A 265,719 List - Free

Just a quick article today, to mention an amazing but very real opportunity.

One of the biggest obstacles to many would-be online marketers is building a 'safelist' of opted-in email addresses. Without those, email marketing is dead before it even starts...

And even 24 percent of nothing is still nothing.

Here's the solution: Smart Safelist.com

Roy Everitt, Writing For Smart Results

At Least Something Works!

Hello again.

Frustrating isn't quite the word when you've gone to the trouble of directing people to a website, only to find you can't update the content to give them what you've promised.

The mysteries of Internet Explorer and/or Google conspired to prevent me updating this page yesterday, but I'm here now.

And the plan was to tell you how the death of email marketing has been greatly exaggerated. To point out that any other advertising medium that could deliver a twenty-four percent response would be lauded to the hills. And any that subsequently delivered over sixty percent of those responders to the advertised event would be hailed as revolutionary.

It wasn't lauded (except by me) and there's nothing very revolutionary about email marketing. I guess it depends on three things:

1. How targeted the original list is
2. How good the offer is
3. How well we write the emails

So we can probably say we got three out of three for our last campaign. Fifty attendees from a list of about three hundred people (and from just under eighty opt-ins) has to be good.

So when I finished congratulating myself for that success I could only think I should be doing this kind of thing for a living!

Then I remembered I was, decided to tell a few people about it, and hit the brick wall that either Microsoft or Google temporarily threw up in my path.

Still, I'm here now, I've told you about it and I can only ask one question: how would a twenty-four percent response to your next campaign help YOUR business?

Roy Everitt, Writing for Amazing Results

The Death of What, Exactly?

Hello again.

I'll get back to public speaking next week, I think, when we're all back into the swing of things...

Meanwhile, I thought I'd share a couple of lessons I've re-learned during the Christmas lull.

Firstly, when anyone publishes an ebook or white paper titled, 'The Death of....' you'd be very unwise to take it at face value - of course, they just want your attention. But when Michel Fortin publishes a white paper and calls it 'The Death of The Salesletter', you should certainly read it. As one of the world's top copywriters, he certainly knows what he's talking about. Which is why I'll give you 'The Death of The Salesletter', just for signing up to Roy Everitt dotcom...

Secondly, when anyone talks about the death of anything in business, that claim is almost always premature. We've even had 'The Death of The Internet' and yet, here we still are.

The obituary for email marketing has been written several times, despite the fact that emails clearly still work. And they work despite the fact that we're all bombarded with more emails than we can possibly read, with more links to websites than we can possibly follow, and with more downloadable ebooks than we can possibly use. Email marketing still works well in the right niches. And, being more or less free, it still works well enough in some areas where it hardly works at all - a one percent response or less is fine if you can send a million emails at almost no cost.

But when you have a much smaller list to market to, you need a much better response, which means you have to give a lot more thought to your campaign - to your offer and how you present it. That's when you want your response to be in double figures, or better. That's when you need some real expertise on your side.

So, a twenty-four percent response to an email marketing campaign can't help but be pleasing. That was the response we got to our last campaign. So far, about seventy of the roughly two hundred and eighty-odd people we've emailed have signed up for our latest venture. Over thirty of the original two hundred and thirty or so actually attended our first event, despite it being just a week before Christmas. We're almost nervous about inviting any more in case the venue can't cope with the numbers...

What this shows is that we chose the right medium to market our product. Another product might sell better through printed direct mail, yet another by online sales and pay per click. Word of mouth and referrals will almost always work.

But get your offer right, put your message across well and market to the right people, and you can still sell - even in the week before Christmas.

And even by email...

Roy Everitt, Writing For Response.

PS. What you must not do in these circumstances is pay too much attention to the few people who didn't like your marketing method. If it worked, and you got the response you hoped for, that's all the approval you need. Marketing, as someone once said, is a 'numbers business'.