How You Use Email Will Determine How Successful You Are 


 
Sending out emails is a vital component of running a subscription website.

 
It is used for making sales, keeping members loyal and making site administration easy. Put a great deal of effort into automating as much of the email distribution and monitoring as possible. It will make your life much easier in the long run.
 

It will be used for:
 
 
  • Marketing to New Prospects Using an Email newsletter.
 
The best way to keep people in touch with your business is to send them a regular email. To turn an email into compulsive reading, it should contain valuable information that is well targeted at the audience. It should also contain a list of new content only available to subscribers. This will help convert free email readers into paying subscribers.
 

This is a simple example of an email newsletter that has been proven to work. Feel free to copy the format:
 
“This is an opt-in email from Business Ideas Report (www.businessideasreport.com). If it was sent to you in error, please click here to unsubscribe.
 
Dear Mr Jennings
 
Here is a hot tip from the money-saving team at Business Ideas Report.
 
If you open an account with Call 18866 (www.call18866.com) you should be able to reduce your annual phone bill by 50%. The average BT sole trader phone bill in the UK was £1,225 per year. That is an average saving of over £600.
 
If you sign up for this service, make sure you are on the lowest tariff there is from BT, which currently is £11 per month.
 
Other articles that our members will be reading this month are:
 
o        Six Ways to Make a Living Using a £200 Digital Camera
o        Create a six-figure income from eBay with zero capital
o        The insider's guide to optimising Google Adwords
 
Regards
Peter Smith
Editor
 
 
  • A Content Reminder Email to Members.
 
At the end of every month, you should send an email to all your members (unless they have specifically opted out) that provides a list of all the articles that have been added to the site during the previous month. This is to encourage them to keep coming back to the site, so at the end of the year they will want to renew their membership. The email can be similar to the example above.
 
 
  • Auto Responder Emails
 
If your prospects or members ever make contact with your company through your site, they should automatically get a response to explain what action they can expect and when. The instances where an auto response should be sent out include:
 
  •  
    • When a query is sent via the “Contact Us” form
    • When a member signs up
    • When a new password is requested
    • When a site visitor fills in a feedback form
 
This capability is a common application that can be easily added to a site. Most good subscription website software and managed services have an auto responder capability built in. If it is not included, you can integrate the application from a company like Aweber (www.aweber.com)
 
 
Why You Should Avoid Doing Email Newsletters Yourself
 
Email spammers have largely deemed email as a useful and constructive business tool. Internet service providers have put in place dozens of filters and firewalls to try and eliminate spam. But in doing so, many honest businesses with opt-in email customers are being persecuted. If your email address is blacklisted by an ISP, they can also track back your IP address to your server and blacklist your website.
 
Once your email address and server are blacklisted, it is a stressful, time consuming process to get them reinstated. This process can take weeks. Indeed, you may not discover you have been blacklisted until customers start to complain about not receiving emails from you.
 
Blacklisting is fairly indiscriminate. AOL is one of the worst ISP’s for blacklisting emails with very little justification.
 
This is why we strongly recommend that you use a professional email company to manage your email newsletters. It is not expensive (from $19 a month) and can save you a huge amount of hassle. The companies that we have used are listed below, but there are several hundred providers of these services: