Written by: eTargetMedia

Spreading word about your company’s products to your target audience can result in lucrative propositions, as well as an increase in cash flow. Your marketing goals should include contacting consumers in your niche market through email, and targeted email lists have proven to be an effective means.

eTargetMedia understands the difficulty of creating an email list that will generate high quality leads. Furthermore, the competition of other businesses in the same market as you places pressure on you to one up “the other guy”.

Leave the email-targeting to the professionals. Their email lists will supply you with numerous designated niche-targeted companies and individuals. The email recipients have given eTargetMedia consent to be included within a target list. With a database of over 15 million businesses, your global reach can be expanded which in turn will increase your public exposure.

Targeting specific consumers in your niche and exposing them to your service through email is a tried and true method to generate leads. Local and global companies continuously search the Internet for a revolutionary service or product. By providing them with a simple pitch, you can build a strong and mutually beneficial relationship that can grow into a larger-scaled proposition. The opportunities are endless and with the help of an effective target list, you’ll be one step ahead of your competition.

You could become the next industry leader. eTargetMedia can help. Expectations are high when it comes to closing out a deal. Aggressive competition, similar products, and a narrow scope of clientele make owning a targeted email list a must for your business.

One of the most effective ways to grow your list of contacts for email marketing campaigns is by doing an email append. This is the process of merging your database of customer contacts with a list of contact from a third party such as eTargetMedia to add emails to your existing contacts. This lets you reach out to customers who are already familiar with your business in a new way.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of your email append campaign:

Provide as much detail in your contact database as possible. Giving eTargetMedia as much information as possible lets us be as accurate as possible when matching contacts to email address. Along with giving us basic information like names, cities and states, make sure you give us other information such as addresses (including apartment numbers) and any relevant phone numbers. Any of these can be used as a way to verify a contact.

Target the right contacts. In order to send emails, you need to have a previous relationship with a contact. This doesn’t mean that they need to be your customer, but they need to have reached out to you in the past. This could be anything from emailing you for more information to scanning their card at your tradeshow booth.

Send a strong initial email. Keep in mind that these contacts will be receiving an email from you for the first time. Make sure that this initial email clearly states that they are receiving it as an invitation to opt-in to future emails and that they will not get additional emails unless they give you permission. State the reasons why they can benefit from being a part of your email distribution list.

By: Karen Waddell | VP of List Services, eTargetMedia

What’s the Point?
On average you only have six to ten words to entice a subscriber to open your email. Beyond 10 words and the subject line may get truncated; even worse your email may
get relegated to the trash folder unopened without the subscriber ever seeing your message. Your subject line needs to tell the subscriber exactly why they should open the email. Get to the point, briefly! Why are you sending an email? The subject line should be a teaser of what’s in the email message. The subject line is the primary reason someone will either open or delete your email. Be descriptive. Be clear. Be relevant!
Subject Line Musts:
• Use Buzzwords: Exciting, Wonderful, Upgrade, Now, Go, Happy.
• Keep it Simple. Subject lines should be 45 characters or less. Definitely not more than 60 characters.
• Ask Questions. Spark the subscriber’s interest and get them engaged with your offer.
• Use #Hashtags: If the audience is familiar with your brand, #’s will increase interaction with the email
and your social marketing.
What to Avoid:
• Words written in all CAPS.
• Excessive Punctuation!!! Avoid characters such as !, $, %
• Company Name: Don’t waste precious subject line space when your company name already displays
in the “From Line”.
• SPAM Trigger Words: Free, Cheap, Save, Guarantee, Affordable, Congrats, and Deals.
• Emoji’s & Emoticons: Many email clients do not support special characters and special characters may not render.

Contact eTargetMedia to find out how we can help you target
your email campaigns to maximize your campaign results.

Choosing the right data card is critical to the success of a direct marketing campaign. A high quality data card ensures that your message will reach the right customers. eTargetMedia has established a reputation for having top-shelf data cards across a variety of demographic and vertical markets. This was recently highlighted when it received a perfect score of 100 in NextMark’s Data Quality Report Card.

eTargetMedia was one of only six companies in its category to receive a perfect score. NextMark’s reviewed more than 74,000 data cards to create their rankings. They ranked data cards using a proprietary algorithm evaluating 13 different characteristics. These attributes include frequency of updates, breadth of geography, efficient categorization, size of list and base price.

Data cards are the main way that advertising and marketing professionals evaluate the quality of a mailing list that is available for purchase or rental. It includes all of the information that a person would need to make an evaluation including the pricing, description of the types of contact included, source, permission level and how often it is maintained. Depending on the mailing list, it can also include specialized information such as the minimum number of records required in order to place an order.

eTargetMedia’s data cards give people a clear understanding about the quality of the mailing lists we have available. We only use truly permission-based email lists, which ensure that your recipients are engaged and ready to receive information about products and services such as yours. The depth of categorization in our lists allows marketers to target specialized segments in order to get to exactly the right customers.

Sending out an email newsletter is a great way to stay in the minds of current customers and entice them to do repeat business with you. But email campaigns are also outstanding avenues for acquiring new customers. Email is a cost-effective way to conduct marketing, but that doesn’t mean you need to expect low return rates. eTargetMedia can help you to find the right strategy to use emails to gain new customers.

