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Nov 20

Every time you send a newsletter, announcement, or promotional email you try everything you can think of to draw your reader in. Once you’ve got them, the body of the email gives them the information you’re trying to get a cross. So, how do you get them to that point?

One option is a snappy, attention-getter opening. It may work and it may not. A far more effective technique is called a banner ad. Banner ads sit at the top of the email and draw your audience into the body of the email. The ad could also lead them directly to the landing page where you want them to go. A banner ad can be instrumental in effectively motivating your audience. Here are a few tips to create the best possible ad:

1.K.I.S.S. That saying you used as a kid can be very helpful in this situation. Keep it simple, silly. The banner ad has only a few seconds to catch the reader’s eye before they move on so the ad has to be simple and to the point. Don’t bother with flash or pizazz because your reader will look right over the ad if they can’t immediately see the point.

2.Call for action with words that raise emotion or attention. Words like ‘free’ and ‘limited time offer’ are always popular. Keywords like this will grab the reader’s attention and make them curious. At this point, including a keyword such as ‘Click Now’ is always a good idea. You’ve got them curious and you need to tell them what to do to get more information.

3.Emphasize what your product can do for your customer. People are always looking for ways to make their life easier or better, so tell them how your product or service can do that! For example, we offer free email templates so a great banner ad for our email blasts would highlight that downloading our templates saves you the time you’d spend designing your own (making life easier) as opposed to ‘we offer free templates’.

4. Remember that you are a business! Keep your ads with the tone of the email it is attached to and don’t forget that this ad is the first impression for your email! Remember to keep it professional. Also, you never know what will grab people’s attention best. Try to create several banner ads and test them over a period of time. Keep the most successful ads and use them in the future. If you ever need new banner ads, model them after the ones you know work.

It is always best to design your own ads because you can tailor them to suite your company and your audience; but let’s face it, sometimes you just don’t have the time. There are several options. You can always hire someone to do it for you, or you can search the Internet for free options.

If the ‘Net is seeming like a good idea, check out AdDesigner.com. Once you sign up to be a member, you’ll have access to all kinds of tips, sample ads, and free stuff. Not to mention you can design your banner ad on their site!

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Nov 13

For your company to be successful at email marketing, you have to reach out to your target audience and draw them in. The best way to draw a potential customer in is to provide them with newsletters, coupons, and promotion announcements. But how do you get them to give you their email address?

If you’re like many companies, you are always asking customers and potential customers to sign up for newsletters, provide email addresses, etc. There is a way to do this that doesn’t require constant requests. It’s called an opt-in.

Opt-Ins are an easy way to draw in potential subscribers and have them willingly provide you with their contact information. After downloading the opt-ins of your choice, you simply drop them on your website and start collecting subscribers! All of the opt-ins have been tested and are guaranteed to bring in a higher conversion rate of subscribers.

Opt-ins are the easiest and most efficient way to build your list of subscribers. It takes little to no man-power and best of all, it’s FREE! Why wouldn’t you take advantage of a free way to guarantee an increase in your potential customers? It’s as good as money in your pocket.

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Nov 9

With the ability to provide stream-lined design, visual cues and the potential for added creativity, there is simply no denying the effectiveness of html emails when compared to simple text. However, programming an html email can take sufficient background knowledge in html and time to program to prove effective… until now.

At EmailTemplatePro.com, you will find a variety of html email templates that can easily be used with no prior knowledge of html. Simply download the email template that appeals to you, add text, and watch the results!

Aside from EmailTemplatePro.com, with StreamSend you will also find professional html email templates along with the professional assistance needed to maximize your message’s potential.

Regardless of whether you are a home business or multi-national corporation, the Internet is allowing us all to be on the same playing field more and more each day, and for the moment html email and services such as StreamSend are the forefront of providing an advantage to all.

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Oct 30

Effective marketing is the key to any successful business. Therefore, the question on every company’s mind is “How do we increase the effectiveness of our marketing?” There are several things you can do, but the quickest, easiest, and cheapest is sending out email newsletters.

If your a company just beginning to explore the idea of email blasts or email marketing, the idea can be daunting. Do  not fret. There are so many ways to get started. If your company has access to a creative team that can tailor your email templates to suit your company that is the best option. However, not every company has the time or resources to devote to this task. If that is the case, there is another option.

Your company can always use pre-made email templates. That’s were we come in. By signing up as a member of this site, you and your company gain access to everything you need to create effective email newsletters. The best part is they are pre-made, tested for optimal efficiency and FREE! It’s your one-stop-shop for email marketing.

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Dec 8

You may have the perfect product, the perfect sales pitch and an endless list of eager buyers’ e-mails, but if your message isn’t reaching its base your potential customers will be nothing more than lost sales. This is the exact scenario that many online entrepreneurs are finding themselves in, often times having to get out of the game long before they ever have a chance. Thankfully, there is a service in place to help easily organize even the most daunting of email lists, ensure that marketing emails actually make it to customers’ inboxes, and provide a wealth of features that will allow you to present your message in a professional manner. That service is StreamSend.

How Can StreamSend Help Me?

Simply put, if you need to send out bulk e-mail in a timely, organized fashion and need to be guaranteed that those emails are actually being received, StreamSend can help you. You’ll find countless tools to organize and maintain an updated list, though organization is only the beginning. StreamSend can also help polish your sales pitch with a wealth of professional HTML e-mail templates and even tweak the look of your e-mail with HTML editing features. However, one of StreamSend’s most enticing features is that every client receives a private IP address. This ensures that your e-mails will never get blocked due to the marketing infractions of someone else using the same IP address.

