Email Marketing Articles & News
The Best Website Traffic Sources
Not a day goes by that any serious website owner doesn't wonder how to get more traffic to their site. This intense desire to generate more clicks makes virtually any online entrepreneur easy prey to many of the traffic schemes and scams that pervade the Internet like conmen on a carnival midway. Promises of fast traffic and big bucks often separate even the most savvy business person from their money because they want to believe the promises made by these ...
Your Fundraising Annual Appeal Letters Need A Villian
Anger is one of the best emotions that you can arouse in a donor. Anger is a healthy emotion, particularly when your fundraising letter offers donors a way to assuage their anger. "Individuals are more prone to respond to a genuine feeling of anger than to any other emotion," says Roland Kiniholm in his book, Maximum Gifts by Return Mail. To make your donors angry, you need a villain. Villains are good. They help you focus your donors' attention on one problem that needs ...
Ezine Publishers: Increase Your Profits With Rss
As an ezine publisher a major obstacle you face is getting your issues to your readers. In fact, because of the spam filters, many ezine publishers lose sales, commissions, and advertising revenue because their ezines don't make it to their subscribers' in boxes. How can you take back this lost profit? A solution to this all too common problem is to add RSS (or really simple syndication) to your publishing mix. With RSS, the email filters won't ...
Email Marketing Your Route to Success
Sending emails to existing and potential customers is said to have a response rate of 3-5%, which towers over direct mail or press advertising. Why is it so successful and how can you maximise your chances of success?
Top Tip: Down editing Your E mail
Down-editing your e-mail is a necessary skill that adds to clarity in your communications and helps avoid misunderstandings. In addition, responding point by point to those who e-mail you also shows consideration for their time and your command of technology.
Write Effective Fundraising Letters By Being Conversational (includes Examples And Samples
I am doing what you do, sitting at my computer, trying to get my thoughts out of my head and into a written form that will help you make a decision. In this particular case, I am trying to write a few intelligent remarks about sounding conversational on paper. You know, how to write a fundraising letter that sounds like it came from the mind of a person and not an institution. I suppose the first thing I can tell you is that you should write the way you talk, unless, of course, you talk ...
Read This, Sell More: Direct Mail Marketing Is About Benefits, Not Features
Your customer wants a cleaner kitchen, not a kitchen cleaner. Your customers are interested in benefits, not features. So sell benefits in your sales letters. The difference between a feature and a benefit comes down to this: A feature is what something does. A benefit is what something does for you. Everything you have to say in your direct marketing sales letters boils down to features and benefits. With every piece of copy you write, however long or short your copy, you are ...
Hidden Secret To Increase Adsense Revenue - Your Newsletter
So many web site owners miss the easiest and best opportunity to increase sales. In a rush to put up as many sites as possible in the vain hopes of generating Adsense revenue, they miss the opportunity to increase sales by not having a newsletter. Far too many sites are being created with poor content, leaving visitors to continue wandering from site to site looking for good, solid, knowledgeable content. If you have good content, you likely have some expertise that your visitors ...
Your Direct Mail Sales Letters Must Differentiate You
For two winters I heated my house with an old fashioned woodstove. I learned the art of reviving a bed of dying coals each chilly winter morning, adjusting the kindling, firewood and dampers just right so that the stove would heat my turn-of-the- century farmhouse for the longest period possible.
Write Fundraising Letter Overlines That Donors Can't Resist (includes Samples And Examples)
Write Fundraising Letter Overlines That Donors Can’t Resist The headline that appears over the salutation in a fundraising letter is known as the overline. Overlines have one goal: to persuade your donor to read your letter. According to direct mail copywriter and author Hershell Gordon Lewis, the best kind of overline to use in a one-to-one piece of communication like a fundraising letter is a hand-written overline, one that looks like a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm. Hand-written ...
Dear Friend: Don't Start Your Non-for-profit Fundraising Letters As A Stranger
Dear Friend: Don’t do it. Don’t start your fundraising letters with “Dear Friend.” After all, when was the last time you received a letter from someone dear to you, addressing you as “Dear Friend?” Never, right? The days of the Dear Friend letter are dead. So let’s bury the Dear Friend letter together. I heard recently of a chairman of the board of a national charity who has given his charity millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of his time, yet he still receives their fundraising ...
Fundraising Letters Are Easier To Write With Aida
Learn a lesson from professional direct mail copywriters. They follow a time-tested format in their sales letters, a format that you can also follow when writing direct mail fundraising letters for your non-for-profit organization. All you need to remember is AIDA. AIDA is an acrostic for the four things you need to do, and the order you need to do them in, to write compelling donation request letters. ATTENTION The A stands for Attention. You need to ...
Tips On Creating A Quality Customer Newsletter
When you're not able to keep in touch with customers as often as you like, a customer newsletter is a great way to keep your company on their radar screen.
Eleven Reasons Donors Stop Responding To Fundraising Letter Appeals
Eleven Reasons Donors Stop Responding To Fundraising Letter Appeals Donors will stop responding to your fundraising letter appeals for many reasons. Some of which you can manage, but many of which you cannot. Use these findings to retain as many of your donors as you can. 1. They forget I suppose you could call this a case of “poor institutional memory.” Donors simply forget your institution. They read your letter, decide to give, put your letter down somewhere, and then ...
