Yesterday I received a rather strange email. It was from someone who’d seen a comment I’d made on Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula blog a couple of years ago. The sender mentioned that he’d seen my comment and asked me to tell him the amount of sales we’d made from our product launch at the time.

Although I’d written that comment – and launched the product in question – in 2006 (I think), the product launch went well and I still recall the results we achieved. Moreover, since it was a simple question my first instinct was to reply with the answer. (There’s a psychological/marketing lesson in this… be sure to read my comment at the end of this article.)

But then it occurred to me that… I don’t even know this person! Here they are – a complete stranger – sending me an email asking me to tell them about my company’s financial results.

Now the story might be different if I went around crowing about how much money we made from the launch in question and someone was asking me to clarify or confirm my claims. (Although, even then, I might want to know WHO I was giving this information to!). But in this case I didn’t do anything of the sort.

I don’t know about you, but I was raised to believe that it was RUDE to ask people how much they earned.

Obviously, those in the Internet marketing and money-making niches have no problem telling all and sundry about how much money they supposedly make. In fact, they do so specifically to help sell their products. Such marketers are, in my opinion, fair game for questions asking for clarification – or proof of – their claims.

But since when was it okay to send people you don’t even know (and who do NOT make sales or earnings claims) how much money they make? Isn’t that just plain rude? Or has the Internet - or Internet marketing - created an environment where good manners no longer matters?

Okay, here’s the psychological/marketing lesson: if you ask someone a question, their first instinct is to think of the answer. Their second instinct is to tell you the answer. Hmmm… how can you use this in your marketing?

If you’ve been involved in email marketing for any length of time, you’ll probably know that building a responsive subscriber base is a matter of attracting subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and sending them content that compels them to take the kind of action you want them to take.

Do both and you’ll experience relatively low unsubscribe rates, high open rates, high click-through rates and high conversion rates.

Sounds simple… but when it comes to providing the right content… what exactly IS the right content? Is it necessarily articles or sales promotions? Is it both? In what proportion? Should both articles and promotions appear in the same email (as in this newsletter) or should they be sent separately? Or should you send both kinds of emails? And, if so, when should you send each kind?

The answer is, of course, to test what works best with YOUR audience. But before you jump into testing… you need something to test. In general, I recommend modelling yourself on a business that is doing well. We have done that with Kikabink News and Success Accelerator which are both somewhat based on the newsletter + solo promotion model used by direct response marketing companies such as Agora, Inc. Then it’s a matter of surveying readers and testing things to elicit ever improving results.

So what kind of insights are you likely to get when you survey and test? Well, consider a recent MarketingSherpa case study about a pet supply company. The company split-tested sending an email with (a) a promotion (including image and copy) at the top of the email and a link to an article below the promotion, and (b) a link to the article at the top of the email with the promotion below. In both cases the article link was actually a hot-linked title (and an appealing title at that) which led to a page where people would see the (short) article, along with various promotions.

Interestingly, version (b) achieved 7 percent higher click-throughs and 6 percent higher sales conversions than version (a). In other words, not only did the article attract more click-throughs, but people who clicked-through to the article tended to buy more than those who simply responded to the ad.

Now this does NOT mean that all your emails should now contain a link to an article at the top, with a promotion below. There are still many, many variables – the target audience for one and the landing page for another – that impacted on the pet company’s results. But the results do support the idea that email subscribers value non-promotional content… and that if they believe you are giving them something of value by way of a helpful article, they will be more willing to buy from you.

Source: Case Study, “Test Content To Create Best Layout To Boost Email Revenue, Conversions, CTRs”, MarketingSherpa, November 5, 2008

Philip Kaplan has released a service, HitMeLater, that enable you to delay incoming email.

According to Mr Kaplan, the service is “free, secure and spamless” and doesn’t require registration. You just send an email to 24@hitmelater.com and the service will resend it to you 24 hours later.

You can change the delay period by substituting the “24″ with some other number or day. For example, if you send an email to “4@hitmelater.com”, you’ll get it back four hours later. Send it to “wednesday@hitmelater.com” and you’ll get it back the first Wednesday morning after sending the email.

Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington reckons he’ll be using HitMeLater to forward his email to Sunday@hitmelater.com (his slowest email day).

I suspect HitMeLater will only be useful if you can configure your email client to automatically forward your email to a predetermined HitMeLater email address. Otherwise you’ll be manually forwarding all those emails. Not that much of a time saver.

Also, another alternative for delaying incoming email is to configure your email client to only download email at certain intervals.

Just remember, the longer you delay all that email… the more email you’ll be inundated with at once…

Source: Michael Arrington, “HitMeLater: A Snooze Button For Your Email”, Tech Crunch, August 14, 2008, HitMeLater

Here are six (6) tips for helping your email messages fly through the spam filters.

1. Regularly check your blacklist status. Visit these sites for blacklist updates: http://www.dnstuff.com; http://www.barracudacentral.com/ and http://www.Senderbase.org.

2. Use a dedicated IP address for sending email, perhaps different IPs for transactional and promotional types of email.

3. Get whitelisted. Request whitelist status from your ISP, get accredited by email reputation service companies such as Habeas (http://www.habeas.com) and Goodmail (http://www.goodmailsystems.com), and ask subscribers to whitelist your email address.

4. Test confirmed optin versus single optin.

A single optin approach can lead to a much bigger list - and greater sales - but can also lead to fake submissions, people erroneously or maliciously subscribing others and, consequently, more complaints.

Confirmed optin - where subscribers must respond to an email (by clicking a link) to confirm their subscription avoids these problems to a greater degree… but can lead to a smaller list. I suspect that confirmed optin may be the safer way to go if you share an IP range (e.g. if you use an email service provider) and/or “force” people to opt-in to view your content (e.g. if you use a name squeeze page). Single optin may be better if you use a dedicated IP address for sending email and you make opting-in completely optional and available after visitors have had a chance to see what you offer. However, as always, ya gotta test!

5. Manage your list. Provide an easy way for people to unsubscribe and make sure the email management software or service you use to facilitate “unsubscribing” works! Further, clean your list daily – get rid of spam rejections and bounces.

6. Avoid spammy content. Use an application such as SpamArrest to detect content that may trigger the filters.

Source: Mitch Eisen, “Use These Tips To Get Past Spam Filters,” SIPAlert Newsletter, June 23, 2008