All internet marketers should use autoresponder marketing. It is easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to find a new one. Creating an email series requires some time and effort, but once it is up and running, all you have to do is sit back and watch. The whole process should be automated as much as possible.

What you basically need to do with your autoresponder marketing program is setting up an email series to be sent to your subscribers. Once they subscribed, they should receive a welcome email, with some information about your business, products or services. Then every days or weeks, they should receive other emails, in which you provide them with valuable content.

Autoresponder marketing is great for building a relationship with your list. If you email people with valuable content, on a regular basis, they are more likely to read your emails, and ultimately purchase your products or the products you promote. Building a list is not only about size but also conversion. Autoresponder marketing is one of the most effective ways to make money online. It is a proven technique and remains among internet marketers and home business owners.

Here are some tips: Send short, eye-catching emails to your subscribers with a short description and a link to a page of your website. Offer a free trial of your product to your prospects and send them instructions to make use of the trial through the autoresponder. When the free trial ends, you will want to follow up with the potential customers to get them to buy because you now have their email addresses. Offer training to your affiliates if you run an affiliate program because this is a great way to offer them value. The affiliates who are marketing your product will always be on the lookout for ways to improve, and when you automate everything you will get maximum results, as long as your training offers value. Your affiliates can be trained in a variety of ways when you make use of an autoresponder. Write reviews about products in the target market and deliver them to your list through the autoresponder. You will be providing value to your subscribers and at the same time making a commission from the sales you generate when someone buys the product through your affiliate link. When someone buys one of your products, you then follow up the purchase with an offer for a second product. The second product could be another of yours, or it could be an affiliate promotion. Use your autoresponders to conduct simple polls. Use your autoresponders to deliver training courses. Use your autoresponders to deliver a “rate card” for advertising on your website.

Email marketing does not have to be difficult; however you need to stay with it to reap the benefits and achieve long term results. Remember the money is in the relationship with your email list, not in the email list itself.

*Did You Know?  Autoresponders can be divided into two categories:  an outsourced ASP model — these autoresponders operate on the provider’s infrastructure and are usually configurable via a web-based control panel and server-side which enables users to install the autoresponder system on their own server.

The knowledgeable email marketers have auto responder accounts. The majority of them act as an affiliate selling other people’s products and services online. Auto responders are instrumental in paving the way for better conversion rates. The secret of an auto responder consists in sending back the response automatically to the sender by incorporating your own business in it. Most Internet marketers have separate auto responder accounts. By building relationships with your subscribers you can promote your products or services to targeted customers and generate repeat sales.

Here are some advantages to using email marketing and auto responders:

1. Turn anonymous website visitors into subscribers — Auto responder software allows you to create signup forms on your websites or blogs. Visitors who are interested in your website’s content will “opt-in” through the signup form and become your subscribers.

2. Build relationship with subscribers — Once website visitors become your subscribers, you can build relationship with them. You can send promotions, newsletters, etc. about your products or services anytime.

3. Promote your products or services to targeted subscribers — The reason why website visitors want to become your subscribers is because they are interested in your content, or the products and services you offer. You need to concentrate your email marketing efforts and convert your subscribers to customers.

4. Set up a series of automated follow-up email campaigns — By using the auto responder software, you can automate the sequence of your personalized messages or pre-set a series of email sales campaigns to be sent to your subscribers. Statistics show prospects take several exposures to an offer before they make their buying decision.

5. Ensure good email deliverability — Strong ESPs establish solid relationships with all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure good email deliverability. Therefore, every email you send has a high probability to be delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

6. Brand yourself with HTML emails – Most auto responder software allows you to send HTML emails. You can stand out when you use HTML email promotions, by including images and your logo to brand yourself. This will help you grab the attention of your subscribers who read your emails and increase your click through rate.

7. Duplication – Many email marketers operate numerous businesses online. They run several of them simultaneously with a similar follow-up email campaign model. They duplicate their first successful follow-up email campaign model into their auto responder software, so they can use this same approach in new markets. This is because they tested which of their follow-up email campaign models work and which ones do not.

