Instead, you can take a peek at these 6 quick fire insider secrets to email marketing. You’ll immediately be able to improve your campaigns, or begin a brand new campaign without having to struggle or stumble.

Quick Fire Insider Secrets to Email Marketing

1. Personality is better than a sales pitch: We all deal with sales pitches all day long. The commercials we see and hear, the advertisements we read, the pushy salespeople at stores we visit and of course the emails we receive. It’s hard to differentiate yourself from the crowd when all you’re doing is offering a sales pitch. Instead, inject some honest personality into your email campaigns. Your list members will be more engaged, you’ll build up more trust with them and you’ll stand out from the pack.

2. Too much of a good thing is bad: This is coming from a person who normally doesn’t agree with this statement. If we’re talking too much of a good thing, like pizza, or Italian sandwiches, then I don’t think that’s possible. But if we’re talking about the frequency of your email newsletters and communications, then it certainly is.

I don’t care if I’m the founder of the company in question, if I’m receiving an email once a day and I thought I was going to be getting a once per week newsletter, I’m deleting your email, skimming past it or unsubscribing. Set up expectations for your email frequency and don’t push the boundary towards excessive communication.

3. 20% of emails don’t get delivered: I’m not talking about bounces here, I’m talking about 20% of emails that you thought were delivered. It’s a startling number, and it speaks to the importance of not making any assumptions about the success of your campaign. Always find concrete evidence to the effectiveness of your campaigns and always work on improving your list quality. Not blindly trusting the stats you receive or hear about is one of the huge insider secrets to email marketing that you should know.

4. 94% of email is spam: Not like any of us needed a statistic to be reminded of this fact, but we all are inundated with spam messages in our inbox. That means that if you want your emails to be read by your list members you really have to work hard on following established best practices. That means short, concise and accurate subject lines, displayed “from” information, qualified, permission based list members and more.

5. Cheap email marketing exists: Yes, there is such a thing as cheap email marketing and it’s one of the best insider secrets to email marketing that you can be given. In fact, many of the best email marketing providers are extremely affordable for any sized business or operation. Even better, they all allow for free trials so you can make the final call based on experience. For example, you can sign up for an iContact free trial with plans starting at $9.95 per month, a Constant Contact free trial with plans starting at $15 per month, a Stream Send free trial with plans starting at $20 per month or an AWeber free trial with plans starting at $19 per month.

6. You’re not done with tests when you’re finished with college: But don’t worry, these tests are certainly a good thing. You should be segmenting your list and sending out emails with slight variations. Compare the results and track which variables perform better so that you can optimize your campaigns to the best of your ability. One-size-fits-all email newsletters and campaigns simply don’t cut it anymore. You’ll be missing out on a wealth of valuable data. Start segmenting, testing and optimizing immediately.

If you didn’t know… now you do. Use these insider secrets to email marketing wisely.

Therefore, the contest is now finished, at least temporarily. Sometime in the future there is going to be a bigger and better contest, and it’s going to be very exciting for everyone so please stay tuned!

I’m going to keep plugging away at the site, adding more content that helps you all run your email campaigns and once I’ve reached a certain threshold that I’m trying to get to I’ll release the details of the next contest.

A few things I’ve learned that can be applied to running successful email marketing campaigns:

• You can’t force anything - While you can push and market yourself all you want, you can’t force something on people that they just aren’t interested in.
• Some things need time to develop – Just like building up a permission based email marketing list, you can’t expect to show up one morning and have a massive list just waiting to read what you have to say. Things have to develop over a period of time in some instances.
• Rebounding from missed opportunities – After an unsuccessful run, like this attempted contest, it’s important that you bounce back and learn from your mistakes. As mentioned, I’ll do just that and before too long we’ll have a much improved, much more exciting contest running.

I’m excited to announce the launch of a new contest here at Succeed @ Email Marketing. The contest is called The Race to 50 More RSS Subscribers and the winner is going to get a package of free email marketing consultation and services from yours truly. It’s very simple to sign up and get involved, so what are you waiting for?

Here’s the breakdown…

This website is an entirely new venture I’ve created. It’s only been released for an extremely brief amount of time. So far I’ve been happy to receive some very positive feedback on the site and the direction it’s taking.

But, and of course there’s a but, I haven’t been as immediately successful as I had hoped in terms of getting traffic to the site.

Therefore I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and come up with a new contest for the site: The Race to 50 More RSS Subscribers. As mentioned, the winner is going to get a package of completely free email marketing consultation and services.

Free Email Marketing Consultation Package

Here’s what I’m going to provide to the winner of the contest…

• Evaluation of your most recent newsletters or messages
• Recommendations for changes in the future given in a 1 on 1 phone conversation – or email dialogue if it’s more convenient for you
• One entire newsletter or message of your choice written directly by me for your company
• Evaluation and comparison of results
• Case study of the changes and the results featured on the website

This is literally hundreds of dollars worth of free email marketing consultation, and all you have to do is make a few clicks of your mouse to get yourself involved.

How to Enter the Contest

1. Subscribe to our RSS feed

2. Send me an email immediately afterward with the subject Contest

3. I’ll keep track of my subscriber count and the 50th new subscriber will be contacted with how we can proceed

The only rule is that there is only sign-up counted per person, regardless of how many accounts or computers you use.

I’ll post the winner as soon as it happens and we’ll get started on your free email marketing consultation right away!

Sound good? Then spread the word! Tell your colleagues, coworkers and friends about the contest and get them involved. Good luck!