Why?

Because most of your website's visitors will not be ready to buy from you just yet.

BUT you can begin to build a relationship with them over time. By keeping in touch, providing helpful information, proving your expertise and building trust. Then when the time comes, why would they do any more research when they know just the people to talk to!

How do you get people to give you their contact information?

As most of you will know, this is easier said than done!

First, what not to do

• Be careful about adding people to your newsletter automatically if they give you their business cards. They may not appreciate you doing this without checking with them first, and will mark your email as spam.
• Ask people to 'sign up' without any incentive or reason to do it. This just won't work. People are suffering from information overload, why would they add to it when there is nothing in it for them? And just the promise of your pearls of wisdom won't do it.
• Ask for more information than you need. If you have a VERY valueable resource to offer or you need certain information (for events, for example) you may be able to get more than an email address. Otherwise, if you don't need it, don't ask for it
• Don't buy a list of contacts. These will not be people hungry for your offer – you will just come across as SPAM

The right way to go about it

Remember you want people who are happy to get your email and are interested in what you have to offer, so no tricks!

The best way to get people to give you their details is to offer something in return, such as:

• A free E-Book – an extended version of a blog with specific actionable recommendations and expert insights relevant to the problems and challenges you KNOW your audience has
• Newsletters with special deals and exclusive offers only available to members
• Host a Free Webinar and collect email addresses when they register
• Set up an online contest with a prize and have entrants sign up with their email address.

In some of these, you will need to get their permission to send them newsletters and marketing messages in the future.

If you do want to add people who have given you their business card, send them a welcome email first, and make it easy for them to opt-out.

And then promote your offer:

• Clearly on every page of your website, your business card and email signatures
• You can use a paid campaign such as Adwords, but make sure the cost will be worth it
• Mention your offer in your Twitter bio
• Add a Facebook Tab that provides information and the sign up form

There is a lot of debate about pop-up boxes.

At the end of the day, it's going to depend on what works for your audience and business. The only way to know for sure is to test different approaches and see what works, but these tips are a really good place to start!

Here's some tips to get you all fired up again and take some of the pain out of the writing process.

Topics you can write about in advance

• Check lists – eg the top ten ways to use garlic in cooking or the seven deadly make-up sins. These are not time sensitive (well, not much anyway) so you can write them and save them for when you are too busy to do it.
• Case studies – these are a lot easier to write when it's fresh, but can be used (and reused) at any time
• Product reviews – either one at a time or as an article about 'the top x solutions for managing xyz'. These are very popular as they help people make decisions. But if you are going to write this type of material, make sure you have actually used the product! Don't just list what they do or copy the vendors blurb off their website.
• Client spotlight – similar to case studies, but focus on the client/customer and less on what you did to solve a problem. These might be better if you want to illustrate the kinds of clients you work with or that use your product, rather than yourself.

How To's

A little over-used, but the good old fashioned how-to guide can provide a lot of value to your readers. These can be in the form of check lists, top x tips and step lists.

Focus on topics that you get asked a lot about that aren't going to go out of date, and you can do them in advance.

Inspiration from your industry

• Write about what's new: latest updates and important news your reader might have missed. Especially useful in fast moving industries. We could probably write a post about changes to SEO every day!
• You can piggy-back off the efforts of those that are better resourced than you by linking to articles and news items that others in your industry have written. It's even better if you ad your comment to what they have said. Use Google Alerts
• The world in review – write about 'top news stories for the last month' or just 'top stories on x topic'

Use Google Alerts to keep an easy track of news articles.

News from your company

• New product launches are an obvious one, but the completion of a project, new staff members, moving premises. Try and right them in a friendly, personal tone so they don't sound like a formal notification!
• Sneak previews and exclusive early bird deals offered to your list are a great way for the members to feel special
• Invitations to events

Dig out your data

• If you have statistics about your industry or perhaps can summarise it from client data, you can use this data to provide recommendations or insights to others. For example with everyone talking about the use of smartphones we can quote usage statistics based on our clients analytics data.
• Run a poll or survey and publish the results – or link to a bigger entity that has recently published a relevant report

Personalise it

Depending on your business, you can make recommendations based on previous purchasing or what is relevant to a particular customer group. Amazon send out recommendations for books on certain topics based on what has been bought in the past.

