Articles by: Darrell Ritchie

I’ve heard it said that mistakes are the only things that you can truly call your own, and in the case of email marketing, that certainly applies. As with most mistakes, however, it is possible to learn from these gaffes, take this newly acquired information, and plow forward with the goal of getting it right the next time. You’ve worked long and hard to assemble your client database, and you don’t want to see it coming undone or falling apart due to stupid miscalculations being repeated ad nauseum.

With that in mind, here are a few of the more common screw-ups to be avoided:

Make sure the address is a clear, real, and easily verifiable one. Nothing puts me off more than an email coming in from a source that apparently wishes to remain hidden. Your recipients need to be able to see who you are. Ideally, you want to make sure that the name of the company is in the address, or your own name, or ideally both. Something simple such as yourname@companyname.com works wonders when it comes to instilling a sense of confidence among your clients. Avoid no-reply address at all costs, because the message you are sending is that you don’t care what your customers have to say.

Keep the subject line short and to the point. Use no more than 50 characters to prevent it from bleeding off the end of the available space, and 20 characters is advisable if you are targeting a lot of mobile readers.

Don’t ask too much right off. Asking for a commitment or action from your readers too soon is like going for that first kiss at the beginning of the date. Limit yourself to one call to action in each message. There’s nothing wrong with asking for business, but you want to do so in a direct, easy to understand and apply manner. Having too many CTA’s will only confuse readers on which link they should click on.

Do not write out URLs in email messages. Use hyperlinks instead. Instead of using the URL http://darrellritchie.org for my music company, I simply hyperlink is to Darrell Ritchie – Right Place Music.

Do not ignore mobile readers, as this is becoming more and more the norm when it comes to checking and reading email messages. Right now nearly 40% of all emails are opened on a mobile device, so you want to make sure that the messages are properly formatted. Emails should be suitable for all mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc), with large calls to action to accommodate finger activations.

Listen to opt out requests. But at the same time include a method for the client to express why they are dropping off your list. Was it the frequency of the messages? The content? Did the emails or your product not meet their needs? Knowing why people walked away is a step toward knowing how to improve your operations in the future.

Yes, this all may seem like a lot of common sense, but never forget, sometimes we get so caught up in pursuing problems that we never stop to think that it might have something to do with the basics, easily remedied problems that we have long since forgotten about.

If you’re like most of us, there is nothing more frustrating than sending out an email blast and getting a tepid response, or worse, no response at all. We can handle success and we can handle failure, but most of us do not like being ignored. It is a disagreeable feeling. It makes you feel unimportant. And there are any number of reasons why folks might ignore your message.

It may not be important to the other person, because there is no benefit to it that they can see. They may not think the message is worthy of a response because of the way it was framed. They may classify it as a low priority message, which has roughly the same effect as leaving a baby in a garbage can. The email may also get lost or sent to the wrong address, or possible caught in a spam filter.

So if you believe email is failing, do you throw all your eggs into the social media basket? Well not immediately. There are several steps you should take to handle ignored messages.

Wait one week before doing anything, especially following up. This ensures that you aren’t bothering the other person or in any way pressuring them.

Make sure you had the correct and current email address. If there are several addresses, send the follow up to all of them. The follow up should remind them about your original message, ask if it had been received, and reiterate your points in a brief comment.

Wait one more week and then respond through social media channels, especially if the email message was an important one. Choosing Twitter or Facebook as a means of communication is becoming more and more common, especially since the person on the other end should have sent at least a short response once they knew you were trying to get in touch with them.

By always waiting for a period of time before each message, you are able to remind the person that you are in need of a response. Some may view this as annoying, but reasonable parties will understand it as persistent and a good use of resources. It is of course up to you whether or not you think the use of social media is appropriate for attempting subsequent communication attempts.

As with any case of communication, a gentle but firm grasp is required. Squeeze too tightly and the goal will spring from your grip, while holding on too loosely may have the same result. You want to take calculated, persistent steps that are designed to get you the results you are looking for. Once avenues through email and phone service have been exhausted, social media is rapidly becoming the next link in the chain when it comes to purposes of communication.

Only you can determine when the time is ripe for this approach, and as always, keep your communications simple, clear, and above all, professional. Doing so will go a long way towards ensuring the longevity and success of your business or product.

No matter how great your message, and no matter how revolutionary your product, it can all come undone during the marketing process if your subject line in your emails is not up to snuff. You have to find a way to stand out from the rest of the glut of messages clogging your recipients’ email bozes every day, and make it something that jumps out and commands attention. You have about 50 characters, (give or take) to accomplish this goal….so how do you do it?

