Posts Tagged ‘Email Lists’

How to cre­ate effec­tive mar­ket­ing email lists

September 25th, 2009

Use iCon­tact to Man­age your Mar­ket­ing Email Lists and Stay in Com­pli­ance with CANN SPAM

I am often asked if email lists are even an effec­tive mar­ket­ing tool any­more and the answer is yes, absolutely yes. You do have to exer­cise care with your list how­ever, the old men­tal­ity of get­ting as many email addresses as you can and then just start blast­ing ads to them doesn’t work. You have to care­fully build your list with qual­ity addresses that are inter­ested in what you have to offer.  Send­ing mar­ket­ing emails to addresses that are not tar­geted are less likely to be con­verted into a sale and are more likely to report you as SPAM. Why go through the effort of build­ing a list if you aren’t going to make the effort to make it a qual­ity list?

Peo­ple still read email, even from peo­ple that they don’t know but in this post-SPAM age peo­ple are more aware of SPAM email and how to iden­tify SPAM email either on their own or with soft­ware. How­ever, if peo­ple are aware of cer­tain adver­tise­ment emails that they have elected to receive then they gen­er­ally won’t mind them and are even inclined to read them.  That is your goal, you want to be they guy who has email that peo­ple have elected to receive.  This is called, ‘opt-in’. The per­son has ‘opted’ to receive adver­tise­ment email from you. Why would they do that? Sim­ple really, you offered to pro­vide them with some­thing in return for their email address and their per­mis­sion for you to send adver­tise­ments to that address and they placed a higher value on what you offered over the sanc­tity of their email address.

Sounds easy enough right?

Well, it actu­ally is. It’s basic mar­ket­ing, find some­one or a group of peo­ple that have a need and then either cre­ate or offer some­thing to them that addresses their need and tell them that the cost of ful­fill­ing their need is and email address and the per­mis­sion to send adver­tise­ment email to that address. That sounds a lit­tle cal­lous and cold when you read it like that but it is the most basic expla­na­tion. Let me warm it up a bit with a real-life example.

Lets use the lawn and gar­den indus­try (since it’s bright and sunny out today); we’ll pre­tend that I am a land­scap­ing busi­ness owner. I have all these won­der­ful prod­ucts that I use in my busi­ness that are man­u­fac­tured by another com­pany (weed killers, plant food … etc). The com­pany that I buy these won­der­ful prod­ucts from has an affil­i­ate sales pro­gram that I could be apart of which would give me a per­cent­age of the sale of each prod­uct of theirs that I sell to one of my cus­tomers. I don’t want to risk los­ing any of my cus­tomers so I decide to only sell to my cus­tomers, the prod­ucts that I use and trust from this manufacturer.

Now I am faced with dis­tri­b­u­tion; I could be con­tent with just in-store sales but what if I could sell these won­der­ful prod­ucts nation­ally or even glob­ally, can you imag­ine the sales!? So how do I get the word out about these prod­ucts I am sell­ing with­out spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars on tele­vi­sion, radio and news­pa­per ads? The Inter­net per­haps … yes the Inter­net! So, what is the eas­i­est way to con­tact every Inter­net user? Send them an email! How do I get their email address and how do I make sure they would at least be inter­ested in land­scap­ing prod­ucts? After all, if I go to all this effort I want to make sure my mes­sage reaches as many peo­ple that are actu­ally inter­ested in land­scap­ing prod­ucts as possible.

Remem­ber how I said you need to offer some­thing that your audi­ence needs and then tell them that the cost for ful­fill­ing that need with your offer­ing is their email address and per­mis­sion to send to that address? So using the lawn and gar­den exam­ple; let’s say I cre­ate a ‘how-to’ guide for mak­ing your own back­yard pond and I offer that guide to any­one at the cost of their email address and their per­mis­sion to send to that email address. Now my only chal­lenge is to let peo­ple know about the guide that I am offer­ing.  I have the guide in my store for cus­tomers to pick up but I need to reach a big­ger Internet-scale audi­ence and let them know about my guide. I cre­ate what the online mar­ket­ing indus­try calls a, ‘squeeze page’ that I can use to dis­trib­ute my guide to Inter­net users via down­load (because the real pur­pose of the squeeze page is to squeeze them for their email address and per­mis­sion not dis­trib­ut­ing the guide).

My real inter­est isn’t in to how-to guide, I am really just after your email address and the per­mis­sion to send to it. I still have to take time and care in cre­at­ing the guide; the guide has to be com­pelling enough for peo­ple to want it and I don’t want to dam­age my name/brand/credibility with junk but the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the guide isn’t the goal in this case. The goal is to offer some­thing that some­one wants and would place a higher value on than the sanc­tity of their email address.