In email marketing, auto responder software plays an important role in building your list. Your email list is basically your database of potential and existing customers. Building a list is a vital step towards building your successful business.

*Did You Know — The first auto responders were created within mail transfer agents that found they could not deliver an email to a given address. These created bounce messages such as “your email could not be delivered because…”.

1. The DMA (Direct marketing Association) places email marketing’s ROI for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested. The figure for 2012 is predicted to be $39.40, when email will account for $67.8 billion in sales.
2. 72% of respondents to an Econsultancy survey in early 2011 described email’s ROI as excellent or good.
3. In a 2011 Focus survey of marketers, the channel cited most often as the best performer over the previous 12 months was email.
4. The ForeSee Results report on the effectiveness of social media recently found that promotional emails were the second biggest influence on retail website visits.
5. In Datran Media’s Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 39.4% of industry executives said the advertising channel that performed strongest for them was email.
6. When asked about their 2012 digital marketing budget priorities, only paid search was cited more often by retailers than email.
7. A late 2011 survey of US small businesses found over a third using email to advertise or promote their business.
8. 51% of small businesses surveyed by Zoomerang in 2011 use email marketing. Only websites were a more popular digital marketing tool.
9. 68% of small businesses surveyed in mid-2011 by Pitney Bowes listed email as their preferred marketing channel.
10. Forrester’s recent survey of US marketers found 88% of B2C firms and 71% of B2B organizations using email marketing.

• You should sign up for competitors’ email programs. It is important to see how they are messaging their Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers in advance of the big day. Closely monitor their emails throughout the sales period to see if their promotions are becoming more aggressive. Here is a valid suggestion – when reviewing the email marketing blasts of competitors try to open and not click, click and not purchase, and even purchase from the emails to see if the mailing frequency or promotions change.
• Know where to get your results. You should monitor your results on the day you send. Do a trial run for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday mailing to make sure you understand the immediate trends for your mailings.
• Make sure your team understands the importance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to your business. Discuss the expectations for availability over the Thanksgiving weekend and rest of holiday season.
• Make sure you have a back-up plan. Select additional products and price points you can offer and prepare your ecommerce platform with secondary coupon codes or discounts. This could save you hours.
• Valuable time and revenue can be lost if you need to make creative revisions during peak hours. Marketers can make quick adjustments to segments and deploy a mailing, but making creative changes can take hours to turnaround. You do not want to find yourself in a creative bottleneck, so prepare email creative alternatives in advance.
• Have a re-mailing strategy included in your plan. Customers will have a significant spike in the amount of email in their inbox so make sure you have a calculated approach to your re-mailing.  This will help decrease abuse complaints and unsubscribes which in turn could help avoid some blocking issues.  One method is to build segments based on engagement.
• Sending a creative variation, changes in your call-to-action, etc. is great for subscribers who have shown they are engaged but did not see anything in the email that made them interested enough to click through.
• Target your clickers who have not purchased –this is your most engaged subscriber. They were not only interested enough to open your email but also clicked. Something happened before checkout that made them abandon the purchase. This audience will be the one to go after.  Make sure you use a subject line and creative that drives to purchase. In addition to featuring your promotion, reference customer service information, your return policy, and shipping options and deadlines.

In other words, you need to become a trusted sender, so you can email market successfully.

Here are some rules to succeed with Email Marketing:

Give them what they want– Before you start sending emails to your database remember how or why someone opted-in to your email list. Did you promise them something? If you have not yet delivered on your promise you should do that before trying to sell them anything. Provide information along with the promotions you are offering. Send some emails which only contain information. This can assist you in increasing consumer confidence and more importantly, consumer loyalty.

Design your Email Format so it is Simple and Concise — Consumers read their emails EVERYWHERE – on their computers, phones, even televisions. You must keep this in mind when developing your email. You want your emails to be clean and easy to read. HTML emails look great but many people do not read their emails in a format that will retain the formatting. Though you can still use this format you want to make sure the email will be easy to read and follow if they do not receive it in an HTML format. Keep your emails short and remember most people scan a message. Highlight the most important aspects of your email and remember less is more.