For starters, keep it short and to the point. Not that you have much choice on the short part, since 50 characters barely gives you a chance to say “hello”, but getting to the nuts and bolts of the message rapidly is the key. Keeping the character count under 50 ensures that the message won’t be cut off prematurely, so you have to make that space count. 69% of recipients report email as spam based solely on what is in the subject line….so why would you even want to risk this?

The shorter your subject line is, the more likely it is to be read, so don’t feel like you have to exhaust all 50 characters….try cutting it down to 20 or 30 and see if that generates better results.

Make the subject line a call to action. You never want to miss an opportunity to ask for their business, and this is a great way out of the gate to do exactly that. For example, which of these catches your eye?

• Darrell Ritchie at Right Place Music
• Meet Darrell Ritchie for great original music

One makes a rather generic statement, while the other actually provides a clue as to the content of the message. Use action words to describe the intent of the message. Some of the best keywords include Download, Save, Meet, and Register.

Personalizing your message is another great way to generate results, instilling a sense of value. Even being able to address your client by their first name is a great way of making sure that they engage with your message long enough for you to make your pitch. You can develop personalized content through list segmentation, knowing what pages your customers are downloading and viewing. You can easily personalize a message by adding a name in the subject line or providing something of interest to that specific contact.

Be consistent. Make sure your email message actually has something to do with your subject line, since few things are more frustrating than opening a message to find completely unrelated content. This will only result in a lack of click throughs or conversions; when you tease something in the subject line, follow through in the actual message.

Subject lines should be useful, with a message that is of value to the reader. They should also be ultra-specific, so that the reader is aware of what is being promised. Unique messages will not only be read, but in all likelihood, revisited, and providing a sense of urgency will do much to see that the reader takes some form of action.

In the world of sports, any time a player’s game begins to suffer, no matter how exceptional that player may be, a good coach will pull him out of the game. And any good coach will also go back to the basics, the fundamentals of the sport in question, starting from the ground up in order to make sure that this player remains at the top of his game. It is the same way with any sort of marketing. No matter how good or effective you are, it is always a good idea to revisit the basics every now and again to make sure you haven’t lost touch with the foundation of what you do. With that in mind, here are four cornerstones of email marketing that need to be reexamined.

Direct mail and email are two different animals. Direct mail is expensive, slow, and in most cases, thrown out without ever being opened. Email is inexpensive, fast, and in most cases, welcome, because folks have to sign up in order to receive email, which means there is at least some interest. It is the only marketing message that people ask to receive in advance.

Lack of email marketing will have a negative effect on your business. The return on investment for every other marketing channel that your company utilizes will be affected by email marketing efforts. For those looking for information, email provides an avenue through which to continue communication after the initial exchange. Without this, you would be wasting much of your marketing budget.

Email also provides the opportunity to offer a second chance after someone abandons a shopping cart. Social media would be struggling to obtain members. You would also be unable to target email openers with the appropriate display offer based on the clients shopping and browsing patterns.

Email marketing is not an easy out. Rather it is a rapidly changing process with a definitive ebb and flow, and it is important to have members of your marketing team who are able to “roll with the changes” and make the most effective use of current trends and methods. You have to be able to segment and target their list subscribers. There is also a need for decision engines that can populate and propagate email templates in real time, based on previous purchase and browsing history.

Despite advances in internet communication, email marketing is still alive and well. Even the rise of social media has been unable to fully supplant the effectiveness of email marketing. Email exists just fine without social media, but the same could not be said in reverse, and email continues to generate record profits for a lot of companies.

So there you go…..never underestimate the power and influence of email marketing, and when in doubt, or when your game starts to suffer, just go back to the basics. Regroup and then concentrate your efforts in new directions. You’ll be surprised at the shot in the arm your business receives.

The world of business marketing is becoming more and more sophisticated and complex, involving digital channels, social media, mobile apps, all combined with more old school techniques such as email. The need to accurately measure and target your efforts more efficiently has never been more vital. This is especially true for smaller companies with limited staff and resources.

It is commonly held that many marketers understand what is required in their jobs, but fall short when it comes to connecting the right mix of content, marketing, and technical savvy. The 5 basic competencies that make up modern marketing include targeting, engagement, conversion, analytics, and marketing technology. Done correctly, modern marketing can open up new windows of opportunity, both in targeting and sales enablement.

If you want to take your marketing to the next level, consider the following ten steps. Followed correctly, you will earn the respect of your peers, the praise of your superiors, and guaranteed job security for pretty much as long as you want it.

