8 Tips for Writing Effective Email Copy

Learning to write effective email copy is essential to your list building success. While you want to provide your subscribers with valuable information and resources, at the end of the day, the purpose of a list is to profit from it. And if you can’t write email copy effectively, you won’t be selling anything.

To get on the path to writing effective email copy, here are 8 tips.

Personalize

It helps to use the customer’s name in the email and sometimes in the subject line (don’t overdo it though). When a person sees their name, they feel more of a personal connection and will be more likely to be responsive to your email.

Write the Way You Speak

Use easy to understand English when writing email copy. It’s nice if you have a big vocabulary, but don’t try to impress your subscribers with it. Write the way you would talk to an old friend. Try to be as friendly and as personable as you can when you write.

Write Passionate Emails

You can’t see your customer when you write emails, so be sure to put some extra feeling in email copy. Be enthusiastic. You want to catch the attention of the reader and stay as far from boring them as possible.

Write to One Person

Imagine the ideal prospect and write your email to that person. No matter how many people are reading your messages, each person who reads them reads them as one individual. Writing as if you are writing to one person will increase the impact of the message on each individual.

Keep it Short Buddy

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Make some paragraphs can be as short as one sentence, and make some sentences as short as one word. Also, each paragraph shouldn’t be more than about 4 or 5 lines. The key is to make your email easy to read with plenty of white space. Long word blocks are intimidating and make a person less likely to read. Also, forget what you learned in English class back in the day, you don’t need to make paragraph breaks based on content.

Don’t be Wordy

Simple enough. Keep things clear and simple. Make sure your message is clear and concise. If your messages are long, just be sure to tighten up your message and make sure it flows. If you want to be eloquent and wordy, become an English professor. This is marketing, so act accordingly.

Use Action Verbs

Make your sentences more powerful with the liberal use of actions verbs. You want your email to be clear enough for a 7 year old to understand. People get frustrated if they have to spend too much time figuring out what you have to say, so make it easy for them.

Use Compelling Subheadings

Your subheadings should be like mini-headlines. Use them to break up large bodies of text and to bring people back into the body of the letter. Many people will only scan your email, so make the subheads communicate a clear message.

3 Keys to Success with Email List Marketing

If you want to learn about email list marketing, this post will offer a few helpful tips. Using a combination of trust, specials, and short reports will quickly lead you down the path of success. Now I’ll cover each point in bit more detail.

Gain Their Trust

One thing you have to do is gain the trust of your subscribers. If your subscribers don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. The way to gain their trust is to give them valuable information. Don’t try to sell them something every chance you get. You actually have to make an effort to refer them to valuable content. And when you do recommend products, be honest. In the long run, your honesty will pay off because people like to buy from people they trust.

Offer Them Specials

Offer specials to your subscribers. When you give people special treatment and go out of your way to please them, they feel indebted to you and they like you more. When you list feels they owe you and when they like you, they will be more likely to buy. Also, a discount obviously makes your product less expensive, so that will increase the number of buyers. And the feeling of being in a special club helps as well, so be sure to mention that the discount is only for list members. And most importantly, make sure you mean it.

Create Short Reports

Another way to use email list marketing effectively is to create short reports to sell to your list. This is a little used method that gives you a taste of product creation without having to commit too much. You can create a short 15-20 page report and sell it your list for $10, or whatever price you think is appropriate. You can create a product a month this way pretty easily. As your list grows, this will be an easy way to make quick money. Once you have a number of reports completed, you can also offer a package deal to get them all for a significantly discounted price.

Opt-in List Basics – Part 2

Let’s assume by this point you already have a quality autoresponder service. But if not, go out today and get an account at either Get Response or Aweber. These services are the most used by internet marketers because they are both reliable and flexible enough to meet your needs.

On average, across most niches or market segments, people say that a subscriber is worth about $1 in revenue each month. But in order for the revenue to be generated, there are some steps that you first have to take. But the good news here, with just with a basic level of math, you’ll see that it will only take about 20 active subscribers on your list for it to break-even. And it will take VERY LITTLE work on your part, to build your list to 20 in the first month.

Building a list from zero, means first having a free e-course, a free newsletter, or a free e-zine. In each of these three types of lists, your subscribers will get to know and trust you because you are emailing them on a regular basis.

How frequently you mail them will depend on your market, your base of subscribers, and even how much time you are able to commit to the development of your list. Ideally, your first set of messages should be at least three in the first week. If you wait too long, your subscribers may forget entirely who you are and why you are emailing them.

To be sure that doesn’t happen to you, simply remind them at the opening of your first few messages.

E-courses are typically seven to ten messages in length. Each message should be brief, but sould also teach something of value.

Remember that your subscribers are PEOPLE (just like you). So in order for them to see value in your emails, be sure to provide great content that they can use.

Growing a list also means you need traffic. So developing targeted traffic is also a skill that you need to build too.

There are hundreds of sources of free traffic available to you. But one of the best that can produce immediate traffic is article directories.

Ezine Articles for example, will place your article on their first page once it is approved. So you’ll be able to gain some instant exposure. The resource box is the block of text which follows the article, where you are able to state your expertise as well as present an offer for your free e-course, newsletter, or other online publication. Link back to a page on your site with minimal information … just enough to invite your visitors to sign up and start receiving your content.

