Getting Into Your Customer's Email Inboxes Through Marketing

Anyone can get onto the email marketing bandwagon. To be successful in it is another story. The answer probably lies in these three areas - how to get into your customer's mailbox, how to stay there and how to make him keep coming back to you for more. This, in a nutshell, is the crux of successful email marketing. Actually achieving it, however, is a long haul.

Getting into your customers' email boxes is getting tougher and tougher. Most individuals and companies have ISP blocking, junk mail filtering and blocking or blacklisting facilities. So unless you get in there and make a visible difference, you don't stand a chance as your email is quickly assigned to the Spam or Junk folder and from there into oblivion. One method to get in is to use a personal line in your subject line. 'Dear Mike' as a subject means the person will at least open your email. Yet another way would be a pre-campaign mail that monitors filtering and blocking. One can then correct the campaign if necessary and find ways to get into the mailbox.

Once this first huge hurdle is crossed, you don't sit back and heave a sigh of relief. Unless your target customer reads your email, the whole exercise is pointless. Put your offer or promise up front in the first few lines. In this age of instant mail, time is of the essence. You waste his time making him grope through a maze of words till he comes upon what you really have to sell him and you've lost him. Make sure you have special offers just for newcomers. This usually elicits a response.

Try to cut the clutter and don't have images. For one thing, images do not show up on most preview windows. For another, they take longer to download and your reader could start getting impatient. They could also be blocked by the ISPs. Make your message clear, to the point and alive. Let him feel the excitement.

To stay in a person's mailbox, you need to constantly remind him of your presence. Make sure you have enough of interesting matter for him to remember you and take note of you. Don't go by the numbers. You may have mailed out thousands of emails. It's the ones who convert, the revenue that rolls in, the bottom line that finally count.

Learn from success. That should be your mantra so you can use it on your failures to convert them to success stories too. Find out what made a particular email work, who it worked on, whether you're targeting was perfect and if so, could you do a repeat performance? Make sure you don't go down the road of unsolicited emails and the losing trail they leave behind. Make sure you use permission-based emails. Also make sure you look after the ones who matter - your long term subscribers. It's on them that your success rides. As for the ones who haven't responded, take the time to try, try, try again.

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