It isn’t surprising that when we send a client a promotional advert about our company in an email, we can get a limited response. Promoting ourselves and our products and services does not get the attention that we would like all of the time. People seem to automatically ‘switch off’ when they perceive something as ‘promotional advertising. They ‘filter’ it objectionably and have a different attitude toward it than other types of email material, and can see it simply as spam advertising.

I run a real estate training and consultancy business and have found that should we send an email containing information that could actually assist the client ( dare I say giving information that could make them money!) I can have a far better response for my business than purely emailing my database promotional advertising.

In business we like to keep our cards ‘close to our chest’ and believe that our information, knowledge and expertise is valuable so why give it away? We can’t just ‘throw away’ our livelihoods!

However I have found that when we email information of value to the client, very different dynamics are at work. For example, I send my clients the UTN newsletter once per month. I send them as links to articles of value that gives insider views to the industry, a tip, a free form or tool to help them. I include also links to my website of upcoming training seminars, in-house workshops, products etc. If I include relevant information that will add value to my audience in their roles as real estate professionals I find that the response to the free information is very encouraging (I can track the response to my link given to my website in the UTN newsletter).

What I find is that clients partake of the information, read it and find value. What then happens is great! They perceive that I am an expert in the industry and when they have a need, I am the one that receives the phone call to do work!

Most people are simply ‘too busy’ to implement the ideas and information I have supplied them, however they think ‘Darren seems to know what he is doing!’

They will call you in to assist them with whatever need they have, and solve it with your product or service. This is simply because when they received and read your free article or tip, they were impressed and perceived you to be an expert. This fast tracks confidence and trust, the very ingredients necessary to facilitate a transaction.

Giving value information away I have found fast tracks this process and does not hinder it!

What information should you use in E-Marketing? This is up to you, but I have found out the more expertise I ‘give away’, the more value they get and the more they perceive I am the industry leader. It is VERY hard for my competition to get in as my profile is ‘first of mind’ with my clients. This is the whole goal of a successful marketing campaign.

So think differently about what information you do not wish to give away, and you may be surprised at the results it may give you and your business.

More and more email programs have automatic junk/spam filters. This means that unrecognised emails are sent to these folders and may never be read by the recipient.

To assist your subscribers it may be helpful to give them some instructions so that they can add your company's email address/domain to their trusted senders list (ie. whitelisting).

While the process may vary slightly according to the program they use - the essential thing is to get them to list your company in their address book as a safe address.

Here is how they can do this for Outlook 2003

• To add your email address to their address book:
  
  1. Right click on the email subject line.
  2. Choose "Add Sender To Address Book".
  
  
• To add your domain to their safe sender list:
  
  1. Right click on a non-displaying image in an HTML email.
  2. Choose "Add the domain to the safe sender list" option.

As you may remember some months back we featured the first part of an interview Winston Marsh did with me while I was in Melbourne last year on how to start an enewsletter and some of the lessons we have learnt over the years.

Now you can listen to the second part of that interview by clicking on the link below.

Winston has a lot of helpful material on his website so why not check it out as well

How can you get more people to open your emails? The answer is to take some time to explore what you are communicating and what the feedback is telling you. Here are some suggestions:

• Take a look at your content and other aspects of your mailings to see if this area needs improvement for enticing those no-shows to open up.
  
  
• Review your newsletter's stats after each mailing to learn about your readers' patterns. See what articles were clicked on and any other information that you can glean to improve your content. Run surveys to help get insight into what your readers are interested in.
  
  
• Fine-tune your from and subject line. Surveys have found that up to 60% of e-mails are opened based on the subject line, 40% on the from field. If the subject line isn't interesting or a familiar title, and/or the from field not recognisable - your e-mail will be deleted.
  
  
• Make sure there's a high 'WIFM' (What's In It For Me?). You have about eight seconds in that 'above the fold' part of the newsletter to get your reader to do the all-important scroll down the page and begin clicking.
  
  
• TOO much great information can be a bad thing; readers will open, think 'hey, good stuff, but too much to read now, I'll read it later' - and never get back to it.
  
  
• Of course, there are people who do read when they have the time, and in fact refer back to articles. Review your stats to find this pattern and keep links from past mailings active.
  
  
• Check your frequency. Quris reported that 68% of the respondents in their recent survey listed 'too frequently' as THE most annoying factor of a newsletter and/or mailings from a company.
  
  
• Research has shown the optimal number of times you need to email someone who is on your mailing list to get a response is six. Reasons it doesn’t get thru include - message got lost in an e-mail-packed mailbox, recipient deleted it by accident, someone else using the computer deleted it, person was too busy to respond, he was on vacation, she had to discuss it with someone else, he wanted to compare with other offers, it just didn't "strike" the recipient in the right way, she filed it for future review, he simply forgot about it, it was blocked by an ISP or user-installed software program