Email Marketing Strategy - A 'How To' Course

...This is page 5 of the email marketing strategy course. This lesson is about defining your email marketing strategy from the beginning (pre-implementation).

Your Email Newsletter Start Up Strategy

Once you have determined your reasons for publishing an email newsletter, defined a target market, and a (general at least) topic, you have compiled enough information to move onto the next step. Deciding on a name.

Your newsletter name should be concise and descriptive without being misleading. The name should make it easy for your readers to quickly make an association with the newsletter, your business, and your website url.

Ezine Naming Conventions

Keep your target market or preferred subscriber in mind when you choose a name. Ask yourself, "If I were in this target market, would I subscribe to this?"

Here's an example: Email newsletters that provide information on the stock market wouldn't be named ‘Tips and Tricks on Making Big Bucks in Stocks!, even though you're sure you'll be sharing valuable tips about the stock market, the quality of the reader you're after will likely suffer than if you'd chosen a name with a bit more sophistication. You're aiming to find a a newsletter title that suits the reader and is realistic in any claim it makes. ‘Top Stock Market Investments’, especially if your domain name was reflected in that title, would be more appropriate for the task.

Personal Branding - Including Your Own Name

Finally, in some markets it really helps to 'brand' yourself, and not just the business name. Positioning yourself as a trusted and knowledgeable expert in your industry makes people feel as though they are receiving news and advice from a reliable source, recommendations from an old friend, personal attention in a hard and cold world.

These are just a few start up pointers to help you prepare for email marketing. We will discuss each of these, and many more, in detail over the course of this free training session.

Creating, Writing and Publishing Your Email News

Let's talk about the different names behind the processes of making money by email marketing. You've read 'ezine', 'email newsletter' and email marketing now plenty of times in this free course. In the beginning of the email marketing course (you may not have started there) I explained these names were all one and the same and meant the exact same.

An ezine is an ‘electronic magazine’. It is precisely what it claims to be. And, just like a standard magazine subscription through postal mail, subscribers can opt to receive the ezine on a consistent basis until they cancel. If you want to get into the 'nitty-gritty' on how these differ, please understand that there are no hard and fast industry standard rules. Call it what you want, it all adds up to email marketing. Publish as your style and ideas see fit.eZines usually have more than one 'article' and each article is an in-depth account of the topic.

eMail newsletters are similar albeit shorter. And email marketing is a way to use either (or a variation on either style of publishing) to promote products (your own or others) to a target market, and earn an income.
Finally, in any and all formats you will find, just like any print magazine or newsletter, advertising.

Paid or Free Subscriptions?

Most ezines are free.

Why? The reader does not recognize that you have expenses because work and distribution is all online and electronic. This makes it a tough sell to squeeze a few dollars out of your readers.

In truth you may have many expenses associated with your email newsletter (not much in the beginning, but as you grow more successful you may have higher liabilities, such as writers, extra hosting fees due to increased bandwidth, etc.)

If your email newsletter is costing you money to publish you need to find ways to offset that cost - either through paid subscriptions or through effective advertising within.

I've never personally heard of an email newsletter not turning a profit, but I imagine they do exist. It is your job to tweak and test your email marketing strategy and mandate until it becomes a profitable venture.

Email Marketing Plans and Strategies

A well-defined strategy, and the tweaking of that strategy, is what 'makes you or breaks you' financially.

Mandate:

• To establish yourself as a credible source of information.
• To illicit trust from your subscribers.
• To gain multiple subscribers daily, and keep them subscribed.
• To advertise your own products.
• To review and promote related products for a commission.

Study and Learn from Your Competition

Study your competition in the marketplace, subscribe to their newsletters and watch how they market their newsletter, their products or other's products. As you read each issue take note of how it feels to be a reader. Adjust your own newsletters based on those feelings. Set your newsletter and your style apart.

There may be a multitude of email newsletter publishers targeting the same crowd as you are. Don't let that stop you! Your subscribers may subscribe to many newsletters. Your job is to set yourself and your content apart - to be the newsletter that your subscriber opens and actually reads. 

You'll want to be outstanding and you can be - be yourself, but mold yourself into what you feel subscribers want - later in your email marketing course we'll talk about how to purposely ask your subscribers what they want. The point is that even though you've chosen a target market that has been already chosen by many other email marketers, if you still have something unique to add, then enter the marketplace and take your share.

We'll talk more about this later in the course - how to set your content apart from your competition, win the attention of your readers, and blow away the competition.

For now, let's move into targeting your market and tailoring your content to serve that market. (I'll show you where the real money is made in email marketing.)