Email Marketing Blog

In the previous article, Email Copy Cats, I mentioned the importance of scripting your own message when promoting affiliate products by email.

Today, let me move a little further into the product launch topic and examine a few of the pros and cons of being part of the crowd and how to incorporate your email marketing efforts into these launches.

What is a Product Launch?

John Doe has created a new, big-ticket product and wants to introduce it to the marketplace with a lot of buzz and a big bang, ensuring a lot of attention and (hopefully) many sales. He’s going to utilize his stable of affiliates to help him quickly get the word out to potential customers.

In addition to large commissions, John is offering prizes for the top affiliates. In the past, these have ranged from a one-year of a Hummer - to a $10,000 bonus - to a one week cruise - and more.. John knows that if he can create a feeding frenzy among his affiliates, it will spill over and create that same buzz and excitement amongst their readers.

The launch is generally preceded by a report, some emails, or even a free teleseminar designed to create a launch presale opt-in list, tied to the affiliates’ links.  The launch itself is designed to create an atmosphere no different than that created at the Black Friday sales.  Long lines of cyber-squatters hoping to be the first one in the door to get all the bonuses and special limited-time deals.

Pros and Cons of Product Launches

If you are an affiliate planning an email product launch promotion, there are a few things you may wish to consider.  Let me preface this by saying that there is no right or wrong answer.

Advantages

Fast, Quick Sales

You can “get them while they’re hot”. If your list has been dripped on, they may be eager to buy as soon as the curtain drops.  If you aren’t there with an offer, they may buy through  another affiliate’s link.

Piggyback off the Main Product

If your area of expertise is similar to the launch product, you can provide a bonus that “fills in the gaps” and provides a more comprehensive experience for your customer. Instead of being seen as only an affiliate, you can play off the launch marketer’s expertise to showcase your knowledge.

Provide an Honest Review

Many marketers provide their launch partners with a review copy of their product prior to the launch date.

This provides you with a unique opportunity to provide your list with an assessment of the product’s value. For a credible overview, you should always include what you liked and disliked. It’s also important to advise your list of the experience level required to make the best use of the product in question. (This is one of the biggest complaints I hear from those unhappy with product purchases.)

Not everyone will buy, but you will increase your stature among those who read your review as someone who is fair, balanced, and has their subscribers top-of-mind.

Disadvantages

You Can Get Lost in the Crowd

I’m one of those “find the best deal” kinda gals.  If there’s a product launching that I know I’m going to buy, I will take the time to shop for the best bonus package.

If you can’t bring anything to the table in the way of bonuses, you may wish to wait until a week or so after the launch.  There is much less competition at that time and many people get so aggravated with being bombarded with emails that they don’t even read them.

If you wait a bit, you could be the only game in town and take advantage of all the reviews and forum chat out there.  That might be the perfect time to mail to your list.

People Will Unsubscribe

Opening their email client, only to find 15 messages with the same subject line, touting the same product, causes many people to simply unsubscribe from all of them.  This is especially true if there are pre-launch, launch, and post-launch emails which have been cut and pasted and sent off to “all my personal friends”.

In this scenario, people aren’t unsubscribing specifically from your newsletter. They are fed up with everyone and deleting themselves from all of them. By not being a part of the launch day fray, it’s less likely it will happen to you.

Whether you decide to promote during or after the official launch, I can’t stress enough that your promotion should be in YOUR voice with YOUR thoughts and YOUR personality. Don’t simply copy and paste the suggested emails provided by the marketer.

If in doubt, put yourself in your customers’ shoes!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

Have you ever received 5…10…20 emails on the same day with identical subject lines?

Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s the fastest way to get me to hit the DELETE key. To me, it shows little respect for the reader. It tell me, “I’m more interestd in my affiliate commission than whether this product or service will benefit you.”

This primarily occurs as a lead-in to a sales letter or landing page, so if you don’t promote affiliate products, this probably doesn’t pertain to you.

But, most people doing any type of internet marketing have joined affiliate programs along the way. And if the affiliate manager is a good one, they’ve provided graphics, banners, and suggested emails, newsposts and other promotional materials to help their affiliates quickly promote their products.

