Direct marketing is still the best method to test, track results and quickly learn what works so that you can scale up marketing campaigns with confidence.
In his recent blog article, "
Getting to scale: direct marketing vs. mass market thinking", marketing strategist
Seth Godin reminds us that the old-fashioned benefits of direct marketing still apply in the era of mobile technology and social media.
Direct marketers, which includes those who use postal
mailing lists and/or email marketing, can:
* test on small quantities to learn which message copy and pricing offers work best, then roll out to increasingly larger lists of targeted prospects and buyers
* learn quickly what works and doesn't work from their marketing campaigns
* devote smaller amounts of money than mass marketers when testing new products and business ideas
The open rate of your email message is nearly 100% dependent upon your subject line. Your potential customers typically spend less than two seconds deciding if they want to read your message. Which means that you have to use compelling subject lines to be a successful email marketer.
Here are 12 tips for creating better subject lines:
1. Communicate fast, just like on an outer envelope. Use 40- 50 characters or less.
2. Mention your primary benefit in the subject line. You must motivate the reader to read your note now.
3. Build your subject line around your desired action. If you're selling a webinar, include date/subject/registration in subject line. If you're selling product, include price savings in the subject line.
4. Write your subject lines first, then create your email marketing message to complement the subject line. The number one mistake of most email marketers is a last-minute subject line.
5. Only use personalization in subject line if you already have a business relationship with the recipients of your email message.
6. Give urgent reason to act now. Examples include "order by x date", "offer ends tomorrow at 6 pm", "registration deadline is today".
7. Be specific. Use phrase such as "Get up to 80% off" rather than "Save money".
8. You can use the word "free" with caution by following these guidelines:
* Don't make "free" the first word in your subject line.
* Don't use exclamation point such as Free!
* Don't spell out FREE in all caps
9. If use the word "complimentary" instead of "free", make sure it's spelled correctly. Many email marketers incorrectly use the word "complementary", which has a completely different meaning.
10. Test your subject lines continuously to find the winner for you. Make sure to send each version of subject line to at least 5000 email addresses.
11. Look at newspaper headlines and magazine covers for ideas on how to express ideas quickly with great appeal.
12. Use software to check the spam score of your subject line and body copy prior to sending email message. Then make changes as needed.
Contactology has free software tool which allows you to quickly determine a message's quality and deliverability.
Learn more about creating more effective email subject lines from these sources:
*
Email Marketing Resources from Lyris *
3 Ways to Write Better Subject Lines*
"All About Creative" book from Direc MarketingIQ
See this video which uses ham and cheese sandwiches as examples for setting up simple tests for your direct mail and email list campaigns. The video explains how to construct both two-part and three-part split tests, which are commonly known as A/B splits or A/B/C splits. The formal statistics term for this kind of market research is "multivariate testing".
Check out the new Hippo Direct YouTube Channel which will feature short videos related to mailing lists, email lists, direct marketing, and online marketing tactics.
And sometimes we'll just have silly videos to give you a laugh.
You can bookmark the Hippo Direct YouTube channel at
http://www.youtube.com/user/HippoDirect
The best way to improve results from email marketing 
is to improve the appeal and responsiveness of your
subject lines. Better subject lines immediately lead to
higher open rates, which will increase the number of
people who click through to your website.
In my work as a list broker I see every day that the companies which have the most success with email marketing continually seek to improve their subject lines. The companies who give little attention to subject lines continue to struggle with their emailings.
Here are 10 tips which you can begin to use with your next email marketing campaign. These tips can be used for emailings to both consumer and business markets.
10. Include an emotional or wishful benefit such as "Take a few days off to grow your business."
9. Include name of company whose product or service is being promoted in the message.
8. Use personalization by first name only if you have a relationship with the recipient.
7. Use "your" or "you" to increase relevance to the reader.
These 6 below are from Lisa Sparks of Constant Contact and her excellent article "6 Tips for Better Subject Lines: Get your emails opened with attention-grabbing taglines"
6. Test your subject lines
5. Think of your subject line as a tweet.
4. Encourage action
3. Get inspired
2. Include numbers
1. List your audience's hot topics
Email list of subscribers to the Philanthropy Today Enewsletter is available for the first time. Go here to see details on renting this email list which gives marketers entree to top management of nonprofit organizations.
Philanthropy Today condenses the day's latest developments into a quick, easy-to-read news briefing. Readers are alerted to news articles just posted by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, as well as nonprofit-related articles that appear in newspapers and magazines across the United States and around the world.
Philanthropy Today subscribers are leaders of nonprofit organizations and agencies, plus fund-raising executives, development professionals, and foundation executives.
Email lists from The Chronicle of Philanthropy are in high demand and have already proven very responsive for the select group of advertisers who've been granted access during the past few months.
Hippo Direct has been given permission to make this email list available to a wider range of companies and organizations. To maintain the high standard of responsiveness, usage is carefully controlled, with only a limited number of marketing messages each month sent to each name on the list.
