Direct Email Marketing - 5 Tips to Make It Easy

Direct Email Marketing - 5 Tips for Success 

A qualified list is better than a big list. Your direct email marketing success begins and ends with the quality of your email list. As an experience professional, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that a small list of raving fans is better than a big list of people who don't care about you either way. You might think it doesn't matter because email is free to send, but that's not the point. Not only will you be able to sell at higher prices to a good list, but it will be cheaper and easier to grow it in the first place!
 

Remember what business you're in. You're in the relationship business where your aim should be to acquire customers and clients NOT make sales. If you put them first and look after them, then I promise... they'll look after you and your profits.
Cut out the hard sell. I'm dead against the hard sell. It works -- in the sense you make sales but as a long term strategy it sucks. So your emails should have a direction and a purpose to lead the reader gently into the sale. Nothing turns me off faster than an internet marketer who emails me only when he's got something to sell me.
 

Give away your best stuff in your emails. Most people are too afraid to do this because they want to "reserve" their best material for their paying customers. This is a mistake. If you give away your best information, your readers will be thinking, "wow... if Jon gives this stuff away... what must his paid products be like?". What's more, you have to understand people will pay for convenience. Having all your best material available scattered at random over a hundred emails is far less convenient than having

it all packaged together in a sensible order in a PDF with explanatory notes, supplementary DVDs and a forum where they can ask questions about it. They will pay for that.
 

Don't be timid. The whole point of direct response marketing is you ask for the sale in a call to action -- don't just trail off and "hope" they get the message. So when you do have something to sell them, perhaps in 20% of your emails, don't be afraid to ask for the sale. And don't be afraid to be as blunt as this: "I give away a lot of my stuff for free... so now I'm asking you to give back. I've compiled all this....". You get the


 By Jon Mcculloch