Here are a few tips for utilizing email to gain new customers:

Make Calls to Action Easy to Find and Act On

When you send out a marketing email, you want people to buy your product or contact you for more information. Don’t bury this in your email — make sure that the call to action is easy to find. Instead of directing them to a form to fill out for more information, give them a link that opens an email they can easily send, or that immediately will place a call to you if they are on a mobile device.

Use High-Quality Email Lists

If you decide to use an email list from a third-party, make sure that the list is high quality and only comes from sources who have opted in to receive emails. eTargetMedia can target your email to specific audiences because their lists are highly parsed and segmented.

Design Emails for Mobile

The vast majority of people use their smartphones to sort their emails before they are read on a computer. If they open your marketing email on their phone and it looks wrong because it isn’t in a mobile-friendly format, there’s a strong chance that they will delete the email immediately before having a chance to read it in depth.

eTargetMedia can help you drive customers to your website’s landing pages with targeted email campaigns. However, if your landing page isn’t designed properly, there’s a good chance that you will see a high bounce rate and few of the people coming to your site being converted into customers. The good news is that eTargetMedia also provides landing page design and development service that can help you to create or refine the key pages on your website.

Here are three things that eTargetMedia recommends you look at to see if your landing page needs improvements:

Is Your Landing Page Too Cluttered? When a potential customer arrives at your landing page, you want them to quickly find the most vital information that will get them into the purchasing cycle. Having too many graphics, text images and videos will only distract visitors. Keep your landing page design clean and to the point.

Are Your Headlines Attention Grabbing? This applied to their size, placement and content. The headline of your landing page should summarize the page in a few words. You want the headline to be large and grab the reader’s attention immediately. You also want it to get the reader to think about why they should read more.

Are You Featuring Your Product? If you are selling a product on your site, it’s important to make that the star of the show. People want to see the product in action in order to understand what it does and get excited about buying it. You can do this by featuring product images and videos prominently on the landing page.

When a person clicks on an online advertisement or organic search engine result for your company, you want them to go to a specific page on your site. This landing page is often the first impression that a customer will have of your business, so you can see why it’s so important to spend time to create a landing page that engages customers and encourages them to take the next step toward purchasing your product.

However, many businesses struggle when it comes to developing solid landing pages for their business. Instead of using them as a focused sales opportunity, they attempt to cram too much information into a single landing page. This can leave customers confused about the purpose of the landing page or not get them the information they need to make a purchasing decision. If this happens, the odds are high that the person will leave the website and no longer be part of the potential sales cycle.

If your clickthrough rates on your PPC and organic search campaigns are low, there’s a good chance that there’s a problem with your landing pages. If this is the case, eTargetMedia can help your business by reviewing and re-designing your landing pages to make it easier for customers to understand your value proposition and get the right information about your goods or services. eTarget Media can review your specific website and business needs in order to come up with a unique landing page solution that is effective at encouraging site visitors to become customers.

Creating a successful email campaign means getting the right message to the right audience. You can’t do this if you don’t know exactly who is receiving your emails. Your first instinct might be to blast your emails out to as many people as possible but this scattershot approach has very limited success and a very low Return on Investment (ROI).

The right approach is to target your email communications to the right audience. Working with a company such as eTargetMedia that has a large and well-organized database of email contacts is a great first step for getting your email campaign on track. By microtargeting your email campaigns, you have the best bet to reach potential customers and will get the most value out of your investment.

Microtargeting has long been associated with political campaigns. Candidates often hire telemarketing companies to perform “robocalls” to potential voters. They make sure that the calls are reaching the right people by drilling down their call lists as much as possible. This includes using consumer data such as age, household income and personal interests to create as complete of a profile of a person as possible and then matching that with a likely voter for a candidate.

But microtargeting isn’t just for political campaigns. Small businesses can benefit by using the same concepts to discover and communicate with potential customers. Even if you don’t have a detailed customer list to use, you can still start a microtargeted campaign. eTargetMedia has a list of more than 150 million consumers and 15 million businesses with demographic and lifestyle information. This makes it easy to parse, segregate and target the data to reach out the right potential customers.

Getting people to open your marketing emails is only part of the process of creating a successful campaign. Your ultimate goal is to make sure that people read the content, are engaged with what they read and become customers of your goods or services. To help you convert your email prospects, eTargetMedia presents three basic steps that everyone should do before embarking on an email campaign:

Have a Targeted Email List: The worst thing that you can do is send out a great email to a list that reaches the wrong people. You need to deliver your email messages to a targeted group of recipients in the same way that you would make sure that your ad campaigns are being delivered to the proper channels to reach your customers. This problem can be solved by using a targeted email list from eTargetMedia, that has been targeted to include recipients that are relevant to your business.

Provide High Value Content: If a person opens an email from you and determines that you aren’t providing them with relevant and informative content, there’s a good chance they won’t open another email from you. Always make sure your emails are filled with information customers can actually use instead of simply being promotional.

Follow Up On Important Emails: If you are launching a new product or service, you’ll want to do more than simply send out one email to your customer base. You can schedule a campaign to send out follow up emails after customers have taken certain actions such as clicking through to your site or going to your shopping cart.