximum reach for your business on the web and becoming a spammer. Here are five guidelines to help you avoid becoming an internet marketing spammer.

1. Don’t Use Social Media as A Marketing Bullhorn

Finding and building community around your business, industry, or niche can be a great way to increase your reach to your target audience. But with these ease of interaction and increase in transparency you need to concentrate on the message you are broadcasting. In order to build relationships you should try to become a resource for your audience and community rather than using the platform as to broadcast your marketing messages. If you are uncertain if your activities are spam behavior or not you can usually ask your community for feedback. Generally if you are providing value to the conversation then you should have no problem.

2. Use Permission Based List Building

Building marketing lists are essential for any businesses. One common misconception with these lists – which are generally used for email marketing – is that building a massive list is your best way to increase sales. I disagree with that and find it the quickest way to becoming a spammer. That’s why we teach businesses to build opt in lists using permission based marketing tactics. This guarantees that your message is delivered to an interested, targeted audience rather than a blasted message that has no relevance to the recipient. If you purchase or manually build lists you will experience low conversion rates.

3. Respect Your Community’s Time

If you have an email list or have built followers on social networks be sure to respect their time. Don’t blast them with emails, updates, copy, or blog posts. A general rule of thumb is to provide quality over quantity. One really good email a week is far more effective than 3 unthoughtful blasts a week. You don’t want to annoy your audience – you want to provide value. As long as you are doing that you will maintain respect with your community and build loyalty. This will pay off over time as you become a resource for your audience.

4. Optimize Your Landing Pages

The page where your targeted audience and/or community land is very important. If your landing page is not engaging you will likely lose your viewer. If you are interested in optimizing your landing page there are several resources. You should first figure out where on your site traffic is landing – homepage via advertisements or blog post via search engines are two examples of entry points to your website. If the bounce rates (you can find in web analytics) on your most popular landing pages are high you need to tweak those pages to retain those visitors and provide them the ability to browse to additional relevant content on your site. Also – use your landing pages wisely and perhaps you should setup different landing pages for different traffic avenues – ie: create specific landing pages for your Twitter account, advertisements, Facebook link, etc.

5. Advertise Contextually

If you are advertising online the quickest way to waste money is to pay for clicks and impressions on pages and in copy that is irrelevant to your business or topic. We recommend not buying links or advertisements on sites that do not pertain to your business. If you do receive a click the conversion rate will be very low because the visitor is has little intent for additional information on the topic of your site. If you do proper keyword targeting in PPC advertising campaigns you will see higher conversion rates as the content you are targeting is optimized to your business website or product.

Tips for Testing Email Campaigns

This video is “5 Tips for Testing Emails” from Linda Bustos of the GetElastic blog.

5 Email Testing Tips & Tricks from Elastic Path on Vimeo.

Is Your Internet Marketing Campaign Spam?

So you’ve been working hard on the internet marketing plan for your web strategy but have you stepped back to look at it from the user’s perspective? Are you a spammer? Online marketing is very community focused and it takes time to build a trusting relationship. You need to seriously reflect on your internet marketing campaign to avoid losing that trust. Last Friday at a Lunch & Learn session my company co-sponsors, our speaker Brett Trout said “Reputation takes a long time to build and a second to diminish” in regards to business ethics. The same idea holds true with a community building and internet marketing strategy.

Here are two examples of mistakes I’ve made where I developed what I thought were value-added marketing campaigns – which turned out to be the opposite.

In an effort to increase email subscribers on GetANewBrowser.com I implemented a modal popup feature of aWeber. I thought this was a value-add feature that provided a call to action to some extra content I was giving out. Even though this subscriber drive was a resounding success – it frustrated users. So I turned it off. Conversions went way down, but my readers are much happier.

The second example I want to share is the practice of auto direct messages on Twitter. Before I switched it – you would get an auto direct message whenever you followed @WebStrategyShop or @abrudtkuhl on Twitter. This means I sent you something like the following message “Hey thanks for following me have you checked out my Internet Business Podcast at ManagingTheEdge.com?” In one instance Aaron Houssian sent me a direct message follow up alerting me to my spammer behavior. At that point I realized my marketing campaign was indeed spamming people and they did not appreciate it. So, after much debate, I turned it off.

In both instances my community alerted me to the issue at hand and, thankfully, stuck with me after I addressed the issue transparently and followed through with their requests. This brings up another lesson – you need to listen to your community. Not only can you crowd source ideas from them they will give you immediate feedback if they feel you are spamming them.

If you are interested in hearing more discussion on this topic – we covered it in the latest episode of our internet business podcast Managing The Edge.

Deliver RSS to Email Subscribers

When we discuss content strategy one of the recommendations we give in almost any circumstance is to create content outposts so your content can be consumed in many formats. One of the greatest distribution mediums for your content is RSS – which by now is universally supported in any technology platform you should choose. Even though RSS is readily available and highly consumed – there are still many people that prefer email delivery.

As you know we are advocates of creating and automating processes – and email delivery of your blog content can be handled this way, so you don’t have to manually update your email subscribers. Now if you use FeedBurner it is easy to setup. When clicked on, your users will simply need to enter their email addresses to receive your RSS feed in their inbox.

However, we prefer to use aWeber – which has two complementary features for creating automated content outposts. First of all you get an extremely customizable tool to send out your RSS feed to email subscribers. We prefer using aWeber for many reasons and their Blog Broadcast tool is one of them.

aWeber allows you to schedule broadcasts based on time or number of entries to send. Furthermore it will automatically send out a message on Twitter for your readers to view posts.

Here are some hints when integrating your blog’s rss feed to email subscribers…

1. Don’t send them too many posts, maybe just your “Featured Posts”
2. Send a digest rather than single emails per post
3. Provide a call to action at the end of these digests
4. Add value to your email subscribers as incentive to subscribe
5. Don’t just dump content on your subscribers – it’s an easy way to lose them

A lot of these techniques and tips have come from a lot of experimentation and tweaking. Again – this is why we prefer using aWeber as it allows us full customization for delivering RSS to email subscribers.

image via Annette Schwindt