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.

When determining the frequency which with you distribute your messages, you should consider two things: 1) your audience’s ability to appreciate each message, and 2) your team’s ability to keep up with the ongoing workload of writing each message.

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.

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.

Determine Your Purpose. After becoming familiar with your audience (see our last post), you’ll want to nail down your purpose for writing. Whittle your purpose down to one goal: Entice the reader to visit your web site. Buy something advertised in your email. Heighten community impact. Make your group aware of certain news or events. Your purpose may be completely unique, but you need to know what it is, in order to market effectively.

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.

This post is a continuation from my thought last week: that while the typical salesperson gives up too soon, his prospect is typically ready to buy tomorrow (80%, to put a number to it). The magic number is 7 impressions. It takes the typical person 7 impressions before they buy.

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.

One of the great features that the onslaught of technology in this industry is that every piece  can be automated, whether from the end user’s vantage point (the email subscriber), or your vantage point (the email marketer). One of the latest features of Online Outbox is Triggers.

Imagine this: It’s Tuesday morning. You send your weekly email campaign, like regular. One of your recipients — let’s call him “Bob” — skims your email that morning, but comes back to it later in the evening. He likes what he sees. He clicks the link to your web site (the link you’ve conveniently placed near the top of the email) for more information. But he doesn’t buy, subscribe, contact you… whatever your conversion goals are. Maybe he left the credit card at the office. Maybe he gets called away to dinner. For whatever reason, he doesn’t convert.

But you’re smart. You’ve created a Trigger, that based upon a recipient’s action (for instance, when someone clicks a specific link contained in this particular email), a specific action is triggered. In this case, Bob now gets (automatically!) bumped into a “clicked the link” Contact List, which triggers an Autoresponder to be sent, 12 hours later, with more targeted info. Reasons for him to buy. Specials or Incentives, or what have you.

Bob receives the email the next morning. Remembers his interaction yesterday, and follows through with the purchase or escalation.

Remember this: The more you direct your marketing to individuals, rather than the masses, and make their experience interactive, the better conversion rate you’ll experience.

Using triggers, you can send automatic birthday reminder emails, add/remove contacts to/from multiple lists based on an email being opened or a link being clicked.

I hope that inspires…