Email marketing saved us all:  Imagine how many envelopes we would have to lick in order to reach as many people as emails allows us to!

Please ignore the silly joke above.  Time to put our poker face and be serious about is.  Ready? And… go!

One of the many problems we have to face when we start an email marketing campaign is how, dear God, how to make these emails interesting.  Remember those days on which you would end up with nothing but fliers and leaflets in your pockets?  Do you remember anything interesting?

That’s what I thought.  Sadly, it’s all the same with email marketing.

“This is so boring… let’s send it!”

When did we stop reading the contents we send to our customers?  Really, guys, what’s going on?  Did I fell asleep during one of the meetings?

Probably I did, while reading one of these boring email campaigns.

It’s unbelievable that we cannot even put up interesting content!  That is one of the things we should be doing in the first place: create contents that drag customers by the eye to our website.  But most people send these gray, bland and flimsy campaigns that seem to be designed by the same robot that writes 90% of the spam I get on my email.

If you want to create an email marketing campaign that works, please: make it fun or go to the default route and send funny pictures of cats wearing hats.  At least your potential customers won’t hate you as much.

“Thsi is well wrtien… lets sned itt!!!!!!!!!!!”

One more thing: PROOFREAD!  Customers open their hearts and ears and take a leap of faith, in hope that they won’t stumble with spam.  The least you can do (and I mean the LEAST, as in “the minimum standard requirements that will prevent an angry horde from chasing you”) is to write, read, proofread, edit, correct and only then send your email campaign.

Spelling mistakes, typos and dodgy grammar will not make you sound dumb: it will make your company, products, services, co-workers and family (okay, that was a stretch) sound dumb.  Be careful and, once again, PROOFREAD!

How to make exciting email marketing campaigns?

• Think of what you would like to read on a corporate email.  You are the only one who knows your company and the only one who can fine-tune the language used on your contents
• Give, give tons.  Useful information, something nice or funny or inspirational.  Give twice as much you would like to receive.
• Don’t be too uptight.  Emails allow themselves to be a bit more intimate and loose on the protocol.  Think of this as an email you’re sending to someone you know about a company you happen to think it’s awesome.
• Design here is key.  The more organized your email looks, the easier will be for your customers and prospects to follow.

Keep these things in mind before you send a seven-paged email campaign about your company.  If you don’t want to read it, trust me on this one:

No one will.

You might want to consider for a second what an affordable web design is.  We know how it is, right? words as “affordable” and “cost-effective” tend to hide an awful truth:  these are cheap websites, done in haste.

I don’t want to brag about us, but, honestly, we don’t have cheap products.  If there’s something we take some pride of is that, well, we create good, competitive, attractive websites for an affordable price.  Every single site we build is done to be user-friendly, attractive and easily positionable, in order to fit any marketing/advertisement agenda.  It’s not an easy task but, hey, someone’s got to do it.

Do you want to know how to make the most of your web design and how to keep it affordable?  Keep on reading, then.

Good web building practices can take you places.

Think about it for a second:  Why do you need a website?  To promote your company?  To create a database?  To sell your products?  Some people just want to have a web site to say “Hey, you know what? we have a website!”.  While that last argument is respectable (who are we to say what do you need a site for?), having real goals keep costs lower.

Once you know the main purpose of your site, you can think of the essential sections and, that way, you can keep the site functional and simple from its very start.

Things your website might definitely need (for starters).

• An intention (sales, brand awareness, conversions…)
• An inviting, clean homepage (think of it as a business card: it’s gonna create a long-lasting impression)
• A means to be reached by your visitors (an email, a phone number, an address… anything.)
• A brief description of your products and services (see, bullet-points can do wonders and keep people reading… hey, you read up to here! Doesn’t that say something about them?)

You see, these are some of the basic things your website must have.  These, along with an attractive, simple-to-use design, can take you places you’ve never been.

… places where big bucks are.

The straightest line between you and your customers.

Internet Marketing blends digital media, advertisement and customer service in one package.  You have to keep those bases covered.  The good news are that you don’t need to spend tons and tons of cash to do do.  Planning saves you a pretty penny and, well, being realistic helps a lot.

In the end, an affordable web design is a cheap web design when you do it the wrong way.

As someone who works on Internet Marketing, professional web design and that’s been immersed all of his life in the world of advertisement (I owe to it most of my education and my life… my mother’s been on the business for a while now!),I’ve learned to appreciate good copywriting.  It’s true, many people see evil in modern ads: persuasive text, seductive ideas that linger for days and days, contents designed to generate an emotional response.

However, in a few special cases, I find the mastership of a craft.  How can you convey these very evil texts, ideas and contents in a small space?

Even better: how can you find these very, very evil texts, ideas and contents in a huge, say, cyberspace?

Not THAT different, but different nevertheless.

One of the most common problems when dealing with advertisement companies is that they constantly try to impose their old tricks to new media.  It’s true: the principles of good copywriting and advertisement apply to Internet ads, but there are some differences (in fact, these differences are additional to the elements that constitute marketing contents).

The main core of marketing is persuasion: you HAVE to grab your customers by the nose and make them take an action.  Sometimes it’s making them buy, sometimes it’s making them share some information with you.  The differences appear in two main aspects: timing and rhetoric (when to say it, how to say it).

When and how.

Facts of life, people:  The attention span of the average Internet user is quite small.  I don’t mean to say that people’s dumber nowadays (although I feel inclined to think the exact opposite whenever I watch reality shows), but we don’t have much time and we need to extract essential information in a short period of time.

When? ASAP.  How?  Well, that’s a tricky question…

Really… how?

• Internet marketing, unlike traditional marketing, can generate conversions immediately.  That’s why you have to have a call-to-action (buy, share information, vote, anything…), something you can’t have on TV.
• You can target a very specific group through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Being assertive is key here.  Be brief and to-the-point.

Wait a minute… wasn’t this an internet about Internet VS Traditional marketing?

Not really…

What I was trying to say, in the end, is that the same principles apply, but you have to get your message through in an immediate way that, ten years ago, wasn’t as urgent as it is now.  People are ready to make business, more than ever.  The economy is so crazy nowadays that everyone is always looking for the best deal.

It could be your deal, if you know how to put it.