Direct Mail Catalogs And Brochures: Write Captions That Sell
Many prospects skim through catalogs and brochures, glancing at the photos and reading the accompanying captions only when a particular image arouses their interest. That's when you have their attention. And so that's when you sell them.
Eight Advantages Of Fundraising Letters Over Other Methods
1. Personal Fundraising letters are about as personal as you can get with a donor without meeting face to face or talking on the phone. Unlike special events, fundraising letters let you have a one-on-one “meeting” with each donor.
5 Simple And Easy Ways To Advertise Online
Some people say that advertising is everything! Regardless if you have a product, a service, a hobby website or just want to share pictures of your wedding, you have to advertise somehow to get the traffic to your site or blog. But not all traffic is equal. There are services that can help you drive tons and tons of traffic to your site and it won't do you any good at all because it's not targeted traffic. Take for example all of the many different 'surf for traffic' or ...
What Happens When You Submit Articles To Ezines?
What's an article anyway, and why would I want to submit one to an ezine? That was a two-fold question and will require two answers.
E-book Security Anxiety
You are not alone. Tons of people are nervous that their e-book will be stolen and put on the black market (hmm, or the cyber black market, I guess you’d call it). Now, stealing is never right or fair, but in this case theft means one good thing, at least they have heard of you! Cyber thieves or not, they know your name and think your knowledge is coveted enough to steal (again, I do not condone this, but there is always a bright side, right?) There are a few measures you can take to ...
Fundraising Letter Envelopes: How To Make Them Irresistible
Readers spend only a few seconds deciding the fate of your direct mail fundraising appeals. Either they open them on the spot, set them aside for later, or chuck them in the waste paper basket. Here are some creative ways to tease your donors into opening your envelopes.
How To Know You Are Living Your Dream
How To Prove To Yourself That You Are Going After Your Big Dream. I have a personal story to share with you that happened not that long ago. But first. Realize this once and for all. You have a Big Dream. In fact, Bruce Wilkinson, author of the hugely successful book, “The Dream Giver,” demonstrates that God has given each one of us a dream to go after. The problem is that few of us take the time to understand what our Big Dream is. And even fewer of us take the necessary action on our Big ...
Rating The Ebook Compilers
Now that you've finished writing your eBook and have a basic understanding of what an eBook compiler does, you may be feeling overwhelmed by the number of compilers on the market. To help you make your decision, I have tested and reviewed the best-rated eBook compilers currently available.
Choosing An Ebook Compiler
What is an eBook compiler? You've written and revised your ebook, hired an artist who has produced outstanding graphics, and now you're ready to actually put together your ebook. What you need to make an ebook is software called an ebook Compiler. There are many different compilers to chose from, but first, you need to know exactly what an ebook Compiler does. Here is the simple explanation: An ebook compiler is a software program that converts either text pages or HTML text into a ...
Fundraising Letters: Where To Find Creative Ideas For Your Appeals
How do you make your fundraising letters creative and fresh year after year when your needs don’t change all that much? I am not talking about new initiatives. I’m talking about the programs that you run year after year. The membership drive that you run year after year. The funds that you must raise to cover administrative expenses and salaries year after year. How can you request funds for these things over time without boring your donors into apathy? Learn a lesson from Jack Foster.
Selecting A Search Engine Optimization Company
A Search Engine Optimization Company can be an invaluable asset in your Internet marketing campaign. They specialize in knowing how to raise your search engine positions, monitoring those positions on the regular basis, and adjusting their strategies to account for undesirable results in any given month. Since this takes a lot of time, effort, and specialized knowledge, it can be in your best interest to go to an outside source rather than try to maintain high search ...
Will Pay-per-click Advertising Help Your Site?
Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes ...
Effective Fundraising Letters Are About People, Not Projects (includes Samples And Examples)
Have you ever met a donor who liked funding infrastructure? I have. Once. When I served as Director of Development for a national non-profit, my organization needed a new heating and ventilation system for the national office. The cost was around $75,000, as I recall. The executive director approached one of our major donors, a businessman who was also a faithful supporter, and asked if he would like to partner with us. The donor promptly wrote a cheque for the full amount. Later on, that same ...
How To Write Fundraising Letters That Motivate Donors To Make Donations To Your Non-profit
Motivating strangers to give their money away is one of the hardest jobs around. It’s difficult to do face to face. And it’s even tougher to do in a letter. But it can be done. And your chances of receiving gifts in the mail increase once you employ some of the tested methods that are used by leading non-profit organizations around the world.
The Fundraising Letter Ps: 25 Powerful Things To Say There (includes Examples And Samples)
Donors read postscripts. This is a sad but important reality in fundraising. Sad because the PS is stupid and belongs in another millennium. In this age of word processors, no one needs to add a PS anymore. But important because a donor reading a PS is a donor looking for information. And that’s your opportunity.
Building Relationships Takes Time: Overcoming the Overnight Surge Urge
Whenever we talk to a new or a "we hope to land soon" client, we are careful to stress the relational aspect of newsletter marketing. In fact, we go lengths to tell people that it takes time to build a list, time to develop trust, and time for people to feel comfortable enough to make the contact to initiate a purchase.