Kipp Bodnar from HubSpot posted an excellent blog 
called "27 Marketing Lessons B2B Marketers Should
Know". His posting describes the top marketing ideas
from this week's MarketingProfs B2B Forum.
My 7 favorite marketing tips are:
1. Make sure that you focus on using your company's most important keywords in your social media status updates.
2. Create as much content as possible and repackage across multiple mediums such as blog posts, podcasts and webinars to increase lead generation.
3. In the current Web 2.0 environment, Marketing = Publishing.
4. When doing email marketing, have a clear reason why you're testing specific elements of the email campaign.
5. Kipp says that 20% of searches done in Google every day have never been done before. Which means that you should continue creating content which is relevant to your business so that next week's searchers can find you.
6. Mobile marketing, which is sometimes called SMS or text message marketing, is becoming an important B2B marketing method.
7. The primary purpose of social media content isn't to provide something for people to read. Instead, it's to provide something which leads to new thinking or new discussions.
The Chronicle of Higher Education Enewsletter Subscribers Email Lists Now Available For The First TimeThe Chronicle of Higher Education is the leading news source for all of academe. The Chronicle publishes a weekly newspaper, a website which is updated daily, and specialized email newsletters. College faculty, administrators, and other academic leaders rely on The Chronicle to stay informed and to get solutions to the challenges they and their universities face.
For the first time, email lists of subscribers to 5 Enewsletters are available. Click on the name of each enewsletter below for details on renting its email list of subscribers:
1. Academe Today - daily summary of the most important higher-education news.
2. The Chronicle Review - articles about intellectual debates, and essays by prominent thinkers and writers re higher education.
3. Community College - weekly briefing on the fastest-growing segment of higher education.
4. On Hiring - the first-stop source for anyone involved with hiring at universities, as well as for anyone who is hunting for a new job at a college.
5. Wired Campus - daily round-up of education-technology news and other technology issues affecting colleges and the people who work and study there.
The Chronicle of Higher Education email lists are in high demand and have already proven very responsive for the select group of advertisers who've been granted access during the past few months. We've been given permission to make this email list available to a wider range of companies and organizations. To maintain the high standard of responsiveness, usage is carefully controlled, with only a limited number of marketing messages each month sent to each name on the list.
For questions about The Chronicle of Higher Education email list,
or to reserve your transmit date now, contact:
Andy Mills
Email: andrewm@hippodirect.com
Phone: 317-566-1161
I've found a great email marketing terms glossary from EliteEmail. Anyone who uses email lists or who is involved with online marketing should check out this site for definitions and useful tips.
For example, according to EliteEmail, "almost all web browsers and email software are capable of displaying four primary fonts properly: Verdana, Times, Arial, and Helvetica, including their variants (Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, etc.) If a web developer or email marketer decides to use a different font he or she risks compatibility problems and the potential that their pages/emails may render inaccurately when viewed by these people."
You can find easy-to-understand definitions for all of these email marketing terms at the email glossary page
* A/B Split
* Above-The-Fold
* ASP
* Auto Reply
* Auto Responder
* B2B
* B2C
* Bandwidth
* Blacklist
* Bounce (Hard)
* Bounce (Soft)
* Call To Action
* Campaign
* Can-Spam Act of 2003
* CAPTCHA
* Challenge Response
* Click-Through Rate (CTR)
* Content
* Conversion Rate
* Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
* Database
* Dedupe
* Domain Key / DKIM
* Double Opt-In
* Email Blocking
* Email Client
* Email Newsletter
* Email Service Provider
* eZine
* False Positive
* Font
* From/Sender Address
* From/Sender Name
* Harvesting
* Header
* HTML Email
* IP Address
* ISP
* Landing Page
* Links
* Load Time
* Mailing List
* Multi-Part MIME Email
* Open Rate
* Open Relay
* Opt-In Subscriber
* Opt-Out List
* Opt-Out Subscriber
* Permission Based Email
* Personalization
* Phishing
* Preview Pane
* Privacy Policy
* Rental List
* Segmentation
* Signature
* Single Opt-In
* Spam / UCE
* Spam Trap
* SPF Record
* Spoofing
* Subject Line
* Targeting
* Unique Selling Proposition
* Unsubscribe
* URL
* Viral Marketing
* Web-Friendly Fonts
* Whitelist
Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at the strategies which Hippo Direct is using to grow our business, and increase sales for our clients. The graphic below shows the Hippo Direct Content Wheel.
The underlying idea is to write original articles and other useful content, then share and publish variations of this content for different market segments. All of the spokes to the right of center represent places in which we distribute our content:
- Blog
- Websites
- Email Newsletters
- Promotional Emails
The spokes to left of center are channels from which the vast world of internet users and prospective clients can access and share our content:
- Links From Others
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
This Content Wheel plan can be used by any business with a website and blog to dramatically increase the reach and results of their marketing program. It combines inbound marketing and social media with direct marketing and email marketing.
