Writing Effective E-mail Messages
Most people who buy our horse horse have been in business for quite some time. It would not be too big of an assumption to think that many of you have been using e-mail with your business for some time now. But, if you have not used e-mail this module will give you a good lesson on how to properly use it in helping to market your equine business.
The use of e-mail in your business is extremely important and it is probably a tool that you have been using that has been greatly overlooked. One of the things we would like to stress with the Horse Course is that you need to pay attention to many things that you did not think where that important when it comes to marketing your business. Many times there are overlooked avenues of marketing that are very cheap yet super effective.
E-mail - The Basics
One of the features of almost any e-mail program is the signatures feature also referred to as the "Sig" file. This is a block of information that is usually at the bottom of your e-mail messages that is usually about three to six lines long. It usually contains information about the person who wrote the e-mail such as name, address, phone number and even a repeat of your e-mail address. Here is what a typical e-mail signature usually looks like:
Sincerely,
Mark T. Ellis
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Horse Course
http://learnhub.com/redirect?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.horsecourse.com
3836 Walhampton Drive
Lexington, Ky 40517
" How to Make Money with Your Equine Business"
Come to our site for free articles on how to market your horse related business!
____________________________________________________________
You'll notice a couple things about my signature. First of all, I included my Web address (also known as URL) in our signature file. You want to make sure that your customers and potential customers know exactly where to find your web site at. One of the things that we would normally put into our signature file would be our telephone number for our business. It is been the experience of our staff that talking to people live on the phone, when necessary, is vitally important and should not be overlooked. If your business has become so great, that you cannot talk your customers or find the time to talk your customers, then you need to hire an answering service to handle this load. People crave personal contact and you want to create every opportunity for your clients and customers to be able to talk to a real-live human.
You'll also notice that the bottom that we put in a tagline briefly summing up what our business is all about and underneath that we put an offer for people to come to our web site to get free articles. The more free stuff that you can effectively give away without hurting your bottom line or your profits, the more people will come to your site and try to do business with you.
A wonderful thing about most of the free e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo's e-mail system, is that whenever you type in a URL, which is your Web address, then it automatically creates the link for people to click on. So when people get your e-mail through one of these free accounts or even your own system, they will be able to click on your URL and immediately go to your web site. Surveys have concluded that people who include the link of this kind at the bottom of their e-mail system has a much greater chance of getting people to go to their web site and do business with them.
Let's Get Creative!
There are all sorts of cool methods of utilizing e-mail that you wouldn't believe it! Here's just example of how you can get creative using your e-mail. This artwork was done using the different characters on the e-mail program.
ASC II ART GOES HERE
You may notice from the image above, that we gave you a screen-shot of the artwork created by an e-mail program. The reason for this is that e-mail operates usually under a system known as ASCII. So, it is a little different to make this type of an image on an e-mail program. Now, you may be thinking, "Gee, it must have taken a very long time to make that image! I don't think I would have the time or talent to make an image like that." Well, you are right. It would take one of the time to actually use your keypad to create the image we just showed you. However, there are a ton of resources on the Internet and you can literally get all sorts of ASCII software for free. As a matter of fact, this particular image was produced directly on a web site and then copied and pasted into the e-mail program. The web page that we used to create this artwork was at: http://learnhub.com/redirect?u=http%3A%2F%2Fascii.mastervb.net%2F This was a free ASCII generator that you can use for free at this web site. There are also many ASCII pieces of software that are being given away for free on the Internet and we will include these in our resources section.
There is one thing that you can do yourself that is pretty easy, and you can do it without the use of one of these editors, and these are very simply, borders. Below is a good representation of creating a board or for your e-mail address.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ @
@ The Horse Course @
@ http://learnhub.com/redirect?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.horsecourse.com @
@ 3836 Walhampton Drive @
@ Lexington, Ky 40517 @
@ @
@ " How to Make Money with Your Equine Business" @
@ Come to our site for free articles on how to market your horse related business! @
@ @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
You can use just about any of the characters that you have on your keyboard to create a more like this and you can experiment with all the different ways of creating borders and pictures. The reason we are doing this course is to draw attention to your contact information and to make the e-mail look a little bit more interesting. One other thing you need to consider in your marketing efforts is the need to create different signatures for different aspects of your business. You need to think about who you are talking to and what aspect of your business you are addressing. As a matter of fact, you may want to create several different types of signatures and keep them on file. Most e-mail programs will allow you to create signatures and you can use different ones for different aspects of your business and for different occasions.
Tip !
We are going to depart from our subject matter for just the second here, but there is an important idea we want to convey to you. The reason we are using e-mail, and the reason we will use e-mail so much because at this writing, it is a free medium and very cheap to use. Therefore, we want to make sure that we are using it to our best ability to that we will be of the use it as effectively as we possibly can. The thing we want to tell you is that you should keep a calendar of yearly events that are occurring either nationally or in the lives of your clients. This is the perfect reason to send out an e-mail.
One of the things we want to impress on you is the idea that you do not want to be seen as a person who is merely trying to make a fast buck or gain another client. You want to be seen as a person or a business that keeps their customers and potential clients informed as much as possible. You can go on the Internet and find a list of holidays that will cover just about every single kind of holiday there is in the entire universe. The last time we downloaded the list of holidays it came out to about 50 pages of holidays! This is fertile ground for you to send out an e-mail to your e-mail list. So, you need to create a calendar and you need to collect a list of holidays. You will be able to find a list of web sites with calendar stand list of holidays in our resources section.
One other thing about this, you should collect the birthdates of every single client and customer that you have. You can send them an e-mail wishing them happy birthday and perhaps a free report on something to do with the equine business or some news that they may not heard about in the horse industry. You need to remember that the more that your clients and customers hear from you, the more inclined they will be to spend money at your business. Don't forget, you must be genuine, caring and actually have concern for your customers and clients or your messages will wreak of insincerity and you may lose their business.
