Making your email marketing work

Your Name I like to use my name in my email addresses, as it adds a personal touch.

Emailing info@domain.com is pretty impersonal. You're not sure if it's going to a real human being, or just a computer.

Even addresses like bookings@domain.com is not so exciting. It is purpose driven, in that you know the purpose of the email is to contact whoever is in charge of bookings, but you're still not connecting with a real live human being, who has a face.

Support@domain.com is still purpose-driven, in that you're asking for help, but it's more and more common these days to have support at major companies run by computers as well.

Remember, the internet is a communications tool between people.

So have your email - at least one of them - being your name, preferably your first name, as it implies the following characteristics:

• You're approachable 2. You're visible 3. You are real
• When people get a reply, it'll be from a real person, hopefully even addressing their particular needs, and using their name adds power to your communication, putting you three rungs above the competition.

Your business Having an email address that includes your ISP, is like saying to the world, I just got the internet, and I love the people that put on the internet at our house so much that I thought I'd advertise the fact in my email address.

And then they put something cryptic like majop@bigpond.net.au As if anyone is going to know that Mark, Anne, Jim, Oliver and Peter live at that address.

If you're planning on any sort of business communication, it makes a LOT of sense to have your own domain name. (See register your own domain in appendixes)

I'll assume if you're running a business you own the dot com of your business... or at the very least have yourbusiness.something Let's say you've registered mycoolbusiness.com It makes sense to a prospect, someone visiting your site, or someone receiving communications from you, to have an email address that is attached to your mycoolbusiness.com address. So like in the previous chapter, you might have Mark@MyCoolBusiness.com That looks a whole lot more professional, powerful and convincing when putting forward a business proposal, than majop@bigpond.net.au Think about it.

If your email is your first impression on the internet, it makes sense to have your email and your business reflecting the fact that you are in business, not brand new to the internet and not able to work out how to get your website going.

Then, when you have your business, you can use the following tricks to make your business even bigger.

Different Emails When you're a virtual entrepreneur - you have no office other than your home computer which may be on the kitchen table, no staff, no inventory that is outside your home, no accounts department - you're it - you need to create an illusion of size.

Having just one email on every page of your website, in your emails, in your marketing etc. looks small.

Here's a tip to make your business look bigger.

Mark@MyCoolBusiness.com Orders@MyCoolBusiness.com Help@MyCoolBusiness.com Newsletter@MyCoolBusiness.com Accounts@MyCoolBusiness.com and on and on.

You could even add members of your family or 'support team'

Jill@MyCoolBusiness.com Stacey@MyCoolBusiness.com Matt@MyCoolBusiness.com Even your dog. Lucy@MyCoolBusiness.com This adds substance - to your new business and helps you track your marketing WeeklySpecial@MyCoolBusiness.com HowDoIPay@MyCoolBusiness.com This looks complicated, when in fact it can be very easy. You set up all the email to be in a "Bulk", "Catch-all" or "Master" inbox. So that all emails addressed to ANYTHING@MyCoolBusiness.com come into your one inbox.

You only need one account. And in your prioritization of emails, you can deal with support@, orders@, help@ emails prior to general chatting with your friends about the latest YouTube video.

Numbers and letters in emails Here are my thoughts... Don't use numbers in emails. Keep your email targeted, specific, and easy to remember.

Think of it as fitting on a business card, and keep it simple enough for a 7 year old to remember it.

My kids will never forget dad@markdavis.com.au but they would probably have a hard time remembering davis5431@ozemail.com.au

Keep it simple.

Dashes and underscores and dots All of these complicate your message.

And could be hard to get right when you are in contact with people by phone, or sitting next to them on the plane, or having to explain it.

If you have to explain it... it's too complicated.

For example:

Mark_Ian_Davis@ Mark.Ian.Davis@ Mark-Ian-Davis@ All these could be interpreted a number of ways... is it a hyphen, a dash, an emdash, an underscore... and where on earth is the underscore on a keyboard anyway!

Think simplicity.

Anything that is likely to confuse a person could mean the difference between getting the deal, or your email being lost in cyberspace. Keep it simple.

First impressions Your email is usually the first thing someone sees from you if you've promised to send them information (if they called or saw you in person) about your products or business, if they are getting a quote or an autoresponder message.

If they are getting communication, you want it warm and fuzzy, not cold and lonely.

So it's important to greet people in your emails in the manner in which you would be speaking.

Dear Friend, Dear <Name>, Dear subscriber, Dear customer, All these are better than getting straight into your pitch, your sales script, your marketing message.

First impressions online are the same as offline. Common courtesy always wins over intense interrogation.

You can try just banging your audience over the head with a selling message, but the chances are 5x higher that they will just hit delete, instead of reading your message to the end.

Subject lines With the advent of spam becoming more and more of an issue with the people of the internet world, reading email becomes a time-consuming exercise.

When we have to sift through 2/3 of our mail as junk, our tolerance of marketing messages becomes much, much lower.

So it's important to also realize that we're going to be judged on the subject line of our emails as ruthlessly as our email address.

The days of simply saying "Hi, thought you'd like to read this" are gone. Spammers use all the conventional ways of addressing emails to "fake" the personal approach, to try and get in under your radar. In fact some of them are so convincing, they may even include your name and even know through other online email subscriptions where you live - so a spammy subject line could read:

"Hi Mark, thought you'd like to visit Disneyland again" Now, if I was Mark, and I'd been to Disneyland, I could be fooled into clicking on that message, REGARDLESS of who it was from. So that I could find out who was sending me this personal message.

No no no no no!

You have to be more direct, to the point, and tie in some of the following:

If you mention their name, make sure it's how you usually communicate with them - Mr. Davis, Joseph, Fiona... and possibly include something specific.