1. Maximize your targeting strategies through the construction of a more complete profile of potential prospects through careful monitoring of online behavior, browsing, and purchase patterns. This is known as Digital Body Language.
2. You have to identify the roles and responsibilities of the ones involved in the buying process in order to create an accurate demographic of your best prospects.
3. Making the customer the central figure in the exchange is more vital now than ever. Company and product centric conversations no longer apply.
4. You need to address and align your messaging techniques across all different digital channels. This allows you to provide value based content where and when your customers prefer to interact.
5. Through campaign automation, it becomes possible to improve the buyer’s experience, provide for the development of customer loyalty, and the effective tracking of conversion data.
6. You should also begin the process of mining conversion data in order to gain insights into marketing efforts and providing insight when it comes to measurable trends, conversion history, and other key metrics.
7. Making use of the proper analytics systems can do much to help you make the correct decisions when it comes to the marketing efforts that you wish to continue, and discovering those that are yielding little or no results. They also provide the proper reporting tools required to justify those decisions through correlation with pipelines and revenue.
8. You can also align your content sharing methods with social channels that are most likely to drive higher traffic volumes and generate engagement, which maximizes the impact of each individual campaign and boosts the return on investment.
9. Social media and other digital marketing channels provide an abundance of data that must undergo continuous and regular analysis in order to maintain peak results.
10. There are other sales oriented methods that go hand in hand with marketing, such as lead qualification, inside sales team management, and sales operations that are designed to be of benefit to marketing teams.

If all this sounds like a lot to digest, it is, but taking the time to implement some additional measures will do much to make sure that you are getting the most mileage out of your marketing efforts.

Checking your open rates, you may find more than a few oddities, things that you cannot quite explain at first glance, such as why anyone would open your email on more than one occasion. The answer is simplicity in itself…there are four different personality types who may open your message, and they will open it more than once for different reasons.

The first, and single most obvious, would be what is known as the rabid fan, someone who is in love with your company or your product, and simply relishes reading or perusing information about you. They place a high level of value on what you have to offer. The response to this sort of reader is simple: you make it as easy as possible for them to spread the news about your company. This can be done through the addition of social media buttons in the body of the email, allowing them to be fruitful and multiply their enthusiasm across family and friends. You get more exposure in the process.

There is also the email sharer, those who not only find your content useful, but think that others will too. They usually end up forwarding the email to family and friends, thereby increasing the potential open rate. You should encourage all of your readers to share this information with others if they find them useful or fun or whatever. Be sure to link to your sign up page at the end of every email. When the message gets forwarded, the forwardees have the option of signing up for your list if they wish.

There is the mobile reader, who likes your message enough to open it on the go, but may have to revisit it later in order to fully digest the content that is being offered. The good side is that you are successfully engaging, but the downside is that it means your messages are not easy to read on small screens. Take steps to make sure that your messages are optimized for display on mobile devices.

There is the preview pane person, who actually is not opening your email several times, but are rather perusing the preview panes that pop up whenever you scroll over messages in the inbox. Open rates are calculated through the use of a tiny, invisible image that is embedded in the email. Each time the image is loaded, even through preview panes, it is counted as an open, which doesn’t provide an accurate record since the message was not fully opened, nor read. You can bypass this problem by making sure that your most important information is at the top of your message, where it is most likely to be displayed. The idea is to make sure that your message gets across, even if the email is never fully opened.

You have to remember that email marketing is never as easy as just pressing send. But rather, you must consider all of the variables that come into play on both your end and the recipient’s. By diligently working the process, you can successfully increase your open and click through rates.

Your email marketing efforts are only going to be received well if people are able to understand and process the message that is being sent to them. You need a message that resonates with readers in such a way that it will make them want to engage with your company or product.

There are a number of copywriting techniques that have been proven to jumpstart results in a major way. Look on and see how many of these you can integrate into your marketing efforts.

Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. Examine your content from the point of view of the person it is aimed at. Are you talking to them or at them? Is your copy engaging, something that will provoke a positive response? If the copy doesn’t ring true with you, then rest assured it won’t with your target audience either.

Push the benefit. Readers have progressively less time to scour numerous email messaged, so it becomes important to make an impact and make it fast. The benefit of your offer should be immediately apparent to the person on the receiving end. By sharing a benefit, readers will know instantly how the message will be of service to them, saving them time, money, and effort. Valuable educational content can go a long way in this area. By all means avoid personal introductions or meaningless content, as such will only send your clients looking for more welcoming climes.

Be of assistance. People always respond better to messages that inform and educate as opposed to those that simply hock a product or service. If you aren’t sure exactly ow you can be helpful, just go back to the last few questions that were asked of you by a customer. Chances are that others have those exact same concerns. You can also search web site traffic or marketing trends in what your visitors are looking for, and provide information on those topics.

Guide them towards a decision. You want copy that serves a customer in such a way as to enable them to make a decision to act on what you are offering. They must be able to understand the premises that lead them to take action on your message, and this comes in the form of a click through.