SIDE BAR: As you progress in your mar­ket­ing adven­tures you will find oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate addi­tional streams of rev­enue every­where with every­thing you do; in the lawn and gar­den case one such oppor­tu­nity exists with the guide (albeit in my exam­ple the guide was just the means to an end).  I could sim­ply place a few affil­i­ate hyper­links of related prod­ucts that I am sell­ing inside the guide that peo­ple who read the guide may be inter­ested in. If I lose them in the sense that they don’t give me their real email address (or don’t respond to my mar­ket­ing emails) they may still buy a prod­uct from one of my affil­i­ate links in the guide (so you still get to mon­e­tize that indi­vid­ual). You always want mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to mon­e­tize every Inter­net trav­eler that comes in con­tact with you or your brand.

The lawn and gar­den exam­ple use a clas­sic tool for list build­ing, the squeeze page but there are as many ways to get a per­son to give you their email address and the per­mis­sion to send to it as there are stars in the night sky. Some peo­ple stum­ble with this area of mar­ket­ing because they feel that is less than eth­i­cal.  My offi­cial state­ment is this; As long as you clearly state what the per­son will be receiv­ing in their email from you and that you pro­vided them with a good or ser­vice of some sort in exchange for their email address and their per­mis­sion then there is no room to debate ethics because that is an eth­i­cal transaction.

The last area you need to be con­cerned with when deal­ing with email lists is ‘opt-out’.  SPAM reg­u­la­tions dic­tate that an email recip­i­ent of reg­u­larly dis­trib­uted email must be given the oppor­tu­nity to ‘opt out’ or elect to stop receiv­ing email from you.  Com­monly this is done through a, ‘Unsub­scribe’ hyper­link located at the bot­tom of the email you receive.  Please do not be igno­rant to SPAM reg­u­la­tions, it is becom­ing seri­ous busi­ness and lots of peo­ple are pay­ing atten­tion to it.

Per­son­ally, I would make sure that all of your email lists stay in com­pli­ance by using a third-party list man­age­ment ser­vice like iCon­tact

Here are a few other ideas for email list building:

  • Place an ‘opt-in’ link on every page of your web site
  • Offer dis­counts and incen­tives through a newslet­ter that you have to signup for
  • Opti­mize your web site for search engines, make the con­tent rel­e­vant and related to an over all theme
  • Invest time into mak­ing a name for your­self with pop­u­lar social net­work­ing sites

As always, feel free to con­nect with me if you would like my assis­tance or guid­ance with twit­ter usage for you busi­ness or other tech­nol­ogy coach­ing for your business!

Writ­ten By:

Ryan Huff
ryan@rthconsultants.com

http://rthconsultants.com

Ryan Huff is a free­lance web devel­oper, tech­nol­ogy coach, mar­tial artist, busi­ness devel­oper and an avid inter­net mar­keter. You can con­nect with Ryan here at The Code­Tree or at RTH Con­sul­tants, fol­low @rthconsultants on Twit­ter or at Face­book

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Great PHP script for val­i­dat­ing email addresses on a squeeze page

September 17th, 2009 
static function checkEmail($email)  {  

     if (eregi("^[a-zA-Z0-9_]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+$]", $email))  {  

          return false;
     } 

     list($Username, $Domain) = split("@",$email);  

     if (getmxrr($Domain, $MXHost))  {  

          return true;  

     }

     else {

          if (@fsockopen($Domain, 25, $errno, $errstr, 30))  {  

              return true;
          }  

          else  {  

              return false;
         }

     }

}

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Squeeze Page 101 for those who are squeezed for time — a prac­ti­cal guide to cre­at­ing a squeeze page

September 17th, 2009

How To Guide for Host­ing Your Own Tele­sem­i­nars! | Easy Traf­fic Steps! A Guide to Build­ing Sus­tain­able Traffic

A ‘Squeeze Page’ is noth­ing more than a land­ing page or a prospect page, often a single-page web site with the sole intent of engag­ing the reader with visual stim­uli such as; images, video, col­or­ful text, bold and unique fonts and mul­ti­ple para­graph breaks to name a few. The pur­pose for engag­ing the reader is to col­lect a very impor­tant piece of unique infor­ma­tion from the reader, an email address. In the days of past, all sorts of trick­ery was used to gather email addresses; crawl­ing and har­vest­ing from web sites, social engi­neer­ing, SPAM … the list goes on.  In today’s Inter­net, there are enough reg­u­la­tions in place that would make it very dif­fi­cult to suc­ceed that way however.

