How to Leverage [your product] in Your Business

Save Money and Look Like a Star to Your Boss

How to Impress Your Cranky CFO – Save $1000

Increase Your ROI by [xx]%, Guaranteed

How to make it onto your buyer’s short list

Complimentary Webinar: [insert webinar name]

Now you can do even more with your [xxxx]

Should your company outsource [insert thing to outsource here]?

Breakfast & Secrets for How to [insert problem you solve or product you sell]

Success Tip: 5 Ways to a Better [xxxx]

Register Today: [inert name of event] Nov. 5 2009

Entry deadline fast approaching

New White Paper: Best Practices for [Insert problem and solution here]

Success Tip #1: [Insert Tip Headline Here]

A gift employees and clients will love: [Insert gift name here]

Extended for a Day: Get Free Shipping Through Friday

Your Weekly Alert: [insert topic here]

Hear Exclusive Research Presented on [insert what your event is about] – Register Now!

Inside: [hot topic in your newsletter you think will get the most opens]

5 Ways to Maximize Holiday Sales

Save $200: [insert event here] Early Bird Registration Ends [insert date here]

Specific ones I think are good and why:

Marketing on a Tight Budget – Part 1 – Hits a pain point and makes it seem like there is even more information to help me, on its way.

Countdown to the Awards Gala: Reason #5 to Attend – This company did a series of 7 email campaigns in a row, to get people excited.

The Venture Capitalist Industry Isn’t Broken: VatorNewsletter – Here they started with the hot topic in the front of the subject line and it was somewhat controversial.

Secure Your SaaS Application (White paper Included) – I like that they tell you there is something tangible in it for you right in the subject line.

Cognos Training: 50% Discount – Year-End Budget – I LOVE the way they use Year End Budget because in many companies if you don’t spend the budget you have this year, you won’t get it again next year. This also works well with “Quarter-End Budget”

Thank You From Dice – This was just a nice thank you for your business with a huge discount to get customers coming back.

Get a $30 Gift Card for 30 Minutes of Your Time – It was to take a demo of a new product.

Frustrated with Graphics in Microsoft Office? – This company sells a product to make it all better and they got to a real pain point for people.

Subject lines are so important since it’s the reason your recipients are going to look to that to decide if they want to open your email. If you’ve got some B2B subject lines that have worked for you in the past, comment on the post, we’d love to know them.

Article courtesy of Vertical Response

Well fear not, you can put a surprisingly compelling newsletter together with a small amount of information. It’s fairly common practise amongst many email marketers to put too many offers together in a single email and then calling them newsletters.

The result, nothing stands out, it isn’t clear to the customer what action they should take, and over time recipients stop opening the emails. A great e-newsletter can be created with very basic information that is readily available. The key is a balance of information and offers (remember the “what’s in it for me” factor). Start by testing a newsletter format with 3 content sections and then increase to 5 over a series of a few months. Let your audience decide the right about of content with open and click through rates.

Easy E-newsletter Content Topics:

1) A Message from the Expert- A short paragraph from you to your audience or an introduction that drives recipients to your blog for a feature length article. Consider offering 5 Ways to “Improve X” in 2009. Include the first 2 lines of copy in your newsletter as a teaser and link to the full story on your blog for the full list.

2) Customer Testimonial- A simple quote from a happy customer about how your product or service helped them or fixed a problem, a measurable result achieved, or link to a video testimonial that you host on YouTube.

3) An Offer – Do you have a white paper, discount, or promotion currently running to announce?

4) Event Schedule- Link to the event page on your website or directly to an industry event you plan to attend.

5) Quick Fact- What’s the post popular selling product last month? What do your customers view as the greatest challenge for them next year? A poll or survey is a great way to get your customers involved in the discussion.

The final challenge is committing to frequency so that your audience will come to expect your newsletters. Write your first 3 issues at the same time. Line up 3 customer quotes, 3 notable events worth covering, and 3 facts to share from a single survey.

