Email Marketing - 5 Secrets To Higher Conversion Rates

Email Marketing - 5 Secrets To Higher Conversion Rates
by Jon McCulloch

Email Marketing, although thought by some to be old fashioned, boring and ineffective remains one of the most powerful marketing strategy any small business has to increase its profits.

By changing from "selling off the page" to an email marketing model it is easy to increase conversions by 10 times, 16 times or even more.

But WHY is... email marketing so profitable... and if it IS so profitable why do so many people claim it doesn't work?

Well, the answer is simple: most people get their email marketing horribly, horribly wrong and make some simple but easily corrected mistakes.

The truth is email marketing DOES work... but you have to be careful to do it the right way, assuming you want the best results. Simply sending "an email" is like going into the boxing ring with a world champion with the advice "just hit him" and hoping to win.

So here are 5 simple ways to make more conversions and hence greater profits from your email marketing:

1. Email more often. I know this goes counter to the advice you've probably had in the past, but the truth is the more often you email, the more sales you'll make. Not only will you make more sales because you're giving them more opportunities to buy, but because they'll be hearing from you more often, you'll have a better relationship with them... and your conversion rates will improve tremendously. By how much? Well, your business may vary, but in my business and my wife's business, we get conversion rates of between 10 percent and 16 percent through email and maybe 1 percent from sales straight "off the page". Yes, you're seeing that right: it's an improvement of 10 or 16 times or 1,000 percent to 1,600 percent.

2. Stop being 'professional'. Forget sending stuffy and formal emails -- they don't work. People want to have a relationship with you, not be addressed as if they were in court standing in front of a judge. So write from one person, one human being to another, using the words, "you" and "me", even if you're writing to them from a big corporation.

3. Ditch the fancy designs. Newsflash: for reasons I don't have space to go into here, the fancy "professionally designed" newsletter templates you're encouraged to use by the email marketing companies and your website designer... look awful in your reader's email client. If you include images, they almost never get displayed, and even your HTML formatting ends up looking like a dog's dinner. Stick to plain text or very simple HTML that LOOKS like plain text.

4. Have a specific call to action in every email. Make it a personal rule that every email you send will have a specific action in it you want the reader to take, whether it's to visit a page and buy something or to do something else. But make sure you have something in EVERY email because you are subconsciously training your readers to take action when you tell them!

5. Write about anything! This is a biggie: most businesses write boring, stuffy emails that are just about their businesses. Don't do that. Include details about your life, and pretty much anything you please. Remember: you're trying to build a relationship and you do that by sharing of yourself. I write about all sorts of things in my emails and my readers love them. Not everyone likes everything, of course, and you can't please everyone all the time, but you'll be amazed at how well your personal emails are received. And my conversion rate is 10 percent or more!

The truth is if you do it the right way, email marketing is fast, effective and extremely cheap.

These five tips will give you a real running start.

Jon McCulloch is Ireland's leading email marketing expert and helps Irish small businesses and Internet marketers increase their conversions and sales by as much as 10 or even 16 times (that's NOT a typo). To discover more about email marketing download Jon's FREE audio training, Email Marketing Kick Start.

Jon McCulloch may be contacted at http://www.jonmcculloch.com or service@jonmcculloch.com

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