Provide an Opt-Out Option– Give your database the option to opt-out. People will appreciate when you do not hold their email address captive. If you do, you will lose their confidence and loyalty.

Now that we have reviewed some rules, let us discuss the next steps you need to climb to move forward with your email marketing efforts:

Devote time each week– Observe a webinar about subscriptions; consumers who have unsubscribed; bounces; statistics – i.e. opens and clicks; and utilizing social media.

Decide your frequency — We suggest sending at least one message monthly or multiple newsletters if you promote more than one service. You also should send promotional messages offering a discount.

Isn’t it time to include a sign-up form on your website — You need to collect new subscribers.

Grab their attention — Design a new template for your email marketing campaigns.

Develop relevant content in your messages — Continue sending your materials, announcements, or promotions with consistent frequency. When your list grows, you will notice increased traffic which should produce increased sales.

Add a line similar to the following to the top of your emails –

Don’t Forget to ADD yourcompanyname@here TO YOUR ADDRESS BOOK to guarantee future deliveries to your inbox.

*Did You Know– Spammers can purchase lists legally and illegally. When you sign up for a website or a service make sure you read the privacy policy carefully to find out what the site plans to do with your email address.

Do you know who your best prospects are? What their purchasing cycles are? What their triggers are? If not you must find out!

Email marketers have been embracing social media for the past year using elements to connect with brands on Facebook and Twitter, in email campaigns. Email and social media are the top methods marketers worldwide expect to increase in their budgets, for 2011.

The biggest challenge for email marketers will be a lack of resources and staff, which is the same problem affecting social media marketers.

Email and social media will continue to get closer as more marketers integrate the two mediums with each other. As marketers continue to bring the two tactics together, their approach will become more sophisticated.

The chances of getting any response from a single email are rare. Factor in the quality of your content, your audience, and your tracking methods — and it can be nearly impossible.

Here are some helpful tips:

Integrate Your Email Marketing with Your Social Media Campaigns

The Social Media Marketing trend is not going, so social media as a way for businesses to broaden and improve your email marketing.

Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Mobile

Mobile devices should definitely influence your email campaign strategy. That means keeping images small and not using too many of them and keeping text short and to the point.

Engage Readers

If you want people to read what you send and respond to your call-to-action, you need to engage them. Grab them with a question or promotion. You can establish a dialogue by asking your readers to answer a question or to participate in events on Facebook or your company website.

Keep things Focused and Brief

Make sure you provide interesting and concise content. Have an objective, as well as a clear call- to-action. Do not try to accomplish too much with a single email campaign.

Keep the Design Simple

Promote your brand, but do not include too many images, because readers will get inundated and disregard your message.

You do want to make sure your email campaigns are well-designed, however do not let them distract the reader from your message. Provide links instead of inserting video clips.

Prepare Effective Email Campaigns

Remember you need to plan your email marketing campaign, for the entire year. Your business could benefit from email marketing during down times.

Discover What is Working by Tracking Campaigns

Be sure to enlist a provider who can track and provide analytics to determine which email campaigns were successful and which ones failed.

Social media has transformed the way the business world communicates. Make sure your readers have a reason and the ability to share your content. Your email campaigns are not a just a sales pitch or informational anymore, they are now a conversation. So, ask your audience to participate.  Ask you audience for feedback.

You can always become a better communicator. The influence of social media makes email marketing more personal, so embrace this fact and get started today!

*Did You Know– Facebook now has 50% of the words social media ad revenue at $1.76 billion in 2010, that’s up 165% from 2009.

1. The emergence of Cyber Sunday– In an effort to get a jump on Cyber Monday, when inboxes are extremely crowded, a growing number of retailers began sending their campaigns on November 29th last year – Cyber Sunday — particularly after 5 p.m. EST.

Interestingly, the Sunday before Cyber Monday saw an increase in email, as 45% of retailers sent at least one promotional email last year versus 36% the previous year. That made last November 29th the biggest Sunday ever for retail email marketing.

2. Growing comfort with the term “Cyber Monday.” While the percentage of retailers sending email on Cyber Monday crept up only slightly, the number of retail emails referring to Cyber Monday by name increased 54 percent last year compared to the previous. Retailers are becoming more comfortable with the term and confident consumers recognize the term, thanks to media coverage.

