Email Advertising Campaigns
If you’ve had a website for a while, you probably know that an email advertising campaign is one of the cheapest ways to advertise online. However, it requires some finesse to be successful with email advertising strategies. Too many webmasters use a much too heavy handed approach, which often results in a greatly reduced return on investment, as well as reduced credibility and a lot of cancellations from subscribers. Worst of all, your emails may be tagged as spam by those who cancel their subscriptions. You can’t succeed online like this. Here we present some common, but plentifully practiced, techniques for email advertising strategies that you should avoid, as well as tips on making your email marketing campaigns into winners.
Here’s an example of what you don’t want to do if you want to try email advertising campaigns. I once subscribed to a travel newsletter that I found in another newsletter’s feature article. I clicked on the link and found a few items of interest, so I signed up for the newsletter. Soon, I discovered this website sent a newsletter almost every day, which was far more than I cared to receive in my inbox.
Then, I started receiving additional emails from this website that told a story of how somebody had just returned from a trip to Costa Rica, writing a story accompanied by the photos they took on their trip and promptly selling it to a travel magazine for a profit. The story was only a couple of paragraphs, and wasn’t especially interesting or informative. It was basically a thinly disguised lead-in to the sales pitch that followed. The gist of it was that for only $3000, I could attend their next workshop and learn all the tricks of the trade.
After a week or two of reading the newsletter, it became obvious that they had no actual information of any value. A short editor’s note, telling me what he’d been doing that day, was always followed by a long and pushy sales pitch. I ended canceling my subscription. This is the epitome of a bad email advertising campaign. You shouldn’t take this approach since it probably won’t work.
Now let’s take a look at how to construct email advertising campaigns that will do great things for your website traffic and income. You know the value of an online newsletter, but as mentioned earlier, successful email marketing campaigns require finesse. Just as on your website, your newsletter needs to have quality content. If you don’t provide information your readers can use to increase their knowledge, or which is at least entertaining in some way, you’ll be much less likely to succeed. One high quality feature article in every issue is a great way to start building a loyal readership, some of whom will forward it to a friend, which could result in a new subscriber and potential customer.
When doing email advertising campaigns within a newsletter format, your ads should not make up more than 10% of the total content. Two or three ads per issue is usually about right. If you have a particularly outstanding offer, you might feature it. For example: ‘This week I ran across an amazing deal that I wanted to pass on to you’ Then tell them why. Write a review and keep it short and sweet.
If you use the ’special offer’ approach in your email advertising campaign, use it judiciously and don’t overdo it. It’s got to truly be a special offer, time dependent, and worthy of sending in a separate email. If the offer doesn’t meet this criteria, your credibility will suffer, and eventually your readers won’t even open emails from you.
One technique for effective email advertising campaigns is to intersperse ads within freebies and resources at the end of your newsletter. You can make this section a regular part of every newsletter, under a title like ‘Freebies, top picks and other resources’.
Follow these do’s and don’ts of email advertising campaigns and see if you’re not well rewarded!
