heartharmony.com.au

Hi again

When businesses start out, they often want to use email to promote sales, publicise events or just keep in touch with clients. Fantastic – exactly what it is designed to do!

But … there are a few common mistakes newcomers to email marketing make.

1. Addresses – You see a dirty great long list of everyone’s names and email addresses in the To section. Aside from the privacy problems with this (remember you are not permitted to share email addresses from your list without explicit consent), you leave yourself open to sharing viruses between computers. All it will take is for one person on your list to have a virus and it suddenly is broadcast throughout the list of names. Put all names in the BCC section if you are not using a merged email through Word or a formal auto-responder/broadcast program.
2. Subject lines - They are all about “ME” and not about the person reading the email. Subject lines are teasers to make people want to open your emails. (And don’t include hyperlinks in your email – spam filters will generally eat your email).
3. MASSIVE attachments – Most email servers won’t accept attachments over about 3MB. Even if your attachment is 3MB, people on dial up with curse you as it will take ages to download. Save your attachment as a PDF. The free way to do this is use a program like Cute PDF Writer. Save it to your hard drive and just hit print and select Cute PDF = Instant PDF document.
4. Accidental spamming - You meet someone and then add them to your mailing list. Right? Wrong! Just because you met someone at a networking event doesn’t mean they have consented to going on your email data-base. You need to know the Spam Act and comply with it. Speaking about Spam, here are some notes I put together a few years back about Spam Act and small business – yes it is a PDF!

As your list grows it pays to invest in an auto-responder/broadcast program. Choose wisely – as if you move your list to another package in later years all of your subscribers need to resubscribe to comply with spam regulations – you can see a massive list drop by 2/3 in that transition.

Think about what else you may need later on – shopping carts, affiliate programs, whatever. You can put different solutions, but it is easier to find the solution that can grow with you as you grow.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff
Heart Harmony