Format of Email Messages
The format of your e-mail messages is very important. You don't want to have your e-mail messages extended across a wide format. What we mean by this, is that your e-mail should be no wider than 50 to 60 characters in width. Many of the e-mail programs that you will use on the market today will try condense the material and thereby chopping up your e-mail message into small blocks of text. Just remember to keep the width of your message in mind, as you draft your e-mail messages.
Picture of Bad Format Goes Here
One thing about writing e-mail messages or building web pages for that matter, is the fact that people's eyes look at blocks of information differently than they do on the printed page. We know most of your English professors will probably cringe at this, but you need to break down the information into blocks of information rather than worrying about having paragraphs that are grammatically correct. You really shouldn't have a block of information that is more than seven lines and a paragraph.
The thing you need to think about on writing your e-mail messages and creating web pages with information on them, is to make sure that even though your idea is not complete yet within a paragraph format, you need to break down the information into chunks that is easily readable on the screen. If you've ever seen someone that has actually written entire paragraph on a web site screen or on an e-mail you will notice that it is very hard for you to keep your place while reading this material. That's because eyes look at the screen differently than they do an actual object like a piece of paper. So, just bear in mind that you need to break down the paragraphs into blocks of material that people can read on the screen.
Effective Methods of Emailing People
After you start collecting e-mail addresses from your site and various other places that you are doing business with, (You may already have many e-mail addresses of clients and people that you have been working with on file somewhere. Make sure that you don't lose these e-mail addresses because they are like gold for your business.) you'll need to keep them on file. For some of our e-mail addresses we use a program Windows calls " notepad". Notepad as is the basic word processor allows used to store raw information on a text file.
In some cases you will want to keep the names of your clients as well as they are e-mail addresses on file. If you are using a free autoresponder service like Sendfree, then you can easily access those e-mail addresses and save them as a text file in notepad. This is highly recommended in should not be overlooked. The reason I say that is because if this information is lost you will have saved on several places on your hard drive and hopefully onto at least a small don't drive or disk. Do not lose your e-mail list!
When your e-mail list is small you'll need to do something that is a little time-consuming but very important. You want to be able to use the person's name that you're sending the e-mail to as much as possible. Now, in the early phases of collecting e-mail addresses and using free e-mail services, we will have to use generic terms in addressing people, but as time goes on and you start using professional services there are ways that the person's name can be inserted directly into the e-mail message as well as the e-mail subject line. Think about this, which do you think looks better to a person receiving an e-mail:
Subject: Here is another update from Stallion Farms!
Subject: John, here is your update from Stallion Farms!
As time goes on and you start using professional e-mail services (we will include a list of the best e-mail services in our resources section) you will want to use this feature in inserting names of your clients into the e-mail messages. However, since we are just starting to collect e-mail addresses, we will keep our e-mail messages generic while trying to convey a personal touch too, as well. If you are just sending out a single e-mail to a person, then go ahead and insert his name wherever possible. However, when you're sending out a mass e-mail of, let's say, 25 to 50 individuals you can use this generic method into your list gets bigger.
How to Make It Look like You Are Sending an Email to Just One Person Instead of Many
There is a real easy way to send out a mass e-mail to a list of people to make it look like it is only going to one person at a time. In case you don't understand exactly when talking about usually when you get an e-mail and the Company and the e-mail is going out too much of people the person sending out the e-mail will use a auction called the carbon copy. You have probably seen this format before it not really realized it. Here's what it would look like:
To: joesmith@aol.com
From: albertalbertson@gmail.com
Subject: Horse Boarding Rates
Cc: joesmith@aol.com;jerryjones@yahoo.com;etc;
Bcc:
You'll notice on the example above that the mills going to a guy named Joe Smith at AOL's free e-mail service. Of course, Albert Albertson is sending the e-mail address out about horse boarding rates . Underneath that is a feature called the carbon copy (or Cc:) and this is where you would put a series of e-mail addresses out to all of the people that you want to get this e-mail. Believe do that is in inserting; but directly after each e-mail address without a space between the e-mail addresses just like in the example above. However, a person would get the idea that they are not the only recipient of this e-mail and they may not fill to special when they consider the fact that your sending out massive e-mail to everybody.
When they get their e-mail message you'll have a complete list of everybody the carbon copy was sent to and they will not feel like they are being sent a special message. Take heart, because there is an easy way around this problem without having to using professional e-mailing service to insert all your customers names into the e-mail messages. The feature on talking about is the blind carbon copy or Bcc. What the blind carbon copy will do for you is allow you to send multiple e-mail messages to everybody that is on your list without letting the recipients see all of the e-mail addresses. So basically what you have to do in order to use this function is to take the e-mail list of the carbon copy or Cc: in place of into the wind carbon copy or Bcc: field. Please take a look at the example below.
To: joesmith@aol.com
From: albertalbertson@gmail.com
Subject: Horse Boarding Rates
Cc:
Bcc: joesmith@aol.com;jerryjones@yahoo.com;etc;
Now when your recipients see the e-mail messages, they will not be of the see all of the e-mail addresses that were on this original e-mail. Now, it is not as good as having the persons named inserted into each and every e-mail but it does service purposefully where building your e-mail list and it doesn't cost you a dime! Actually, with all the services that are beginning to be included in to the free e-mail accounts like Google's e-mail service in yahoo's e-mail service, it wouldn't surprise us found it to see these companies and the frontier where you can insert the person's name into the e-mail message. But, that may be a long way off or it may be here tomorrow, it is very hard to say.
