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One of the mistakes most often made, is not looking at your product or service
announcement from the point of view of your customer. Stand back and look at
what you are offering, how can you present that service or product in such a
way that it will appeal to you. If you are offering a service, why should someone
buy it from you, rather than the other 1000 people offering that same service?
Sometimes it's a little tough to be objective when looking at your own ad copy.
I look at ad copy everyday and to be honest I'm really shocked at some of the
things that I see.
I'll save space here by not repeating all of them. Rather I will list a few
ways to get your offer, be it newspaper,direct mail or e- mail, thrown in the
trash immediately. There may be some things here you don't want to hear or believe,
but take my word for it the things I'm listing can make the difference in success
and failure.
I will talk only about your initial contact advertising, follow up contact
takes a completely different tack. Listed here, not necessarily in their order
of importance, but rather in the order in which they can get your message trashed
are just a few of those Mistakes.
1. Not addressing your offer to the recipient. (I know, you can't take the
time to address all that mail)I would say at least 50% of the people receiving
e-mail not addressed specifically to them, will immediately hit the delete key.
If your offer is so fantastic that you can loose 50% of your audience right
out of the gate, by all means send out mail with your self, both as the sender
and the recipient. Or addressed to friend@whatever.com. You get the idea. You
will also find this tactic addressed in the anti spam legislation. ( Note: This
does not apply when sending mail to an opt in list. )
2. Using a vulgar or unrealistic sender address, I'll leave the vulgar to your
imagination. As far as the unrealistic, dontmiss@this.com or just4u@me.com again
you get the idea. You will also find this tactic addressed in the anti spam
legislation. For the sake of ease (math was never my long suit) let's say this
tactic looses you another 10%.
3. No Subject or a subject that causes an immediate delete. Now what could
be a subject that could cause that? Well, how about. EARN A MILLION DOLLARS
WITH JUST 1 TIME INVESTMENT OF $20. 00 or any variation of that theme. Again
you get the idea. Now you may well be saying to yourself, but that's what my
program offers. That's wonderful, but in order to get someone interested in
that program, a different approach is needed. Something like:Income Opportunity
5 minutes of your time could be the difference. or:Home business opportunity!
Let's Talk. What can a grandiose subject line cost you, we'll say another 10%.
4. The cc: field filled with dozens of addresses or the To: field for that
matter. If you need to send the same e-mail to more than 1 recipient use the
bcc: field. If your mail program does not offer a bcc: field GET ONE THAT DOES!
There are so many reasons for this it would take another entire article to address
all of them. But the main one in my opinion is you do not have the right to
advertise those addresses to the world. It is very bad netiquette. You loose
another 10%
5. HTML other than url's. There are many, many people out there that don't
have the $10,000 set up that you have, and their mail programs DO NOT translate
HTML into anything but gibberish. If you want your message to be read, write
and send it in plain text. The percentage here is probably higher but again
we'll say 10%.
6. Sending e-mail the size of War and Peace. Here again there are a number
of reasons not to do this. Besides the main one, there are a lot of people out
there that are limited in the amount of space their mail server will allow.
Mine (yes, I still maintain one of those free addresses) for example is 2000k.
When my inbox, saved mail and drafts exceeds that amount my mail STOPS. Not
1 day goes by that I don't receive at least one 75 to 100k e-mail. 20 of those
and I'm out of business. The other important reason, the recipient just won't
take the time to read a book in there e-mail. A message of that length needs
to be on a web page. Opp's we lost another 10%
Ok, let's examine what happens when we make all those mistakes in sending out
1000 of our e-mail ad's. Right off the bat we loose 50% by not addressing our
offer to the recipient. That reduces our mailing to 500. We loose another 10%
for our return address. Were down to 400. 10% more for no subject, now were
at 300. We decided to advertise those addresses our up-line sent us to the whole
world and lost another 10%. Now were down to 200. Our new e-mail program is
really neat and we put flowers and red, white, and blue stripes on our outgoing
messages, now were down to 100. We had such a great story to tell and we were
just so excited about all the neat stuff we spent 2 whole hours writing down
every detail. You just lost your last 100 potential customers.
Granted, I have never received a single e-mail that contained all of those
mistakes, but it only takes 1 or 2 to significantly reduce your response rate.
You can't afford to let all your efforts and hard work go to waste by making
these easily correctable mistakes.
"Your Success Is Our Success"
About the Author:
Jim Peters is Manager of NSI "SOLUTIONS". NSI specializes in custom
website design,promotion, maintenance, domain registration ,site hosting ,site
and graphic design, as well as e-commerce packages for small to medium sized
companies. In other words "SOLUTIONS". |
