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If you run a weekly or monthly newsletter then you want to get the best results possible from your efforts. If you sell ad placement in your newsletter, you will want to test the placement of those ads for maximum exposure for your advertisers. Many people make the mistake of what I call set and send. They setup their newsletter, do not bother tweaking it and just send it out. Some go as far as to not even test the results of the newsletter, they are happy to just have people subscribing to it. Here I will break down a few key components and show you what you can change to help maximize the effectiveness of your newsletter.

Split Testing Subject Lines

This one is not as important as the others on this list, your subscribers know you are going to send them something every week or every month. Make it visible that this is your “Company X Newsletter For The Week Of/Month Of”. These people willing subscribed to receive your newsletter, so in most cases stating that this is your newsletter that will be enough to have them open and read it.

Split Testing Your Ad Placement

This is important not only for your advertisers, but for you as well. You want your advertisers to sign up to advertise with you again to make you some extra money. You should be testing your ad size in your email newsletter to see which sizes fit best in certain sections. Does a 468×60 get more clicks at the top, middle or bottom of your newsletter? Are the 125×125 ads to bunched up on the side? Try experimenting with a 160×600 vertical banner on either the left or right side of your newsletter.

Some people like to place ads in the middle of the content of their newsletter, this can put some readers off as they wish to continue reading what you wrote and not have to see a huge ad in the middle. Many people might just skip right over the ad and keep reading, you will want to test the CTR of those ads if you decide to place them in the middle of your content.

Split Testing Your Layout

The layout of your newsletter is important for any future success it may have. Some may disagree and say it does not matter on how it looks, it is more about the content it provides. The content is very important, if not the most important thing for your newsletter. The layout however determines how your content is laid out, where your ads or product offers are placed and the colors you use. You want your content to be easily readable and spaced out, cramming your content together makes it harder for the reader and for your messages to clearly stand out. You can also test different color schemes to see which are more appealing to your readers, you can even go as far as to ask them which they like better. This gives you the chance to interact with your readers, get their input and get closer with them.

Split Testing Your Call To Action

Many website owners use a newsletter to further promote their products/services or showcase products that are on sale. Placing your call to action or the message that says “hey click here to buy this” is crucial in not only helping you increase your sales, but to keeping your readers as well. If readers get your newsletter and find it plastered with your call to action over and over again, you will find your readership numbers fall. By placing your call to action in different areas each week, this will give you the stats of which spot produced more clicks and then you can track your sales. If you sell several products on your site, try having a small section of the newsletter devoted to those items with a small thumbnail and name. Viewers will then be able to physically look at those items and it increases the chance of them clicking on it.

In The End

At the end of the day it is truly beneficial for you to test different newsletter to see which changes are making the biggest impact not only for you, but your advertisers. When you have found the best results, you can then sit back and watch how effective an email newsletter can be. You have optimized it to the best of your ability and have increased your chances of more sales and feedback from your readers. Keep the layout clean and always have more content then ads. If you are not offering any ad placement, you can focus on advertising your own products or service to increase your profit stream.

The power of email marketing is a strong tool to have in your internet marketing arsenal.  Sending out newsletter’s is a great way to get more sales, or if you are not selling anything then it is a great way to keep your loyal visitors.  You never know, one day you might want to sell your own product or advertise an affiliate product.  Either one you choose, having your own opt in list is crucial in making or breaking your sales.  Getting the list is not as difficult as you may think, here are a few things you can do to attract more people to your list.

Information That Is Only In Your Newsletter

Put right above or next to your sign up form that by signing up they will receive free weekly/monthly news, information, tips, techniques for whatever your site talks about.  If you run a blog, put in somewhere that this information will only be given out in your newsletter.  This way it motivates the viewer a little more to sign up and see what type of information you are giving away in your newsletter.

