By Anthony Braide

Spammers have done their best to give email marketing a bad name. Email is such an all-pervasive communication tool, and its use as an extremely effective means of building customer relationships and selling products and services remains un-dented. Imagine trying to run your business today without access to email - it would be impossible. In fact, surveys have found that the vast majority of internet user's site email as their primary reason for using the internet, despite the spammers' best efforts.

While we are on the subject of spam, here is a quick word to the wise, do not do it!

It is an effective way of upsetting future clients and associating your company, products and services with dodgy Viagra, porn, and scam artists. Most importantly, spam does not work. It is as simple as that.

However, opt-in email marketing is exploding because it does work. Companies are lured to it by incredibly low costs and high response rates. It is easy to get started, and it puts any organization, large or small, on a level playing field.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do anything and the vast majority of email marketers are getting it wrong. The industry is young. Those who are doing well are not falling over themselves to share the secrets of their email marketing success with competitors. However, there is some good news. Unlike conventional direct marketing pieces, email marketing is both cheap and easy to test, and the results can be comparatively easy to collate and analyze.

If that is the case, then why do so many of the marketing emails I receive get just about everything wrong? Why do not the senders never seem to learn from their mistakes?

Learn from your mistakes

The advantage that email marketing has over any other type of marketing is its tractability. Instant, live results from your marketing campaign were a marketers dream just a few, short years ago. Now they are a reality, but not everyone is taking advantage.

Emailing your database from Outlook or using bulk email sending software is usually a waste of time for both you and the recipient. The main reason being, you get little or no feedback, unless a recipient chooses to email you back. True, you can set up a read receipt in Outlook but that only tells you a very small part of the story. Imagine if you could tell, at a glance, who is not interested in your services and really does not want to hear from you again, (do not waste any more of your valuable time on them). Alternatively, who opened your email and read it repeatedly, (wow, those people must really be interested!) Better still, imagine if they clicked directly through to your website and you knew what link they clicked on (you would know exactly what interested them). Useful stuff like that!

Fortunately, all that information is easy to obtain if you use a good email-marketing tool like www.livewirecampaign.co.uk rather than Outlook. There might be a learning curve of a few days, but it is worth it, to make your emails 100% more effective, right?

With this kind of marketing intelligence you can really start to harness the power of email, because email can give you something special - instant, live, two-way communication from every address you deliver. That is right, every single one. Even emails that bounce back tell you something - it's likely those addresses are dead and you need to update your database. If you are getting 20% opens and only 22% reads, then you know something about your email is not connecting with your recipients. If it was; they would be reopening the email to re-read it or show it to the boss, so you would be getting a much higher percentage of 'reads' to 'opens'.

With this kind of in-depth information, you can begin to learn from what you are getting right and what you are getting wrong. You can begin to mould your campaigns and target your messages. Improve your response rates and follow up on click throughs. In essence, learn from your mistakes and find out what works for you.

To start you on the right track, here are five tried and tested ways of improving the effectiveness of your emails.

1. Keep your subject lines short and to the point. Longer than 40 characters and they will be cut off by many email clients. Do not use words like OFFER or FREE or exclamation marks for emphasis!!! You will be relegated to the spam folder.

2. Keep it simple stupid. Do not make your emails too long or try to cram in to many offers. You have got a second or so to grab your readers' attention so keep it concise.

3. Let your readers know what to do next. Put a clear call to action on your email; use a link to your website or your telephone number, big and bold.

4. Make it time limited. Putting a deadline on your email proves to increase response rates. Make it clear to your recipients that if they snooze they loose!

5. Time it right. Do not send your email at 10'o'clock on a Monday morning when everyone is manic. It is going to get deleted. Timing is everything so choose a time of day when your recipient will be more receptive.

Pay close attention to just these five rules and I guarantee you will improve your response rates. Good luck and remember the power of email marketing; customer knowledge!

Anthony Braide is Managing Director of Gencia Media Ltd, makers of http://LiveWireCampaign.co.uk

LiveWire Campaign is a UK Company that gives you access to free email marketing to you clients and candidates. No need to pay for expensive software, just create your free account and start your first campaign today. Send a campaign to up to 50 recipients per month free. Purchase a unique Pay-as-you-go voucher if you need to send more.

Visit the website at http://www.LiveWireCampaign.co.uk or call 01565 641481 and speak to an Email Marketing Specialist.