Debbie Mayo-Smith: Eight great email marketing strategies

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1. Mate, all I need is your email address

I want to send you my email marketing material. I don't care where you live, how old you are, what company you work for or what your interests are. I just wanna sell, sell, sell to you. Of course those people outside of my location are interested in my products and services. Even if I don't work or sell over there.

2. Email is so easy. I think I'll send another. And another.......

And another. Wow, this email is great! I can send out as many marketing emails as I want and it costs me NOTHING!!!! My clients would love to hear from me more often, and all about my products and services.

3. Decide against launching an online newsletter.

"Heck, why do I want to waste my time adding value and education my customers and prospects? Why would I want to develop a relationship with them? It sounds like too much work to me. I really only want to sell! Sell! Sell! Sell to them.

4. I'll just email everyone in my address book.

Whoops. How did so many people get in there 2 or 3 times? Who cares? Whoops - they just reported me for spamming. Why? They once sent me an email didn't they?

5. Ignore subject lines.

Why shouldn't I write whatever I want? Why should I waste my time trying to be clever and imaginative? Why would I want to catch peoples' attention? They'll open the email. Why they know it's from me!!!

And who cares that only 35 character spaces will view in their Inbox? It's my email so they'll absolutely click it open to see the whole thing anyway.

6. It's my email. Mine. Mine. Mine.

I want to talk about me. ME. ME. ME!!! Me and my company are so interesting aren't we?

7. I'll have them click through to my website homepage.

Why bother directing them exactly to what I'm talking about. They'll hunt and search for the article / product/ sale item for sure.

8. I'll just PDF my print newsletter for online use

'Oh I just love my print newsletter. The pictures and graphics and formatting are oh so nice. So what if it's 600K? It looks cool and I want to keep it that way for my website and email'.

'What? the average consumer probably doesn't have Acrobat reader. And if they do - if they don't have the latest version (the one my PDF is created in) it won't open? So what. It's okay. They'll download it so they can read my newsletter'.

* Written by international speaker and bestselling author Debbie Mayo-Smith. For more tips, over 500 how-to articles visit Debbie's article webpage.