The ideal email message is one that is conversational in tone. People prefer to buy from people, and making your email sound like it is coming from a real person on the other end will do much to endear your customer base and draw them to your service. Make the content of a personal nature, but don’t go out of your way to overpersonalize, since too much may come off as insincere.

Don’t prattle on and on. Utilize enough content to get the point of your message across, but no more. Too much content can have an adverse effect on your response results. Basically, any content that does not in some way lead toward your goal should be eliminated. Keep paragraphs short and to the point, and convey key points in short, easy to read segments.

In an ideal marketing scenario, you would have 100% click through rates accompanied by a 0% unsubscribe rate, but that never happens, so one of the things you need to do to maximize your results is to actively push to get people to unsubscribe from your email marketing newsletters. Yes, you heard that right.

You have to remember that at any given time, you are going to have a certain percentage of your email list that is simply not qualified to be your customer or client. You don’t have what they need, they can’t find what they are looking for, and how they ended up on your list is anyone’s guess. Always know that there are a portion of your readers who will never, ever buy anything.

So how do you get rid of the deadweight (that sounds terrible, but let’s call it what it is)?

For starters, simply ask your readers if they wish to continue receiving your messages. Is what you are offering worth their time? They will respond to questions like this, and while it may cause your unsubscribe rate to go up considerably in the short term, it will ultimately prove beneficial, resulting in higher click through rates and more in the way of customers with something to actually offer your business.

Oddly enough, emailing more often might be a benefit. Those who are interested in your company or product will not mind hearing from you, even if it is quite often, and those who are not will grow weary of you fairly quickly and request an opt out. Emailing more often will do much to weed out the bad seeds and strengthen relationships with the most qualified prospects.

Pitching in every email is recommended. While some would argue that a sizeable percentage of your emails be devoted to simple content designed to provide information and service, it only takes a minute to tack on a short call to action or link to your product. Anyone that would get offended over that little bit is not likely to be your best customer anyway. They click unsubscribe, and you are on to greener pastures. Messages should be 95% content, 5% pitch.

Call attention to the unsubscribe option, because if they have been receiving your emails and opening them rarely if at all, they are probably the ones you want to get rid of. People should have to requalify themselves by remaining engaged with your company. By asking them to leave, you make them choose what they want to do, and in a strange sort of way, making someone feel excluded is often a very good way of making your company or product attractive to them again. If you don’t appear needy, or desperate, you become that much more attractive.

In short, a bigger list is not always better, you want to emphasize quality over quantity, and sometimes you simply have to prune the tree. This can be difficult, and it may even hurt for a minute, but in the end it will benefit you, your company, and your product.

Since 1997, I have maintained an email list of customers and professional colleagues, and even after all this time, and even with the advent of more modern forms of communication, I have found that email remains the most effective and viable form of communication. While mobile apps and texting have gained ground, there is just something to be said for a well crafted and composed email message, with relevant content, targeted to the appropriate audience. With that in mind, I’d like to share a few of my own recipes for email marketing success.

For starters, grow your list organically. Yes, there are companies that will sell you a list of email addresses, but the list isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. These people have never heard of you, they have nothing resembling a vested interest in your service or product, and an email blast sent out to them will have much the same effect as throwing a bucket of water against a cement wall.

By growing organically, I mean providing opt in opportunities on your website where people can volunteer their information. By the same token, provide a means for opting out, since there will always be a percentage of people who discover that your product simply isn’t for them. Take both seriously; if someone wants on your list, add them, and if they want to be removed, then do so promptly.

If you are in the habit of networking, as I am, then you don’t want to miss an opportunity, so always ask for an email address, and politely request permission to add them to your email list. Email is a nice, unobtrusive method of staying in touch with your audience, as opposed to a phone call out of the blue which may or may not come at an opportune time. Email allows the recipient to read the message at a time that is convenient for them. People like that, and respond very well to methods that are respectful of their time and schedule.

Make the most of the subject line. Boring subject lines will not get you read. Get creative and make it something that is eye catching and will make the recipient want to see what it is about. If you are not the creative type, then find someone in your office who is. Test it around, see what others think.

Don’t overdo it. I’ve seen guys that send out email messages two or three times a week, and as good as your product may be, even good things will grow thin after too much exposure. You want to keep it special…make an email from you an event. Something that they will look forward to. You do this by refraining from sending out an email blast unless you have something relevant to share, a new product , a new service. I’m in the music business, so we refrain from sending messages until we release a new album project, or are announcing a tour. In many cases, if your recipients see less of you, then they will be far more willing to look at what you have to offer when they do see your name in their inbox.

Always link back to your site. You want to provide the shortest path back to the desired destination, so have links prominently placed near the beginning and end of your message.