Free Ebook

This is still a freebie, however instead of giving them just a newsletter, you are giving them an actual product.  To the viewers it is like getting a free gift from you to them.  Now this ebook does not have to be made by you.  You can purchase ebook’s with resale rights, the only problem with this is the ebooks are used by many other people.  Hire someone to create a small ebook for you, this does not take any time away from you and you still get your ebook for a small fee.  You can check out some of these sites to have someone create the ebook for you.

Getafreelancer.com

Freelancedesigners.org

Scriptlance.com

DigitalPoint.com (Buy/Sell/Trade Section)

One method I learned about is going to a forum that is deals with your niche. Find a few people that have a high number of posts and seem to be very knowledgeable around your niche.  Send them each a PM to see if they will write a short 10-15 page ebook regarding your topic.  $50-$100 later you will have a well written ebook that took you no time to make.  Yes you are spending a little bit of money, but you are saving yourself time and you will make that money back in the future. There are also site like Elance where you can outsource the ebook.  If you have the time and do not mind doing the research, you can always write your own ebook to giveaway.

Discounts and Coupons

If you are running an ecommerce site, this is technique is a must.  Give out coupon or discount codes once a month, this will not only insure more subscribers, but it will lead to a higher sales volume.

Monthly Specials

This is another great technique for an eccommerce site to use in conjunction with giving out discounts and coupons.  You offer special pricing on certain items that only your newsletter subscribers have access to.  When the viewer sees the option to sign up for your newsletter and is the only way to receive monthly specials, more people then you think will sign up.

First Access To New Items

List any new products you have coming out in the coming weeks or months and let the viewers know by signing up to your newsletter they can purchase those items a week in advance.  This gives the viewer that feeling of being special because they will have the opportunity to buy items in advance before anyone else.

By implementing either one, two or all of these techniques, you will be on your way to building a bigger opt in email list.  The key thing is having the traffic coming to your website.  If you do not have any traffic coming to your site, then how to expect people to sign up for your newsletter.  You could even create a landing page for your newsletter and spend some money on a PPC campaign.  For some this might be out of the question, but for others it is another way that truly works.

This post was originally made on Internet Marketing Access

Without a doubt one of the most profitable means of internet marketing is the use of bulk email. Conveying messages to your current customers or potential customers about a new product launch or even discounts is a great way to help boost your sales volume. Bulk email has also been a highly controversial internet marketing method, some people mistake it automatically as spam. There is a difference between the two, bulk email is following all of the legal laws while spamming basically tosses any and even all laws right out of the window. In this post I will discuss what you need to do in order to be CAN SPAM compliant.

1. Email Addresses - This is what will make or break your bulk email marketing campaign, either you have a good list or you have junk. By law you are not allowed to harvest email addresses from any website. You are also not allowed to auto generate your email addresses with the use of a third party program. Examples of auto generated email address would look like:

1. steve@yahoo.com
2. steve@hotmail.com
3. steve@gmail.com
4. steve1@yahoo.com
5. steve1@hotmail.com
6. steve1@gmail.com

These programs can auto fill in random letters and numbers before any domain name you specify. In the end you would not want to send an email to these addresses anyhow because there is a good chance you will a low deliverabilty rate and A LOT of bounce backs. A bounce back is merely an email message that could not be delivered because either the domain name does not exist, the email address at that domain name does not exist or your IP/domain name has been blocked.

In a perfect world you will only want to send your advertisements to people who have opted in to recieve an email from you. This will give you a better chance of receiving less spam complaints then if they were not opted in. You can still get a complaint here and there even with a full opt-in list, sometimes people forgot that they had signed up to receive any emails from you.

2. Subject Lines - Your subject line must be related to the email you are sending. If it is about a new marketing book you are trying to promote, do not use a subject line like “Who Do You Think The Next President Will Be?”. False or misleading subject lines are against the CAN SPAM ACT and can land you in serious legal troubles. Keep the subject aimed at what you are trying to convey to the reader and you will be just fine.

3. Advertisement Warning - If you are trying to sell a product or even tell them about discounts you are offering then either in the subject line or at the top of the message you need to clearly state that this is an advertisement. I suggest using it in a smaller font and centered right above your email body. Using it in the subject line can lose the effect you are trying to get out a good subject line and some ISP filters actually block the word “advertisement” in a subject line.