While this is a great idea - and we at Implix provide our affiliates with these types of tools - it is important to make them your own. This is especially critical if a product launch is involved, where numerous affiliates will be mailing their lists at exactly the same time.

The last thing you want is for your prospect to open their email client, only to see a list of emails with the exact same subject line.

Your originality should go beyond the subject line and include, as a minimum, the first few paragraphs of your email. Since most people scan email by reading what is in their preview screen, before deciding to open it, it is not enough to have only a unique subject line. You should carry original comments through the preview screen. (If you’re not sure how much text that entails, send yourself an email so you can test for yourself.)

In the next post, I’ll address the pros and cons of participating in major product launches (the “doors open at midnight” variety) by email.

As always, your comments and questions are appreciates. Let us know what’s on YOUR mind!

Following the expansion of our customer support staff and the extension of support hours until 8 PM, we are pleased to announce another step forward in helping you take full advantage of our service.

Planning your campaign for the weekend?

In addition to the regular 9-8 EST Mon-Fri telephone, live-chat and email and our existing weekend email support, we are adding telephone and live-chat service on Saturdays, 9-5 EST!

Starting next Saturday, October 28th our helpful customer support representatives will be standing by to provide you with all the help you need to turn that Saturday email marketing campaign of yours into a great success!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of GetResponse customer support representatives and developers for the amazing work that they are doing.

It takes a lot of effort to maintain infrastructure that delivers millions of email marketing messages every day, and I’m proud that we have such a wonderful team of talented and Internet-savvy folks who enjoy sharing their professional enthusiasm with customers like you.

To give you a flavor of what it’s like behind the operations, please step into our international offices and meet a few of our team members, who ensure that GetResponse runs smoothly every day.

We have plenty more exciting features, technology updates and improvements in store over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more.

Regards,

Simon Grabowski
CEO
GetResponse

North American Office

When Jonathan, Customer Support Supervisor is not preparing his mouth-watering barbeque, he is providing GetResponse customers with top-notch service over the phone and live-chat.

Marija, always kind, courteous and friendly, is always ready to help GetResponse customers with their support questions. Marija is one of our live-chat and telephone support representatives.

Customer Support Supervisor, Bobbi-Jo, having just received an installment of “Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service” book is busy… doing just that.

European Office

Eveline is an energetic email support representative and trainer. Always full of great ideas, she has a keen grasp of how to get things done… fast!

Anna likes to keep her paper files, notebooks and at least 4 mugs close at hand. Her office is far from virtual bits and bytes, and her administrative support is invaluable.

Head of GetResponse Business Development, Chris and his team are taking care of our enterprise customers, helping private label partners and forging new business alliances.

GetResponse Project Manager Jacob and Jacek (one of our talented developers) are working together on an exciting new GetResponse technology upgrade.

Complex database structures, algorithm optimizations, email deliverability monitoring procedures… GetResponse developers’ bread and butter.

PS.: To meet more people behind GetResponse, please take a look at our team page.

A popular anti-spam organization, SpamHaus, was ordered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to pay $11,715,000 in damages to e360insight and its CEO, David Linhardt. e360insight sued SpamHaus earlier this year over illegal blacklisting of their mailings.

Additionally, SpamHaus was barred from causing any email sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be “blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in anyway”. The court also ordered SpamHaus to publish a public apology for deeming the group a spammer.

SpamHaus, a British-based organization, did not accept the US jurisdiction and believes that the order is not enforceable. “As spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place” SpamHaus stated.

At GetResponse we use SpamHaus as one of the methods to filter inbound spam and prevent spammers from abusing legitimate email marketing and autoresponder campaigns. We regret that the US court system can be used as a weapon against a non-profit organization that strives to keep our mailboxes clean.

UPDATE

In a proposed court order dated 10/6/2007 Judge Charles Kocoras of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois calls on the organizations responsible for registering the Spamhaus.org Internet address to suspend the organization’s Internet service. Both ICANN and Tucows, the Spamhaus.org registrar, are named in the order.

