Woody Allen said that 80% of success was simply showing up. Many great ideas never make it past the drawing board. But the great ideas that are actually implemented are the ones that are remembered.

Once you’ve started your email campaign, stick with it! Your content will be good some weeks. Other weeks, you’ll be scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Occasionally, your email will go out late. Some will be short. You won’t be as proud of some, but stick with it. As you grow in your ability to produce valuable content on a timely manner, your emails will gradually become something that your readers are looking for every time.

This concludes our six-week series. Stay tuned next week for a new set of ideas to make your marketing campaigns truly productive.

Building on the your target audience, and your purpose in contacting them, it’s now time to craft your message. Your purpose will drive your content.

For instance, if your purpose is to get readers to your web site, you should offer some “teaser” content: maybe it’s a headline, or the first three lines of a recent article on your site. Something that will grab the reader’s attention, and entice them to take further action. Then follow that teaser with a link to a specific page with that entire article. If, rather, your purpose in contacting your readership is to sell product, your content will need to be crafted in that direction.

The concept is not difficult to grasp, but starting with an analysis of your audience and your purpose will make crafting your message much more direct, and the more direct your messaging, the greater the impact of your marketing.

Several clients have approached me recently with questions about some of the basics of marketing via permission-based email newsletters, and rather than re-create the message from scratch each time, I’m posting the information here. For the next several weeks, I’m going to post parts in a series about Developing an Email Marketing Strategy. After that, I’ll be back to our usual drivel, I promise!

Determine Your Audience. More than likely, you’re already familiar with your target market — those prospects who make you smile most, when they convert to actual clients. But for many businesses who are marketing via email, your target market may not be the exact market that will open and read your email messages. Busy professionals, for instance, may receive more than a hundred emails in a day, and — nothing personal, but your message doesn’t possess the same urgency that others in an inbox might.

While this doesn’t mean that you should not communicate to that market, you should rather a little time thinking about what will make that target client stop and read. What will come across as relevant? What will come across as urgent? It’s often the urgent, and always the relevant, that gets the best read.

A well-planned campaign will be well worth the forethought.

The more you tailor your messages to target recipients, the more effective it will be. The economies of email allow you, the sender, to target your emails with precision, so take advantage of the technology. For example, if you are making an offer applicable to both realtors and accountants, you’re likely to have better results if you’ll split the two groups into separate Contact Lists, and send two separate emails.

Before you write your emails, develop a thorough understanding of the needs and interests of your target market. This understanding will help create a style and tone that is appropriate to your audience — whether your readers are entrepreneurs, corporate-level executives or stay-at-home moms.

All levels of membership at Online Outbox offer unlimited Contact Lists. Read about other features of Online Outbox here.

If you’ve taken a break for a while from email marketing, or if you picked up an old list for prospecting, WAIT! Even if you’ve used compliant methods to obtain the addresses (subscription forms on your web site, double opt-in processes, or purchased lists that are legitimate, CAN-SPAM compliant, etc.), email addresses have a tendency to go bad, expire, for whatever reason, or some of your subscribers may not remember you after a lengthy break. There are methods for re-introducing your emails that will be effective and profitable.

A great method for getting back in the swing is to segment your lists, and send to certain segments first. Perhaps segment on the basis of demographics, or industry, or those who most recently signed up, and may most likely remember you.

Personalization of your content can do wonders for your readership. Address your readers by name, where appropriate. Include their industry, age, gender, shoe size — whatever information is relevant, and will demonstrate an attention to detail that resonates with your readers. Online Outbox provides Custom Fields for this very purpose.

Further segmenting your content based on will allow you to further customize your messages to the specific circumstances of each of your readers. For instance, it may be beneficial to send an entirely different message to a group of industrial printers than to a group of real estate agents. You could create separate contact lists altogether, or simply segment those lists as you prepare to send your messages.

Online Outbox allows you to customize the email headers in your campaigns, so the emails actually come from you, rather than from Online Outbox. Email headers contain organizational information that will likely remain the same for the entire campaign. Email headers contain such information as the From Name (your name, or your organization’s name), the From Email Address (your email address, or a generic newsletter-oriented email address) and the Reply-To Email Address (your email address, or “donotreply@yourorganization.com”, etc.).

You can configure unique email headers for each Contact List. To edit email headers for an existing Contact List, simply navigate to the Contact Lists page, and edit the appropriate Contact List. You may edit any available options here, in the Edit Contact List page.

Do you post to a blog on a somewhat regular basis? A great way to get new and recurring traffic is to notify your subscribers when you have new content available on your blog. Sending a short “teaser” with a link to your blog page to “read more” will 1) show your readers that they matter, 2) bring more traffic to your site, and 3) give you a little rapport with Google and most of the other search engines.

Sending emails too frequently will motivate your subscribers to end their subscription. Sending emails infrequently, and you’ll lose rapport. There’s not an optimum schedule for sending marketing emails, because each email campaign has a unique purpose. That said, I would recommend not sending emails more frequently than once per week, and not less frequently than once per month.

If you find that setting aside time in your schedule is difficult, I’m with you. Here’s a trick. Block off a few hours on a particular morning each month. Write your next two or three emails, and stagger the delivery of the emails to meet your strategy – with most email marketing services (but especially with Online Outbox), you could schedule Email #1 to be sent today, Email #2 to be sent next Tuesday at 8:00am, and so on.

If your subscribers remember your previous emails, and, even better, are looking forward to receiving them, your readership (marketing guys will call this your open-rate) will skyrocket. The first-glance constant of your email in your subscriber’s inbox is obviously the email’s “From Name” and/or “From Address”. The first item that most individuals look at when determining which mail to open and which to ignore or complain about, is whom it’s from. Building recognition will do wonders for your readership.