So don't say... Re: What we talked about the other day instead say Re: following up on the joint venture project discussed on 3/3 at Starbucks. The specificity is something the spammers can't duplicate.

I will also sometimes continue my email from the subject line right into the body of the text... or repeat the subject line in the first line of the text. I use the subject line to grab the attention, then go from there to the body and start the entire message again.

Remember, sometimes they will print or save the email, so the duplication of the subject line can be a good idea.

In my newsletters that's exactly what I do:

• I state the subject line consistently the same each issue, just with

date stamps to make them easy to file/sort/filter.

• I then reiterate the subject line in the first or second line of the

newsletter.

For example:

Subject Line: The Daily Grab for September 17, 2006 First line of email: The Daily Grab for September 17, 2006 In this issue... 1. Friends in high places? 2. Google Superman Live Schedule 3. News from the world of Big Money 4. Google Tip of the day 5. Got a regular business without a website? then the newsletter continues More on subject lines What does Christmas in Singapore, Ramadan in Malaysia and New Year in Philippines all have in common?

They are all events that you can tie into your subject line.

Just as marketing in the traditional media changes with the seasons, holiday, vacations, special days, anniversaries are all good marketing topics in your subject lines.

Why?

They show that you have an awareness of the holiday of the year. It can show your cultural awareness of different countries and religions.

And it tells you when people will be reading your email or away enjoying themselves at the beach.

In Australia, no-one works much through January. It's the break everyone waits for all year, sitting by the beach, camping in tents, surfing, sunbathing. The chances of an email newsletter getting through are very small.

So I believe it's important, in fact vital, to be changing your subject lines to suit the times, and when you know some of your customers are away, direct your marketing instead to people who you know ARE reading.

On that subject- a little side-note. Don't put people under too much pressure in your subject lines. When you tell them in a subject line that they have to respond within 24 hours, they assume it's a lottery style competition - SPAM - and they'll delete without reading.

Keep your communication light, but specific, direct but friendly, and you'll get more people reading your emails.

SPAM checking It's very important in direct email marketing of any sort, that you make the most of the opportunity to build your database.

And the safest way today is by using mailing programs that use double- opt-in verification.

What that means is, say you went to my site, www.markdavis.com.au You enter your name and email to subscribe to The Daily Grab. Within a few minutes, you'll receive an email from me asking you to confirm your subscription. Therefore you're giving me permission to continue to communicate with you in a bulk email kind of way.

There are many programs out that help do this, spamarrest, spamsorter, spameater, etc.

I use my 1shoppingcart account to handle the verifications, and then when I send email even 1:1 personally, the fact that they have "whitelisted" me or given me ongoing "permission" to email them, it gives me a red carpet welcome in their INBOX.

You can do this one email at a time, or just at your ‘mailservers' settings, slowly add people to your own "allowed" list or "whitelist".

By the same token you can disallow or "BlackList" anyone. And that will keep their spam out of your inbox, so you don’t have to worry about it any more. Until next week when they find out a new way to email you.

Free emails The exact opposite of everything I talked about for outbound marketing and business emails is the free email account.

I love to use Gmail because it has an unlimited inbound storage.

You can search your emails quickly, and it's great for labeling and storing the following types of emails:

Subscriptions to ezines. Registrations you have to fill in for public WIFI spots Any sites that require you to register for them with a name and 'valid' email address Public notifications New product announcements and of course, if you suspect that you might get a bit of spam when you hand out an email address, your free account is the best one to use.

Here is why. It's not on your computer - it's stored at the server. It's not slowing down you getting your email into outlook/thunderbird/mail etc. It's unlimited storage means you'll never miss out on an email because your inbox is full.

So go into Google and search for gmail or Google mail. And if you can't get it, email me at mlmozzy@gmail.com and I'll send you an invitation to your free Gmail account.

Mark Davis is a well-recognized face in the Business Community, and Direct Selling in particular.

For over 10 years now he has been a contributor to Tom "Big Al" Schreiter's Fortune Now Newsletter, and the promoter of such big names as John Kalench, John Milton Fogg, Randy Gage, Jerry Clark and more, Mark has built significant businesses supporting the growth of Network Marketing distributors businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Supporting the growth of the Network Marketing industry in Australia, companies call on Mark to add historical perspective and a vision of the future for their distributors.

Also in demand for leadership weekends, trainings and seminars on internet marketing, sponsoring and building large co-operative organizations, he's an inspiring and dynamic speaker. In the last 3 years, Distributors have been trained in Companies including: Neways, Nuskin/Pharmanex, TriNature, Jewelway, USANA, Melaleuca, Mannatech, Amway, Excel, VIVA Life, E Excel, Isagenix, Pre-Paid Legal, Vitamark, Hello World, Ameriplan, Market America and many more.

A feature speaker at the Network Marketing Mastermind II in Houston, Texas, Mark has trained over 4000 people in 9 countries, and his unique talent for down-to-earth, value-for-money training has him in demand throughout the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with trips to Malaysia and Singapore.

Recently he spoke at the first Internet Marketing Bootcamp in Budapest, Hungary, for internet marketers and home-based business people. He returns there this year after glowing reviews.

In recent times he sold more than 2.5 Million Dollars of Corporate entertainment in 6 months, after building a million dollar publishing company in the 90's.

He has also completed more than 200 students in the past 18 months through nationally accredited training certificates in the areas of Retail Sales, Retail Management, Store operations, Business Development, Frontline Management, Marketing, Computer Skills, Customer Contact and Call Centre, Wholesale, as well as numerous short courses on Public Speaking, Coaching, Mentoring, Positive Thinking and Self-Motivation. For information on these courses click here.