A spam-savvy Illinois lawyer shares his perspective on the issue and believes that the outlook may be bleak for the anti-spam organization.

UPDATE #2

A federal judge presiding over a spam dispute rejected a marketing company’s request to suspend the domain name of an anti-spam group that ignored an $11.7 million judgment against it.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles P. Kocoras denied a proposed motion from e360 Insight, which sued the Spamhaus Project over its “black list” of spammers. Wheeling, Ill.-based e360 Insight contends it is improperly on the list because it is a direct marketer that does not send unsolicited e-mail.

Email marketing can be profitable for any business, no matter what kind of product or service you are selling. It is significantly cheaper than other advertising methods and it enables you to build credibility with your subscribers. As a result, you can generate more sales and profits.

The foundation of email marketing is a targeted, responsive and permission-based email list. If you have a list of subscribers that trust you and consider you to be an expert in the field of your interest, you are on the right track.

Below you will several list building ideas that will help you make the most out of your email marketing.

1. Provide useful, relevant and unique content. Your visitors will not give you their email address just because they can subscribe to your newsletter free of charge. You have to provide unique and valuable information that will be useful for your subscribers.
2. Add a subscription form to every page of your website. Make it elegant and accessible. Locate it at the top-left corner of your site, as that’s where the human eye will initially travel.
3. Make the sign up process as easy as possible. You shouldn’t ask for too much information upfront, because you will lose subscribers.  Collecting just the name and email address should be enough for most email marketing campaigns.
4. Address your visitors’ privacy concerns. Most people are worried that they will receive spam after giving out their email address. Tell your potential subscribers that you respect their privacy and link this statement to a privacy policy page.
5. Show an example issue to your visitors. This lets your potential subscribers review your newsletter before they sign up and determine if it is something they’d be interested in.
6. Create a web-based newsletter repository. By putting an archive of all of your newsletter issues you can make it more appealing for your visitors to subscribe. You will also generate additional traffic from search engines.
7. Contact other newsletter publishers. Let them know that you’d be interested to announce their newsletter if they’re up to do the same for you. This way, both of you can build your lists faster.
8. Give away useful free stuff. Write an ebook or a PDF report. Hire a programmer to create downloadable or web-based software. Then give it away to your visitors provided that they join your list.
9. Request that your subscribers pass it on. Word of mouth is a powerful viral technique that works great with email marketing. If your subscribers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends. This can be a good source of new subscribers.
10. Let others reprint your newsletter, as long as its content is unmodified. Many webmasters and newsletter publishers are actively looking for high quality content, and if they reprint your newsletter, you will get new subscribers, traffic and links pointing to your site.
11. Include a “Sign Up” button in the newsletter. If you are using plain text instead of HTML, provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required, because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that your readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint it online. You want to make it easy for them to subscribe.
12. Add a squeeze page. A squeeze page is typically designed only to build your list. It features a powerful headline and a couple of most important benefits that should make your subscribers salivate to sign up to your list. Once created, use a service such as WordTracker to find hundreds targeted keywords, and advertise on them using pay per click advertising on Google, MSN and Yahoo.
13. Include testimonials in your squeeze page. This is crucial. Put 1 or 2 strong testimonials from satisfied subscribers on your squeeze page. This can be in any format, but you may find that multimedia (audio or video social proof) is more “believable”. People like to follow footsteps of other people.
14. Blog religiously. Blogging is a great way to communicate with your potential customers, and it creates a nice synergy with your email marketing. Be sure to include your newsletter sign up form on each page of your blog.
15. Use co-registration service to build your list. Co-registration is a great way to build your email list. Your newsletter’s ad appears on other website’s and their visitors are able to check your subscription box and become added to your list. A good co-registration service can be found at GetSubscribers.com.

Simon Grabowski is an owner of the web-based GetResponse email marketing software that makes it easy for thousands of marketers and small businesses to send their newsletters and build their email lists. Try GetResponse free of charge at http://www.getresponse.com