Remember, this month’s event can become next month’s main article. That’s a formula for successful newsletters in 2009.

Article courtesy of Vertical Response

A study by Sharpe Partners, an interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet users in America share content with others via e-mail. This is good news for companies who use computers as their way to sell their products.

Their study also shows other interesting result aside those things that mentioned above. This is with regards on the kind of content that are often forwarded. The most popular content is humorous material.

Next is news. Next is healthcare and medical information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies. So if you will use viral marketing as one of your tool in promoting your product, use humor as your content since it is the best content among all categories.

Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an e-mail to insure that it will go viral.

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an advertisement.

One of these examples is when Disneyland forwards an email for about a million people with a picture taken at their park. It shows the picture of Donald Duck in front of Cinderella Castle. The tile of it was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. Many people laugh and enjoy it so they pass and forward it for others to see.

Almost all of the people who have a computer see the picture as well as the advertisement of Disneyland. It attracts the attention of millions of people since it is an “advertainment” rather than a plain advertisement.

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign. You must come up with an idea that will entice your readers rather than creating a pure advertisement.

Article courtesy of Vertical Response

We’ll today, I’m uncovering ways for you to use Twitter and how it could benefit your email marketing campaigns, as well as how your email marketing campaigns benefit your Twitter followers.

Ready, Set, Email, Twitter!
For the newbies: Twitter is a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read messages known as “tweets” that are no more than 140 characters long.

Get Started

Many of you might just be starting out on Twitter. What do you twitter about? Who reads your tweets? Many businesses set up a Twitter account, and write about new things that are happening in their business, what’s going on in the industry, or they retweet articles they might find interesting. So how might this work together with your email marketing campaigns?

Get Followers
You may have people that visit your site or location that aren’t on your email list but they might be if they knew all of the cool stuff or the “Email Only” offers you publish in your emails. So in order to get more followers you’ll want to post your Twitter handle on your site, in your email marketing campaigns, on your business card, and in your email signature so that people can easily click on your link and follow you. For instance ours is: http://twitter.com/mailgloo. Then start to track the number of followers you get.

Email + Twitter = A Perfect Match
Now, here are a few things you can do to combine your Twitter presence with your email marketing campaigns.

Twitter Your Subject Line – Now that you’ve created your email you sent it out to your lists, take your subject line, which is hopefully less than 140 characters, and twitter it, then included a link to your hosted version of your email campaign. You’ll likely be reaching part of an audience you never knew you could have. If they like your content they’ll click through and read it, then they may even sign up to your list.

Think About Search on Twitter – Depending on the way people search for things on Twitter and the content of your subject line, (check out the free service called TweetDeck that enables you to search and filter on keywords), people that never knew anything about you might see your tweets.

One example would be a winery might be having a sale on their wines, and anyone that might search on “wine” using a tool like TweetDeck, would be exposed to any tweets that include the word “wine”. This is a great way to get even more eyeballs on your tweets and ultimately your email marketing campaigns.

Include “Follow” Links in Your Email Marketing Campaigns – Make sure you include a “Follow Us on Twitter” link in all of your email campaigns. With the velocity at which emails get forwarded, a newcomer might want to “try you on for size” by following you on Twitter before making the commitment to join your email list.

Get Them to Sign Up – You may also consider adding a “Sign Up to Receive Our Emails” link so that those coming to the hosted version of your email for the first time from Twitter have a place to add themselves to your email list. Entice them to sign up by having “Email Only” offers or notices.

Use Twitter for Research – If you use free twitter tools that help shorten your links like http://bit.ly/ & http://tr.im/ (remember your entire tweet is limited to 140 characters) you can track how many people click on links that you include in your tweets. Then you can see which articles, offers or stories that you twitter about should be included and above the fold on your email newsletter.

If you’ve got any ideas for how you’re using Twitter with your email campaigns we’d love to hear them!

Article courtesy of Vertical Response