StreamSend May Work, But is it Worth the Cost?

Find out for yourself! StreamSend offers a free 30-day trial to let you get a feel for if the system can help with your individual needs. After the free trail, they have standard plans starting as low as $19.90 per month and Large Volume Plans beginning at $209.90 per month. It should also be noted that there are no contracts to sign, so if you find 5 months into your campaign that you’re not getting the results you feel you deserve you can easily change course.

StreamSend Sounds Great, But My Business Isn’t That Big

It’s true that StreamSend works with some of our nation’s most iconic brand names including Jelly Belly, MTV and UPS, but that’s not to say that StreamSend can only benefit the big guy. From small businesses looking to make the leap into the big leagues to home businesses simply trying to stay a float, if you have a product that needs online exposure StreamSend can help.

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Nov 29

Unless you’re living in a cave, you’re being bombarded with reminders about the Holiday season. Don’t be annoyed by these ads, listen to them, examine them, learn from them. Take a great commercial you’ve seen on television, turn it into an email and blast it out to your subscribers.

My most successful email marketing campaigns have stemmed from the Holiday shopping season.

Remember, if you have a product, that product could be a gift. Don’t just remember for yourself, remind your customers! Sometimes it just takes one sentence: “Looking for that perfect gift? YourProductHere is the number one choice for YourNicheHere” to plant a seed in your subscriber’s mind.

My stats for last holiday season:
  • 23% Higher click through ratio
  • 19% More Sales
  • 27% Less opt-outs

Take advantage of the Holidays! Get motivated and send out some extra emails, throw in a coupon or a limited time sale, and you’ll see better stats too.

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Nov 10

Building and growing a responsive, quality mailing list can require a dreadful amount of work. Furthermore, once you have built your list, you must nurture and grow it. Whatever you do, do not flood your recipients with advertisements and pointless emails constantly. This is a great way to destroy your precious opt-in list. Honestly, acquiring all of those email address is minuscule part of the email marketing process. It is extremely important to know that you’re building an individual relationship with every person who gives you their email address. If you mess up in the beginning, you are hindering your chances on building a lucrative relationship with your subscribers. On the other hand, do it right and prove your company’s worthiness, and you will both have smiles on your faces for years to come.

There are 3 key elements involved in list building:
  • Acquiring The Email Address

This is the easiest task in building a list. The rule here is that you must have the explicit permission from the subscriber to send them emails. Place a check box on your sign-up page or include this in your terms of service. Remember, it’s all about building trust. It is also illegal not to include this statement if you intend on emailing your subscriber according to the CAN-SPAM act in the United States.

  • Welcoming Your New Subscriber

We all receive the pointless, and endless flood of emails filling up our inboxes called SPAM. Because of this, it can be difficult to make a person read your email. A well thought out welcome message with good content, will build the foundation for a good email marketing relationship between you and the subscriber. The welcome message will not only build trust, but will verify the validity of each email address, further weeding out the bad seeds. It also acts as a 2nd screening process since 90% of your opt-outs will come in after you send this email, so make it pretty, and make it good!

  • Customer Relationship Management

This is the most important element of maintaining a quality opt-in list. It is unfortunate that this is the most overlooked step of list building. I can understand why, as this is by far the most time consuming aspect of nurturing your opt-in list. You must honor all of your subscriber’s personal email preferences. If you have an email marketing service provider or some good server-side software, take advantage of the tracking features. Many will allow you to track bounces, unsubscribing, clicks, and inactivity. This is very useful data and should be analyzed and archived regularly.

Always make sure that you’re holding the interest of your subscribers. If they seem to be fading away and your statistics are declining, send out promotions, special offers, and even surveys to pull them back in.

Most importantly; never give up on your list!

It can take a lot of time and energy to build a great opt-in list. In the end, when you’re staring at page after page of your opt-in subscribers, you will surely look at it as time well spent.

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Nov 7

Added 16 brand new opt-in templates

email marketing templates

Click Here to Download Templates

Professionally designed, just drop right into your website to start grabbing your visitors names and email addresses. These high quality opt-in email templates have been tested and optimized for high subscriber conversion rates.

Attention grabbing opt-in templates like these are by far the fastest and easiest way to get visitors to give you their name and email address so you can start building a targeted list of buyers that you can send offers to for as long as you’d like! Just drop these “interactive magnets” into your website to start your email harvest!

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Oct 28

This may not seem to be directly related to email marketing, but since most of my clients run full time websites I thought it would be nice to touch on this subject. I couldn’t even begin to list the hundreds of online resources for website valuation, so I have placed links throughout this post to the most accurate resources on how to value a website.

There are an array of online tools, sites, and consultants that claim they will give you an accurate estimate on what your website is worth. When using any of these methods it is always a good idea to take into consideration some commonly overlooked factors such as the effectiveness of your opt-in list and/or email newsletter.

You will often see the automatic website valuations gathering information on your site such as the number of back links. Back links can be links from blog comments, forums, and directories. If your site has valuable content people will want to link back to you, these are probably the highest valued back links one can obtain.

Many of the website valuation guides will mention your Google page rank, and overall search engine ranking position. Several other factors such as Alexa ranking, link popularity, and compete ranking can also play into your website valuation.

For more detailed information check out this site: how to value websites

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Oct 24

Have you created a Squidoo Lens yet? We’re just getting started on ours and thought we’d share it with our readers.

Click Here to create your own Lens

http://www.squidoo.com/htmlemailtemplates

Help us out by rating our lens or adding it to your favorites. We have only scratched the surface of using squidoo so please bookmark our lens and check back often for updates!

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