Email Marketing: What's Your Email Bait?

Email marketing probably offers some of the best ROI in the business. It's inexpensive, it's immediate, and it's effective.

And that's the problem.

Because it's so easy to do, everyone's doing it. There's an estimated gazillion email newsletters out there, competing for your prospects' time and attention.

Unless you can give visitors a compelling reason to subscribe to your newsletter they won't. A free ezine is no longer enough. You need to include some "email bait."

Too often I find sites that offer email newsletters with "enticing" come-ons like, "Sign up for our email newsletter," or "Join Our Mailing List." It begs the question, "why?"

Our bait are articles only available to our subscribers that would be interesting to small business owners and entrepreneurs. 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Web Site and The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make are a couple of the titles I've used for email bait.

Before I started offering free articles I received 1 - 2 new subscribers a month; now we average 3 - 4 per day.

For some of our clients the appropriate bait has proved to be free t-shirt giveaways or access to special diagnostic surveys. Whatever you choose as your bait, make sure it's compelling to your target audience.

I could give away free tickets to the New England Patriots, but that's only going to appeal to a small segment of my target audience (those with good taste) and will also attract a lot of people who won't be interested in our email newsletter our our Web site design services.

By the way, if you're still searching for a good email service provider, we're very happy with Constant Contact.

Rich Brooks
What's On Your Hook?

Tags: Newsletter Marketing | Email Newsletters | Internet Marketing

Comments

[Email Delivery]

I remember someone telling that a good bait would be the word FREE :)

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