The squeeze page solves a lot of chal­lenges that other ‘less than eth­i­cal’ ways of col­lect­ing email addresses present.  A user sim­ply going to your squeeze page nav­i­gates one of the most impor­tant hur­tles in list build­ing, ‘opt-in’. You didn’t force the user to go to your page and your not keep­ing the user there either, they can still exer­cise free will to leave or stay. It is up to the user to pro­vide their email address to the squeeze page, its your job to make them want to do that!

Your squeeze page’s only mis­sion in life is to be com­pelling enough to make the user want to give his or her email address through the squeeze page. Your only mis­sion in life (regard­ing the squeeze page) is to drive users prefer­ably tar­geted) to your squeeze page, ide­ally by the droves!

Your squeeze page should get straight to the point, it isn’t gen­er­ally going to be a full fledged web site. You typ­i­cally won’t have an, ‘About Us’ page or any other typ­i­cal web site pages. The first part of your squeeze page should be all about why the user wants either what your sell­ing or what your rec­om­mend­ing. Use sev­eral brief para­graphs to do this.  Mul­ti­ple para­graph breaks will keep the user’s eyes mov­ing and atten­tion focused.  If your whole descrip­tion is in one sin­gle para­graph the user’s eyes will get bored and then they’ll likely leave the page alto­gether. RBGY! Red, Blue, Green and Yel­low … these col­ors are your friends! I am not advo­cat­ing you cre­ate the Inter­net ver­sion of a three ring cir­cus but I am telling you that you do not want all black text!

Text col­ors and Squeeze Pages

  • Red = Stop, Alert, Warning
  • Blue = Calm, focused
  • Green = Excit­ing, Motivating
  • Yel­low = Atten­tion, Proceed

You should use black text at a nom­i­nal 9 – 12 point font for stan­dard con­tent and descrip­tions (not head­lines or titles .. etc). Imagery is accept­able on squeeze pages but you don’t want to slow down the load time of your page (no host­ing images on other sites an hot-linking!), if your squeeze page loads slow the user will almost assuredly close the browser win­dow on you.

Hav­ing adver­tise­ments on a squeeze page can be a dicey game.  You are dri­ving traf­fic to your squeeze page to either sell or rec­om­mend a prod­uct to users, you typ­i­cally won’t want to dis­tract them with, ‘shoot the mon­key’ adver­tise­ments. You need your traf­fic to remain focused on the task at hand, being con­vinced to give you their email address!

Search Engine Optimization

SEO or Search Engine Opti­miza­tion is a topic in itself and is beyond the scope of this Squeeze Pages 101 guide how­ever, SEO is absolutely vital to your squeeze page and is worth a quick trip to Google. Addi­tion­ally if you want to con­nect with me (Ryan Huff), I would be happy to set you on the right path to learn­ing about SEO. A word of cau­tion though, be wary of any per­son or com­pany that tries to guar­an­tee you a con­sis­tent spot in any search engine. That magic bul­let sim­ply does not exist. If you could pay some­one to make your page, ‘the num­ber one result in Google’, don’t you think Google would have caught on by now? You can inves­ti­gate Google Adwords, which is a paid posi­tion­ing ser­vice from Google (but not posi­tion­ing in the result set of a search).

Essen­tially though, SEO is all about rel­e­vancy, how rel­e­vant is the text in your page to the key­words the user typed in to what­ever search engine they used. The best way to main­tain good SEO on your squeeze page is to keep your page focused on one topic, don’t let the page text go off into dif­fer­ent topic areas — keep the page laser focused, there should be a sin­gle under­ly­ing theme through­out your page. You’ll also want to learn about META tags which are hid­den state­ments that are placed on your squeeze page that help search engines find the page (but the user won’t see the META tags on the sur­face of your squeeze page).

Here is a sam­ple squeeze page that I have made so you can see what I con­sider a ‘good’ squeeze page. To look at the exam­ple page ‘under the hood’, right mouse click a white area of the page and choose ‘view source’.  This will expose all the code and even the META tags used to make the squeeze page work.

Exam­ple: A Sam­ple Squeeze Page

As always, feel free to con­nect with me if you would like my assis­tance or guid­ance with squeeze pages or other tech­nol­ogy tasks for your Inter­net business!

Addi­tion­ally, here are some use­ful links that can help you build your opt-in email list and gen­er­ate a mas­sive inter­net following!

This arti­cle is writ­ten and pro­duced By:

Ryan Huff — Your Tech­nol­ogy Coach
ryan@rthconsultants.com
http://rthconsultants.com

Ryan Huff is a free­lance web devel­oper, tech­nol­ogy men­tor, mar­tial artist, busi­ness devel­oper and an avid inter­net mar­keter. You can con­nect with Ryan at http://rthconsultants.com, fol­low Ryan at Twit­ter or at Face­book

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