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Staying in touch with your prospect builds trust and keeps you fresh in their mind so that when they are ready to buy, they’ll come to you.

Email marketing is a great, inexpensive way to keep in contact with the people on your list and to form and nurture a relationship with them. If you do this correctly, you will get more business than the Average Joe and you will not have to do anything else to get clients to buy. It is therefore important to set this up correctly. Once you have done this, you can pretty much just leave it. Then you can concentrate on building traffic to your website because the system to capture leads and nurture the relationship with them is done for you automatically.

Here are a couple of ways you can improve your email marketing:

First, you have to worry about your prospects opening your emails. If you are not yet tracking your email open rates, you need to start doing so straight away. You need a good email marketing provider like Aweber (or mailchimp if you are in New Zealand). Not using a provider will give you too much work, as well as the possibility of you getting banned by your Internet Service Provider for sending bulk mail. Bulk mail just ends up in the spam folder just because it is bulk mail.

Once you have a provider, you can then set up your emails, set the frequency that they are sent as well as track the click through rates, open rates and bounce rates. You then have something to work from.

Once you have this information you’ll want to improve your messages so that it doesn’t happen again. Here are some reasons why your emails may not get through to your prospects’ inbox:

Spam words

Some words are triggers for the spam filter. These include: “special offer, free, discount, cheap, home business, %, work-from-home, limited time, click here, coupon,” and the chance that your prospects are getting your emails if these words are present are slim. Spam filters are becoming more sophisticated, and your email can be removed before it even hits the inbox. A good email marketing provider like AWeber will be able to pick up if you have any spam words in your messages, and will alert you before you send them.

Subject lines

The next thing you need to worry about is getting your readers to open your email. This should not be a problem if they signed up because they want to read what you have to say. However, if you have a boring headline they may want to skip reading it because they have many other emails or they are busy. Make sure they know it is from you, and have a proactive title so that they want to open it. If your emails are interesting, and give them more information related to the reason they signed up in the first place, they should look forward to it, and open it. Avoid subject lines that are full of hype or make outrageous claims. If it sounds unbelievable, you will lose credibility with your prospect. Make sure your subject lines are real, convincing and a bit mysterious.

You need to put your name or your company name in the “from” field so that the prospect recognises you. “Noreply” or “Systems” addresses are less likely to be opened.