3. More of a buildup to Black Friday. In addition to the large increase in the number of retailers sending promotional emails on the actual Black Friday, retailers promoted Black Friday in their emails more vigorously and much earlier. During the four weeks leading up to November 27th last year, the number of retail emails referencing Black Friday rose 96 percent last year compared to 2008.

The volume of email marketing messages sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday hit an all-time high last year. However, according to email vendors, message deliverability was an issue for marketers.

According to the Retail Email Blog, which is run by Smith-Harmon, 71% of major online retailers sent at least one promotional email on Cyber Monday, up 1% from the previous year. On Black Friday, 69% of major online retailers sent at least one promo message, which was up from 59% in 2008.

The large volume of email challenged deliverability. Almost one in four email marketing messages were not delivered to recipients’ inboxes on Cyber Monday, meaning that 76% of retail emails made it to the inbox.

Deliverability was at its lowest on Cyber Monday from 8 to 9 am and noon to 1 pm, when the largest volumes of mail were slowing down ISPs.

Another factor in the drop in delivery rate comes from mailing to inactive names, or recipients who have not opened an email in more than six months.

ComScore reported that consumers spent $887 million online on November 30th (Cyber Monday last year), up 5% from 2008′s Cyber Monday and matching the heaviest online spending day on record.

So, consumers are readying themselves for the biggest online shopping day of the year and gaining insight into the latest and greatest deals being offered online.

Here were some 2009 trends of the busiest online shopping day of the year:

1.  More retailers were offering exclusive deals last Cyber Monday than in years past. According to research, 87.1 percent of retailers had a special promotion for Cyber Monday.

2.  Mobile Commerce was predicted to have a major impact on Cyber Monday sales due to the increasing popularity of the smart phones. Mobile Commerce likely influenced consumer decisions since it gave users the ability to comparison shop, place orders, and guaranteed in-store pick-up.

3.  Exclusive online discounts were deeper than years past. Retailers such as offered as much as 50 percent off select merchandise.

4.  Retailers were offering free shipping as an incentive for customer to buy online.

The 2010 Holiday Season is upon us and there is an abundance of predictions based on activity, from previous years.  Here are some for 2010:

1. Social and rich-media campaigns will not get much traction after mid-November.

2. Discount codes will become more prominent in pre-header messages and subject lines.

3. “Share with your network” functionality will be used more strategically.

4. Designing mobile-friendly email is more important than ever.

5. At least 50% of retailers will send an email on Thanksgiving Day and at least 70% will on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Signup for Emercury today and begin benefitting from email marketing today. Refer a retail business before Black Friday and earn double the referral fee.

*Did You Know – Sales tracking firms (who represent 500 major retailers) reported that online sales were up 14% above Cyber Monday 2008.

It is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol – a protocol for sending email messages between servers. Most email systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an email client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your email application.

It is the easiest and fastest way to get email from one place to another. Once you transmit your mail to the SMTP server, it will be sending it out. If some failures occur, it will be trying again and again. Since the real SMTP server is constantly connected to the Internet, it can try resending its failures at any time. As a result, you do not have to worry about failed recipients. If you send direct, you will have to resend to the temporarily failed recipients several times to make sure all the addresses are covered.

What does this mean as far as my email is concerned?

Let us look at the way this all works. Email is composed and read in an email client. This is the part of the process that is most familiar to you. If you want to read mail you click Check Mail, New Mail, or something similar and new messages show up in your Inbox. To send mail you click Compose or Write and the client gives you a compose window where you write your message. When you are done you click Send and the message gets sent.

The “Client” part of the term email client refers to the fact that this software requires the help of a Server to do its job. The client takes care of making the mail useful to you but the servers are the ones that actually move the mail around. Think of the client as your desk (or wherever you store and compose paper based mail) and the servers as the postal service.

First, your client must locate a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol server to send mail through. This will generally be provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or the host for the domain the email address belongs to. The client knows how to find this server because the server’s name or IP address was entered in the client’s configuration for the sending address.