Although having a opt-list of 10,000 or even 50,000 is a sustainable goal, the truth of the matter is that most marketers have a list that only ranges from 1,000 to 2,000 subscribers. So be encouraged with every new subscriber that you gain and set your subscription goals in small but achievable milestones.

10 Quick Ways to Build a List

Growing a list of 1000s of responsive subscribers
by Fabian Tan

The importance of list building is talked about all the time. But just HOW do you build a list of responsive subscribers on a daily basis?

I’ve created a 10-point cheat sheet that you can use to grow a list of 1000s of subscribers, mostly on autopilot.

Here are the 10 steps:

1. High Leverage Article Marketing

With article marketing, I’m not just talking about the usual step of submitting articles to article directories. That still works very well. What I’m referring to is submitting your articles to popular authority sites in your market. For example, if you’re in the Internet marketing niche, popular sites like Entrepreneur, About, Associate Programs and even popular blogs like Site Fling are possible places to submit articles.

Submitting your articles at these places means you’ll have less competition and receive more traffic without having to compete with thousands of other articles.

2. List Builders

List builders typically work like this: you sign up for the exchange, and you’re allowed to promote to thousands of other members with an email promotion, but in exchange, you agree to receive emails from other members as well. Examples of such networks include List Joe, The List Auction, Viral URL and the new Viral Ads Unleashed system. I have personally used List Joe and The List Auction to add hundreds of new subscribers to my account every month just by sending out an email every 3 days. It is definitely worth a go.

3. Forum Marketing

We’ve got the old workhorse of forum marketing here. The problem with many people when it comes to forums is they don’t have a system. You’ll want to create a list of authority forums in your market, and then submit to them religiously almost every day. If you have a list of 5 forums, and you submit 5 posts to each of them every day, you’ll get a steady flow of new sign-ups each day. And this is just ONE of your traffic streams that you’ll be using to build your list.

4. Giveaways

Giveaways are another proven method of building your list. The idea is that dozens of list builders promote the same giveaway event so everyone grows their lists. The drawback to this is that you may be “giving” away your subscribers to dozens of other lists. Well, these days, you don’t even have to promote the giveaway if you don’t want to. Yes, you don’t have to! Many events provide the option of upgrading so you will receive additional points that will boost the position of your gift.

5. Ad Swaps

One of my biggest list builders is ad swaps. The idea is amazingly simple – find other list builders in your market, and propose to them that you will send an ad for their squeeze page to your list, if they will do the same for your squeeze page. This is a startlingly quick way to grow your list. I have personally added tens of thousands of new subscribers to my list from this method alone. It seems this method is picking up steam with other marketers as well.

In my opinion, this is like giveaway list building on steroids. But, unlike in giveaway events where the person who runs the giveaway is really the big winner, in an ad swap, 2 parties can be the big winners.

6. Blog Marketing

A blog is labor intensive but at the same time it can drive a flood of targeted visitors to your primary business. The great thing about a blog is that there are many ways you can leverage it for traffic – you can use it to tag and ping, it is easy to social bookmark, RSS is easily integrated and it is great for search engine optimization. Through my blog (which I have not been paying as much attention as I should), I have added hundreds of new subscribers.

7. Video Marketing

Video marketing is a highly scalable strategy for getting traffic. The hard part is getting the video created. Once that is done, promotion can be easy using automated tools like Tube Mogul and Hey Spread. These tools (or websites) submit your videos automatically to more than a dozen of the most popular video sharing websites online. Imagine if you create a short 3 to 5 minute video every week and submit it to more than a dozen of video sharing sites weekly. That should be enough to give you fresh inflows of subscribers.

8. Craigslist

The popularity of Craigslist.org has been growing immensely in the past year or so. In fact, in 2008, Craigslist’s popularity grew by 87%. This is probably because more people are going online to either search for bargains or to look for jobs or business opportunities. This means that Craigslist has never been a more fertile ground for marketers to tap into. I have not been taking advantage of it as much as I would like, but it is certainly something to put on your to-do list.

9. Ad Brite

Ad Brite is a banner ad exchange website where publishers and advertisers work out ad deals. I have personally advertised my sites on dozens of sites in the network and have reaped hundreds of fresh leads. The competition is also far less than it is on AdWords.

Here is a tip: Direct response, all-text banner ads seem to get the highest click-through rates.

10. Get Response Power Leads

If you’re looking to buy leads, then look no further than Get Response Power Leads. I have spent hundreds of dollars with them and have gotten a lot back in return. My list grows by the dozen daily and these people are highly responsive. Because the system is backed by one of the top autoresponder companies online, you can be sure of the quality of the leads, because they are real. I highly recommend checking them out.

There you go, my 10-point cheat sheet to growing a list of hot subscribers in ANY market. Apart from the List Builders tactic (which is more suitable for the home business niche), all the other tactics can be used for any niche.

All that’s left is to TAKE ACTION!

Fabian Tan is an Internet Marketing expert and author of the popular 59-page report: “Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!” Head over to http://www.MurderYourJob.com to get your FREE copy now.