For example, did 100 people click through for information but only 10 actually clicked from your sites information page to the buy-now page? Perhaps you can change the offer on your site and measure it again. Like we’ve mentioned before, Test and Measure! It’s the only way to achieve true results.

Avoid: Interested? Buy this widget today!
Instead, use: Learn how a widget can change your life.

BAD: “http://www.xyzsite.com/newsletter/2008/e/a/article/sales2.asp”
BETTER: “http://www.xyzsite.com/Money-Saving-Coupon”

The concept is simple. Actually, the concept is simplicity. If you use URL’s that are long and deep, your reader’s eyes will tend to skip over the URL, because it looks like a jumbled mess. Instead, use something that is short and sweet, with clear benefits that will help reinforce the value of what’s on the other side of the link (Remember our article two weeks ago about enticing the reader?).

Now here’s something: What if you don’t have control of your site structure (the URL)? Here’s a simple way to bypass it: go to bit.ly and create a URL that points to the URL you actually want. A side benefit: bit.ly will actually track the people who visit your links. But you don’t need that, when you consider Online Outbox’s statistics, do you?

Our topic for this week is temptation. To illicit a response, you need to Be a Temptress. Entice your readers by tempting them to keep reading on the “other side” of the link. Start sentences, but don’t finish them. Create teaser paragraphs and provide a link to the rest of information. Ask a question and provide the link as the response.

Avoid: Dromophobia is the fear of crossing streets.
Instead, use: Learn what Dromophobia is.
Or use: Did you know there is a phobia of crossing the street? Learn more.
Or use: There’s an old joke about the chicken crossing the road. But did you know that millions of Americans fear that same activity? Learn more.

The trick is to create intrigue. Get someone to click to find more, and you’ll then find new opportunities to interact with your reader.

Notice the pattern. Every time the subject line includes terms like “planning”, “strategy”, or “goal” – all related to business plans – the open rate is over 30%. The moment we deviate and include other terms that we think people might respond to, like “competition” or “generating leads,” the open rate drops below 30%.

Look at the last two subject lines. There is a 10% increase in the open rate for the one about our 2008 Business Planning Guide compared to our information on Generating New Leads.

These numbers make it clear: readers want information to help them set goals and write a business plan. The insightful point is how connected our readers are with terms related to business planning, strategy, and goal setting. These terms are our audience’s hot buttons.

So what are your readers’ hot buttons? You can find out by looking through your campaign statistics. For your campaigns with higher open rates, what do those campaigns have in common? Look at everything, from which list you used and the source of that list (readers that opted in on your web site will give you a higher open rate than a purchased third party opt-in list), to the day or even time of day the campaign was sent, news going on in your industry or in the industries of your readers. Knowledge is power. Stay informed with how your campaigns are performing, and you’ll make better decisions about future campaigns.

If you sell a product or service but are not enticing prospects to subscribe to your email newsletter with some sort of offer, you’re missing a significant opportunity to grow your list of subscribers. And chances are, your competition is already doing so.

Rather than simply posting product information on your web site, offer discounts, freebies or other incentives for visitors to subscribe. You’ll have a captive audience, captivated.

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.

If your audience is typically busy, don’t distribute a message every day. If your team can’t maintain consistency in sending a meaningful message each week, try every other.

Keep in mind when scheduling that consistency is crucial. Your audience should expect your message on a timely basis. You can schedule your messages to begin distribution at a specific time.

Also, remember that there are natural optimal moments for a person to receive and appreciate a message. Some industries are inundated on Monday mornings with problems or orders from the weekend. Typically, not a good day to distribute. Better days are Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

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.

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.

Granted, none of us are typical. But I suppose the stats apply to the median of the whole at large.

The point I’d like to make here is that you can’t send an email blast and expect your prospects to come running. I advocate pushing your products and services to the same contact over a period of several months. Don’t just send the same message each week. Change it up. Highlight different features. Create targeted landing pages on your web site that will convert better than just sending prospects to your home page. Keep it simple, but over a month or two, your target client should have a good idea of what it is you sell, and what it could do for them.

Then they still won’t buy. But one day, when they come across a need that specifically relates to them, your product or service will be fresh in their mind.