Passing the message to the SMTP server is roughly equivalent to walking a letter down to the corner post box and dropping it in. As far as you are concerned it is sent.  Similarly, after passing the message to the sending SMTP server, your email client will say something like “Message sent successfully” because at that point its job is done.

One major difference between the mailing a letter and sending an email message is that an email message can have multiple recipients. If you want to send many copies of a letter using snail mail you have to make many copies and address a lot of envelopes. With email you just use one envelope with a lot of addresses.

After the SMTP server accepts the message from your client it works its way through all of the recipients (everyone with a “To:” or a “Cc:” or a “Bcc:”) and tries to deliver the message to each one. This is where the Domain Naming System (DNS) and specifically Mail Exchanger (MX) Records come in. The sending SMTP server has to consult the DNS MX records for each recipient’s domain to find out where to send the message. This is similar to your local post office sorting your letters for delivery to your local post office.

Nearly all SMTP relay servers on the Internet restrict access to their own users. In most cases, SMTP relay servers allow access based on the IP address of the email client. On the other hand, some SMTP relay servers require authentication with a user name and password. No matter how authentication is done, it is easy to use an SMTP relay server as long as permission has been granted.

Did You Know? Many Internet service providers use DNSBLs (DNS-based Blocking Lists) to disallow mail from open relays. Once a mail server is detected or reported that allows third parties to send mail through them, they will be added to one or more such lists, and other email servers using those lists will reject any mail coming from those sites. The relay need not actually be used for sending SPAM to be blacklisted.

Internet communication studies have revealed that social networks and Facebook in particular, are replacing email as the most popular way to stay in touch with friends.  96% of respondents regularly use Facebook to connect with friends, followed by text messaging at 93% and email at 91%.However,email is still the primary communications tool for work and office related communications. Email also is where people receive their receipts and confirmations for online purchases. People do go into their inboxes, daily, to transact in non-personal ways. People are still able to receive, and often are receptive to, your email marketing campaigns.

One of the most imperative reasons to continue, (or begin), your email marketing program is because of the increased viability of direct response marketing via email versus via social networks. How users behave in both environments is different. In an email environment the user is participating in a solo activity with no other distractions. He or she can review your email and be directed to clicking links or taking other actions. Users are absorbing and responding to your message. In a social network environment, it is more difficult to generate direct response actions or sales. Social media users become action takers rather than one who reads your message.  Social media users move on to the next opportunity to interact with other social network users, which is time consuming and takes longer to result in action.

A few short years ago people believed MySpace would last forever. Today, MySpace is struggling with revenue and much of its user base has migrated to other social networks. Moving your profile and following from one social network to another is not challenging. As soon as their friends and contacts start to do it, users will do the same. We believe that nobody will ever abandon Facebook or Twitter, but that does not mean another option, using better technology, will not come along. When it does, you will need to build your social network audience from scratch. On the other hand, while people do change email addresses, they do so infrequently and often keep the same email addresses for years. Once you have an email database, you have a more reliable and long term method of contacting users.

There has not been a social network that has proven it can withstand a decade of use, but many email providers have. Do not abandon your email list unless you are willing to take the risk regarding having your social networking strategy impacted negatively by advancing technology. However, the fact that’s users spend less time in their inbox than they used to will impact your email marketing campaigns, so you will need to focus on certain things to make email marketing in the social networking era work.

Inboxes are crowded, and users will want to quickly clear them out. You must send out compelling offers. Make sure you segment your list, study what offers your users respond to, and then send the best offers when using your email campaigns.

Because inboxes are more crowded deleting email without even reading it has become more common. Make sure you spend time and effort on your subject line. You are competing with more email for fewer resources. The subject line is the most important step in the process.

There was a time when people would scan their SPAM or junk folders. This is not the case anymore, so you must make sure your sender reputation is clear and your messages are reaching the inbox.

Social networks are not replacing email, but they are altering the way email should be used. Make sure your email strategy responds accordingly. Send quality, relevant, targeted emails to clean-lists. You will discover that email still works best for R.O.I. purposes.