4. Physical Address - In your message you must list your physical mailing address, this can even be a PO Box if you want to use that instead. You can just put this at the bottom of the message and center it to make your email look more professional.

5. Unsubscribe or Remove Option - A one click unsubscribe or remove request is mandatory in any email message you send. You can have it direct the reader either to a separate landing page where they can simply enter in there email address or you can have them reply to another address to be taken off of your email list. You cannot make the user sign up for anything before giving them an opt-out method, it has to be a one click link. Another rule in regards to a removal request, is you must remove there email address from your mailing list within 10 business day’s of there request. On a final note, when you send an email, your removal request page or email address MUST be active for 30 days. What that means is you cannot send out your emails, then a week later take down your remove page or delete your email account.

6. Fake Headers - This one is a biggie and why most bulk emails you here about getting arrested are caught. An email header is like a label, each email you send out has it’s own unique label so the mail servers know how and where to relay you message to. People try and manipulate these headers in efforts to not get caught and to try and get by any spam filters in place. Using fake headers is another discussion all by itself, so I will go into greater detail for you later this week and show you examples.

7. Valid From Address - By law you are not allowed to send a piece of email using a fake email address. Let’s say your real email address is steve(at)internetmarketingaccess.com, but instead you use steve123(at)gmail.com. Even if you own the other address, you are not allowed to use it as a valid from address unless that is the account/domain name you are truly sending from. People try and use fake email addresses as there return address for mainly two reasons.

1. Get by spam filters. If you are trying to send out hundreds of thousands of emails then chances are the domain name you are sending from will get blacklisted. Thus using a bunch of fake or otherwise different email address can help get around your messages being blocked.
2. Bounce back emails can come in by the thousands if you do not have a valid email list. People who spam do not want to be bothered by dealing with them, so they simply use fake email addresses and never worry about what comes back.

8. Using An Unauthorized Computer - In today’s world you always see stories of hackers who have infected thousands of computers with there virus. In most cases the main purpose of the infection is for them to control your computer to either send out spam emails or for DDOS attacks on another network. These types of infected computers are considered part of a “botnet”, which I will talk about in another post. Using these computers as a mail relay server, spammers are able to send out there junk without having to break a sweat. In the past (late 90’s to early 2000) the use of open SMTP relay’s were popular to use because they were easy to find, free to use and had no limits. You could use these open relays at your own free will because the network administrators did not know they had left there system wide open. Thank goodness for windows security patches and network admins awareness of spam because most of these open relay’s are now closed to the general public.

9. Using Fake Registration Information - If you rent a dedicated server, then it along with every domain name that runs on that server needs to be registered in your name. You can not register a bunch of domains using fake names or physical addresses. I know what you are thinking, “but I use a prepaid credit card to register all of my domain names”. Well to be 100% legal when doing bulk email, then you better register those domains in your name.

10. Using Multiple Accounts - So you have a nice little program that will auto create a bunch of google or yahoo email addresses for you. To match it, you have another program that will auto login to these accounts and start sending out your emails. Sorry to say, that is illegal as hell. You might be thinking that because you are using proxy servers when creating these accounts as well as when you log back in to send them that you are fine. Wrong again, you are advertising something that in the end will always come back to you. It could be a landing page that has affiliate offers on it, or just an email that they have to respond back to for a sales company to call, or worse yet YOUR OWN DAMN WEBSITE. All of it can be traced back to you with ease.

In a nutshell these are the rules you need to follow when considering doing any type of bulk email marketing campaign. If you are already doing one, then you might want to double check what it is you are doing to make sure you comply. You can read the full CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 laws if you do not believe me. Many email marketers think they are above the law or that there campaigns are so small they will not get caught. As the general public gets more and more pissed about spam, they will keep going after people who break the law. Now can you bend the law a little bit, yes you can…

This post was originally made on Internet Marketing Access