Link to your blog posts

This is content re-use. Don't assume that everyone on your email list visits your blog or even knows you have one. If there was a post from a year ago that has been your most popular ever, extend it's life by linking to it in your newsletter.

But in all cases make it:

• Well written. Spell check it and proof read it
• Relevant to your audience
• Informative and interesting

Happy writing!

The 4 words that will get your email opened  – can you guess what they are? Go-on, try it before you click.

5 tips for email marketing calls to action – this is about how to get readers to act with buttons and text

5 ways to make an email newsletter your best sales tool – I love the term 'serve snacks' in this article (it's not what you think – nothing to do with food!)

Top 5 delivery myths  - you don't want your email marked as spam. Think that someone who has read your emails for months and opted in to do so wouldn't mark you as spam? Yes they will!

7 Steps to an email opt-in page that works – once you've got them to click on the 'sign up' button or link, here's how to make sure they do actually do it!

Another one from copyblogger – How To Write emails that sell (and that people love to read). I read and enjoy almost everything copyblogger writes, so they must know something, right?

Did you know there is a 'best' time to send out your email - When do you send them out? When is the Best Time to Send Email to Your List?

Want to know how people read email on mobile devices? Here's some research by Mailchimp that covers some best practise and behaviours of mobile email users – did you know that 72% of the people they tested read their email in bed?!

Email Design Layout and Format tips  - how wide should your newsletter be?

Like most things in marketing you have to test different approaches and see which works best with your audience, but fortunately, there are some rules-of-thumb to save a bit of time and wasted effort.

One of the most important is how do you get your email opened in the first place?

1. First impressions - your subject line

It won't matter how good your offer is or how well written the body of your email is - if the subject line smells sales-pitchy or self interested you will skip reading the rest.

Although it will vary by industry, the most successful subject lines :

• Let them know you are on their side and you understand their pain.
• Avoid obvious enticements such as free, reminder, etc
• But will create a sense of urgency eg "final 7 days"
• Are actionable - eg "sort your storage shortage today"
• Are less than 50 characters - keep it brief and matter-of-fact
• Are controversial - eg "are social media guru's ruining it for the rest of us"

2. Sort our your sender

If you can, send the email from a person rather than info@yourcompany name.  Personalised emails are more likely to get opened. 

3. Experiment with timing

Try splitting your email database and sending the same email at different times of the day or day of the week to see which gets the best response.  There aren't any set 'best times' because it depends on your audience.

4. Don't let them forget about you

If you collected someone's email address two years ago and haven't sent them anything since, they will have forgotten why they signed up in the first place.

So they'll either dump you in the trash or mark you as 'spam'.

5. Don't LOOK like spam

Avoid capital letters in your subject line, or obvious spammy phrases like 'free', 'get it now' or 'you must act now'.  Over-use of exclamation marks may also trip you up.

Bright red fonts could get you in trouble, as will crazy-fruit-salad colour schemes.

If you send out nothing but a huge graphic thinking it looks nicer and you can control layout easier you're making a mistake.  Not only do most email programs block images by default, many spam filters will block your email because it doesn't have the right balance of text and images. People don't like it either.

6. Don't BE a spammer!

Of course people are more likely to open your email if they actually asked for it.

Unsolicited email (ie SPAM) is illegal in NZ and can get you a fine of up to $500,000 for organisations.

If you are going to send out email marketing, make sure you are familiar with your obligations under the Anti-Spam Law which includes having a functioning unsubscribe facility and a restrictions against address harvesting software.

If too many people mark your email as spam, this can affect the performance of your campaign.