The first step to getting started with email marketing, whether it is your primary method of customer contact or in combination with a social network strategy, is to choose a superior email marketing manager.

*Did You Know– 64% of decision-makers view emails on mobile devices. By ensuring your newsletter is accessible and readable on mobile devices you will increase your reader base and stand out as a marketer who adapts to changing environments

Even though a 100% inbox delivery on an email campaign is 100% fictional due mainly to temporary errors and soft bounces, it is possible to secure your email delivery through a few steps.

Here is a checklist, of requirements, which should help you to reach near 100% email deliverability:

1 – Do you have enough dedicated IPs?
Your ID when broadcasting newsletters is usually based on the couple IP/Domain.
Some ISPs and webmails limit either the number of hourly or daily number of emails to be received from an IP. You therefore need to have sufficient IPs according to the volume of emails sent to these ISPs.
Sharing your IPs with other senders might get you into troubles should the other senders send poor campaigns.
It is also necessary to build your own sender reputation always using the same IPs and slowly getting the ISPs’ confidence.

2 – Are your Domain Key/DKIM and SPF correctly configured?
Yahoo! and Hotmail use the Domain Key (or recently DKIM) and SPF to identify sender domains. Having an accurately set ID will help you build up a solid reputation.

3 – Is your reverse DNS working correctly?
Most of the email receiving servers query the reverse DNS to see who is sending, so you need to make sure your reverse DNS is correctly set before email blasting.

4 – Are your email headers correctly set?
There’s a few things to know when email blasting, Gmail for example asks for “precedence=bulk” to be stated in the email header.

5 – Do you use double optin in your newsletter subscription process?
Double optin is the only way to make sure of two things:
a) the user wants to register for your newsletter
b) the real owner of the email went through the proper process of subscribing.

6 – Do you have a simple and efficient unsubscribe process?
With the SPAM complaint button easily accessible, in every email, you need to have a simple unsubscribe process.
The more complicated the unsubscribe process is, the more likely the user will click on the SPAM complaint button.
For the same exact reason you want to take every unsubscribe request into account ASAP, any email received after the user having unsubscribe is a potential complaint to the ISP.

7 – Do you correctly identify complainers and remove them systematically from upcoming email blasts?
Several ISPs provide email senders with feedback loops. These feedback loops are useful to measure the perception users have of your newsletter and of course to stop sending to complainers.

8 – Do you sometimes check for inactive profiles and remove them from your list?
An email that has not reacted (opened) on any email sent to him/her for a long time should probably be removed from your list; it is likely you will never get any benefit from sending to this person. You probably pay a fee to send emails to this user, and you also take the risk of this email being a SPAM trap.

9 – Do you avoid SPAM words, special characters and ALL CAPS in your subject lines?
Part of the email filtering is made on the email content itself. You therefore need to check your email subject line for common SPAM words. It is preferable to avoid special characters such as $, £, % or accents and avoid using too many capital letters.

10 – Is the Image/Text ratio correct in your email?
One of the most common technique Spammers use to bypass content based email filters is to use images instead of plain text. Having only images in the email you blast can make the ISPs suspicious and sometimes lead to false positives – (i.e. legitimate emails being blocked by filters).

11 – Is your HTML code orderly?
One important thing when sending an email to users is to have a clean HTML code. The first reason being all webmails, browsers, and email readers might deal with your bad HTML in different ways, and therefore your email might be displayed incorrectly on several of them.
The second reason is the SPAM filters are likely to block poorly coded emails.

12 – Do you monitor your marketing pressure on your subscribers?
When people subscribe to your newsletter it is recommended you tell them how often you will send emails to them, even if the time of year is special (sales periods, holidays, etc.) you need to make sure you do not over communicate with your subscribers. If you do not you might see an increase in your unsubscribe and complaint rates.

Did you Know? In general, a delivery rate of 80% or more is considered satisfactory; 90% is very good. You will never achieve a 100% delivery rate, as there will always be a few soft bounces (full email boxes) and hard bounces (invalid email addresses) on your list. Keep in mind that this figure does not factor in the emails that are automatically sent to the recipient’s junk folder.