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Check It Out: 75 Words to Consider During Your Next Electronic Campaign

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

75 Words to Consider During Your Next Electronic Campaign

Social media and e-mail, for all of their popularity, can only offer so much reach to potential customers. You can have the perfect sale at the perfect time using the most pristine analytics possible but lose conversion because your message got lost along the way.

How can you be sure your message will get in front of as many eyes as possible?

  1. Consider using some of the most popular retweetable and repeatable words on Twitter and Facebook.
  2. Avoid words that will land your message in a customer’s spam filter

The 20 Most ReTweetable Words & Phrases (according to DanZarrella.com) are:

you twitter please
retweet post blog
social free media
help please retweet great
social media 10 follow
how to top blog post
check out new blog post

According to spam filter experts, there are at least* 55 words or phrases you want to avoid in your e-mails include:

#1 Accept credit cards Affordable
All natural Apply online Bargain
Best price Billing address Buy direct
Call Cards Accepted Check
Click /Click Here / Click Below Click to remove Congratulations
Cost / No cost Do it today Extra income
For free Form Free and FREE
Free leads Free membership Free offer
Free preview Full refund Get it now
Giving away Guarantee Hidden
Marketing Marketing solutions Money
Name brand Never No Hidden Costs
No-obligation Now Offer
One time / one-time Opportunity Order / Order Now
Order today/ Order status Orders shipped by priority mail Performance
Please read Price Risk free
Sales Satisfaction guaranteed Save $
Save up to Special promotion Urgent
US dollars

You may obviously need to use some of the words above in your next e-mail, however, be sure to use the word(s) sparingly and never put a word like Free or Now in all capital letters. Increased frequency or repeated use of these words can highly increase your chances of an email landing in the spam folder.

Many third party email systems like Constant Contact, iContact, and AWeber automatically pre-check your email for you against a spam database and then give it a “spam rating”. The rating is supposed to help you gauge how your email stacks up against other spam and thus provide an idea of whether it will be caught in spam filters or not. I highly recommend one of these types of services if you are not already utilizing a third party system.

*This list was adapted from //www.marketingforsuccess.com/wordstoavoid.html. For a list of 250 words and phrases to avoid, take a look at Words and Phrases that Trigger Some Spam Filters at: //www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_phrases.htm.

Filed Under: Email Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Social Media Tagged With: ecommerce business support, ecommerce business tips, ecommerce expert, ecommerce marketing, ecommerce traffic conversion, Email Marketing

Creating Effective Email Campaigns

By Eric Leuenberger Leave a Comment

Creating Effective Email Campaigns

Customer retention is your ticket to profitable sales, which I explained in this post about the 80/20 rule and the lifetime of a customer. And I also discussed some key ways to earn customer loyalty, including staying in front of your customers.

Email marketing is a great way to stay in front of your customers.

But how do you create an effective email? Start with four key elements:

  1. From name: this should be the name of your business or website because that’s who they want to interact with and it avoids any deception, which is the first way to lose customers.
  2. Subject line: make it short, sweet and intriguing to allow them to quickly understand what the email is about and entice them to open it.
  3. Email content (body): can include images and text and should follow up on the subject line, outline the offer, state the benefits to the customer and include the call to action.
  4. Call to action: ask your customer to do something. What is the end goal of your email? This is what you want to tell them to do. “Shop now,” “Learn more,” “Click for details,” “Go shopping,” “Add to cart,” etc. You have to ask (or tell) if you want them to do something. Customers like to be encouraged to take action.

These four elements are the basic components of effective customer marketing: Get Interest, Get Opened, Get the Action.

Filed Under: Customer Retention Tagged With: Customer Retention, Email Marketing

4 Major Components Present in all Effective Emails

By Eric Leuenberger 1 Comment

4 Major Components Present in all Effective Emails

A staple in any customer retention program is the ability to write emails that strengthen relationships, get responses, and persuade action. Not enough attention is often paid to this critical component of building a business (and when attention is given to it, I too frequently see it performed incorrectly.) As such I am going to cover a number of topics spread over a series of articles that will help you develop more effective email follow-up campaigns.

