Email Marketing - 5 Easy Ways To Increased Profits

Email Marketing is by a long way the quickest and easiest strategy for any business to boost its conversions and 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 facts are inescapable: email marketing works... 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. You'll make far more sales because you're both giving them more opportunities and incentives to buy from you, and developing a better relationship with them... and your conversion rates will improve tremendously. By how much? Your business might get different results -- perhaps worse, perhaps better -- but in my own business my conversion rate is about 10% through email and maybe 1% straight off the page; for my wife it's more like 16%. Yes, you're seeing that right: it's a massive boost of 10 or 16 times or 1,000% to 1,600%.

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 all sorts of technical reasons we don't need to worry about here, fancy HTML emails invariably look a real mess at the other end and very few of your readers will see anything even remotely resembling the gorgeous email you put together... look awful in your reader's email client. if you have images in your emails they simply don't show up properly and your "standard" HTML formatting is butchered by non-standard interpretation by your email programme. Either use plain text, or, if you want the best of both worlds, use simply formatted HTML that looks like plain text but allows you to use underline, italic and bold as well as use anchor text in links.

4. Have a specific call to action in every email. Make it an unbreakable personal edict you'll have a clear and unambiguous call to action in every email you send. But whatever you do, ensure every email contains SOME call to action because you want to get your readers in the habit of responding to your instructions!

5. Write about anything! This is a biggie: most business owners write excruciatingly tedious and boring emails that are nothing more than tired exhortations for people to buy their stuff. Don't do that. Include all sorts of personal stuff about your life and anything else that comes to mind, including current events, news, that kind of thing. Remember: you're trying to form a relationship with them and the best way to do that is to share personal details of you and your journey through life. 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% 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.


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