Author: Patrick Griffin

Patrick Griffin has been marketing online for 15 years. He's a serial entrepreneur and an avid email and content marketing enthusiast with a background in publishing and journalism, including a UK Press Award.

If You Make A Major Change Tell Your List In Advance

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Email Marketing Tips

Email Marketing Tips: Imagine if you had a standing arrangement with a good friend of yours that you would show up at their house every other week.

You would enjoy each other’s company, pass the time and share interesting news and gossip and then arrange to do the same thing in a couple of week’s time.

Now imagine if you suddenly thought it would be a good idea to turn up every other day instead…and just started to do so without a word of warning to your friend.

It would first seem a little odd and then it would begin to put a real strain on your relationship as you would quickly begin to intrude too much into your friend’s life.

In all likelihood your friend would probably ask you not to show up at his house at all…and that it wouldn’t take too long for them to reach this conclusion.

You can probably see where I am going with this already.

If you send out regular emails to your RocketResponder list then your subscribers will have become used to the frequency with which they hear from you.

If you make a slight change – especially if it is for a limited time – then that is ok but if you are going to dramatically change the frequency at which you send out emails then you should warn your list in advance.

Just a note to explain the change and the reason behind it could save you a lot of unhappy subscribers and a lot of unnecessary unsubscribes.

 

Adding A Picture To Your Emails

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Adding A Picture To Your Emails

Adding A Picture To Your Emails

I get a little annoyed when I hear people talking about their list as merely a marketing resource.

Yes your RocketResponder list can be a very valuable marketing resource…but it is much more than that.

Your list, first and foremost, is a collection of individual people, human beings with their own distinct personalities, likes and dislikes.

So when you communicate with them then you must always remember that you are talking to a group of individual humans and not just your marketing list.

An easy way of showing that you value the personal touch is by showing your subscribers that you are human too.

One way we do that at TimTech is by including our photographs on emails when we contact our subscribers.

Here are a couple of recent examples to show you what I mean:

Adding A Picture To Your Emails 1

Adding A Picture To Your Emails 2

Why not try the same thing for yourself.

Be yourself. Be personal. Show your subscribers that you care. Adding a picture to your emails is one way of doing just that.

Three Top Tips For An Autoresponder Email Series

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Autoresponder Email Series

There are times when it is difficult to know just what to write about for your autoresponder email series.

You are using RocketResponder to build up a nice list of subscribers but just what are you going to tell them?

Fear not because here are three quick top tips to get you thinking along the right lines:

  1. Make the difficult simple – You had to learn the stuff you know about right? Well, so will the people who are new to the niche you are expert in. Make an email series, or a series of email series, explaining some of the key products you sell or some of the key concepts relevant to your niche.
  2. Share your secrets – Be open and upfront with your tricks of the trade. I am not suggesting you give away all your most sensitive trade secrets but use your experience to give others a step up the ladder.
  3. Build up interest at key times – Do you have a big launch coming up or is there a big event happening in your niche. Don’t wait until the day to tell people about this but build up hype and interest in the weeks leading up to it. Then when the big day actually comes you know that your list will be as responsive as it possibly can be. Just don’t over do it though or you run the risk of making your list sick and tired of the event by the time it comes round.

There are three quick ideas and I am sure that once you start thinking about communicating with your subscribers, that you will find many more ideas of your own.

Now all you have to do is get writing.

Just A Reminder About Why You Are Here

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yes checkbox

Everybody you send an email to has got something in common…each of your email subscribers has given you permission to contact them.

But, being human, sometimes we forget that we have signed up to any given list in the first place.

So you could do your email subscribers a favor by reminding them of how they got to be on your list in the first place.

A cool way to do this is to include a little blurb in the footer of every email you send out.

It could say something like this:

“You are receiving this email because you signed up to my blog/filled out an online form on my website etc. to receive emails from me.

“I work hard to ensure I send out relevant emails to my subscribers but understand that needs and circumstances change.

“Therefore if this information is no longer relevant from you and you don’t want to hear from me then please use the “unsubscribe” link right here.”

Including something like this is good because it shows that:

  • you care about your email subscribers’ needs
  • you fully appreciate that you need their permission to contact them
  • you genuinely want to give them relevant information
  • you don’t want to waste their time if they no longer want to hear from you
  • you are totally upfront and honest about how to subscribe from your list.

 

Take Your Time With Your Email Campaigns

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Email Campaigns

You may have heard the expression “more haste, less speed” or “act in haste, repent at leisure,” but what has any of that got to do with email marketing and email campaigns?

Well here at RocketResponder we think quite a lot really.

Sometimes, sadly, it is all too clear that people spend a lot of time and effort in building a list of subscribers and then put hardly any time or effort into actually interacting with them.

You need to put the same care and dedication into dealing with the communication side of your business as you out into product development, marketing or sales.

Here are some silly mistakes you really must avoid:

  • thinking that your email campaigns are not really that important
  • thinking that you can leave the writing of emails to the last minute
  • rushing through your autoresponder series because you have “much more important” tasks to be getting on with or
  • adding a last minute email marketing campaign for a product launch because you have run out of time and the launch is just a few days away

Customers are getting increasingly sophisticated and they will know if you have just rushed out some half-baked email campaign at the last minute.

Doing so will give the impression that you just don’t really care at all; that you don’t care about your customers and that you don’t care about your products.

So always build in your email campaigns into your product launches, upcoming promotions and overall marketing strategy.

Use the power of email communication to show that you do really care and, in the process, give yourself a jump start over the competition who use email badly.

Plan what you want to say in advance and take as much time as is necessary to get the job done properly. You should reap the rewards in better customer retention and increased sales.