Email newsletters and online newsletters aren’t the same thing. An online newsletter can be read by anyone anonymously by just visiting a site and there’s no way to track whether they have any influence at all. Though these newsletters may wind up in Google’s queue, and may bring a few more visitors to the site, the real value of enewsletters comes through the process of sendmail when they are delivered into the email inboxes of subscribers.
Legitimate opt-in e-mail advertising isn’t spam.
The first important point to remember is that people who subscribe to enewsletters are very real prospects and much more likely to convert into clients than average web site visitors.
Marketing is known as a science because testing can be performed and results quantified. This is done through multiple double blind tests. The more people there are who sign up for an enewsletter, the more double blind sampling can be done. In statistics it is important to deal with no fewer than 30 people at a time.
So to perform a single double blind you will need a minimum of 60 email addresses to work with, and two versions of your enewsletter offer.
You’ll begin your enewsletter in the form of an email with two carefully written titles, one to show up in the subject line of each groups email inboxes.
If your entire email database contains just 100 people, then it’s only practical to do a single test.
For the test you’ll have two different emails – one may focus more on the benefits of an offer you will eventually be making, one may focus more on the individual features as bullet points. Your email doesn’t show the entire newsletter (or possibly doesn’t show any of it) but instead has a link to one of your tracked web pages – a landing page – with your actual newsletters. One prepared for the first group of 30 recipients, and the other enewsletter prepared for the second group.
Again, you vary the copy and change around the offer and benefits to see which one converts to more sales or inquiries that could lead to sales. If you’ve done things right and all goes well a percentage will turn around and buy. But let’s look at the tracking results first.
Say that your first email with subject line one actually got clicked on by the majority of recipients, only you got no sales – whereas the second email you sent out didn’t get clicked on quite as often (you can tell by looking at your site meter results to know they were referred from an email) but you made two sales from the content of the actual enewsletter version you had waiting for them online.
The next step is to combine the best of both for the remaining 40 people on your emailing list and send subject line number one along with the link to enewsletter number two and see if your conversion rate holds true for that larger group – more clicks and more sales.
As time goes by and your email database of sign ups grows into the hundreds or thousands, you can do more double blinds, and use larger samples of 50 or more to get more reliable results. You can change your page layouts, move your images, change your headlines and do any number of things to see what converts people best.
If you collect zip codes you can divide recipients into different zones and make your advertising copy in your enewsletters and landing pages more personally meaningful to each group by adding a familiar theme, point of focus or regional concern to each groups enewsletter. Those in Colorado during heavy snowstorms might reflect on that. Areas of the deep south may be experiencing unusually mild weather. Some zip codes may be more affluent than others so if you run the zip codes by the census bureau and they come up richer, you can offer them more premium high ticket luxury items without as much regard to price affecting their acceptance.
So by using the total strategy of enewsletters the business owner who has enough time, energy and savvy can boost sales significantly and increase sales steadily over time.
Additional incentives to buy might be used, such as increasing the immediate value of an offer by making it time sensitive. Buy before December 31st and save 20%. Make the offer transferable – so if a client receiving an email has a friend who might be interested she can send it to her friend to take advantage of the deal – and at the same time the friend just may sign up for her own enewsletter.
As you can see, this is an advanced conversion technique closely related to SEO in as much as merely getting to the top of the search engines without doing anything to increase sales is largely useless unless the percentage of sales per visitor can also be optimized and increased.
The beauty is that it’s not that hard to set up and most of the work will be done by the business owner who is then left to be in control of his or her own destiny. Some basic web page creation and publishing software may be installed on the client’s computer with a page template matching the site and built in links to the site’s own main pages – essentially a gateway page template. The client can prepare and upload the offer itself, collect, maintain and control the email submissions to join the email newsletter group, and perform the testing. The enewsletters themselves need never appear on the site as linked to from any regular site page – but if at some point one particular offer turned into an overwhelming success, it could be added at that point to help boost overall sales from everyone visiting the site even for the first time.
So what’s been done here is a marketing trick combining several simple ideas into a complex concept. Done exactly as described and on schedule (no missing months or multiple months) the results are exciting to see as real sales start building.