The first thing you have to do in building an effective email follow-up program is to determine your desired outcome of each email (you can’t build an effective email if you don’t know what you want to achieve from it.)

Depending on your desired outcome a response could be any number of things. Overall though, emails have three primary roles.

  1. Build Relationships: All email programs should build a stronger relationship with your customer and seek to enhance your brand in their eyes.
  2. Get Responses: Example- respond to surveys, questions, feedback, etc…
  3. Persuade Action: Example- clicking a link in the email.

No matter your intention, an email should aim for the following actions at a minimum and in the following order:

  1. Get attention (interest)
  2. Get the open
  3. Get the action (response, click, etc…)

In other words, the job of an email is to first get the attention of the recipient, second to persuade them to open the email, then finally get them to act upon something in the email by clicking (typically back to your site.)

It goes without saying you can’t get the open if you don’t get their attention and you can’t get the click if you don’t get them to open it.

Now, having said that, how to you maximize the opportunity for achieving the three desired actions above (interest, open, action?)

To do this you need to understand that there are 4 basic components which all emails are made up of.

The 4 Components Present in Effective Emails

  1. From Name
  2. Subject Line
  3. Email Content (body)
  4. Call to Action

Of course, every email should have an opt out option etc… but that is for another article and I will not go into detail on it here.

To achieve the first two actions (i.e. interest, open) you must develop an effective subject line. Make it short, sweet, and intriguing. Let’s say you are running a limited time fall promotion for some product you sell.

The Subject Line

A good subject line might be:

Get 50% Off. 5 Days Only. Details Inside …

A less powerful subject line might be:

Fall Into Savings for a Limited Time!

The first subject line clearly states the offer and then ends with a subtle call to action (details inside) followed by an ellipsis (or hellip)—An ellipsis is a three-dot symbol used to show an incomplete statement. Ellipses are used in on-screen menus to convey that there is more to come. (…)

The From Line

The from line should be the name of your business or website to be most effective. Why? It is your business or website that they are transacting with and using it in the “from” line will help trigger brand awareness which will answer at least one major question they will ask when they receive the email—”who sent me this email?”

The answer to that question combined with the subject line easily tells them what the offer is and who it is from. They need to know this so trust is built and any hesitation to open the email based on security is removed from the equation.

Ok, you have now accomplished the first objective and let’s say the open the email. What next?

Well you now need to make sure at least two basic things are present to get the next action (which is the click in our example.)

The Content
Your email body (the text, images etc…) needs to reinforce the offer and provide details on it. Don’t go into your whole life story and write a book here. Keep it simple, state the benefits to the customer, stick to the facts, and then provide a call to action (or two).

Remember, people are overwhelmed by emails and they aren’t going to spend a ton of time reading so get to the point and make it compelling. Give them a reason to take action and then most importantly, ask for the action! It does you no good to develop a super email, get it opened, and forget to give them ways to perform the final action.

Many people just need a good prompt to get it done and this is what is referred to as the “call to action”.

The Call to Action

Calls to action ask the reader to do something. They are things like “Shop Now!”, “Learn More”, “Click for Details”, “Go Shopping”, “Add to Cart”, etc…

Provide your reader with a number of ways to get back to your site including hyperlinks to your domain, to the product(s) you are promoting, and a few good “calls to action” like listed here.

The call to action should also reflect what your intention is for them. If you want them to “Start Shopping” then tell them that. If you want them to “Complete the Survey” then tell them that. Don’t assume they will do it just because you present it to them—ask them to do it.

Those are the basic components of what makeup all emails and how you can use them to develop an effective email that get the three desired actions completed—Get Interest, Get Opened, Get the Action.

I’ll be going into more details you should consider for developing effective email follow-up campaigns in upcoming articles. This is a good place to start.

Filed Under: Email Marketing Tagged With: Email Marketing, writing effective emails

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