If you can't answer "What's in it for me?" then you will have a problem developing and designing an e-mail campaign that works effectively. True, it's sometimes harder to apply this exercise to one product/service versus another, but if you can't answer this question, no one is going to buy.

To apply this concept to real-world offerings, here are some examples of why people click and buy:

• They buy more memory for their computers so they can run important software or fun games that won't work well without the extra memory. (They don't just want to brag they have it.)
• They buy courses on making money to fulfill their dreams of vacations, cars, houses, and so on. (It's not because they look like fun.)
• They purchase the latest vacuum cleaners because keeping their houses clean will be easier or faster. (It's not about all the gizmos it has.)
• They purchase insurance to protect against a future disaster. (It's not because it has an immediate value.)

Take a moment and think about advertising you've seen for these and other products. Don't the most memorable ads quickly zero in on the real benefit to the consumer and always answer the question, "What's in it for me?" Of course they do.

With e-mail becoming increasingly harder to employ effectively, now is a good time to review your messages and make sure they answer that critical question. In most cases, talking about the features of your product is not going to motivate consumers to buy, but presenting a strong value proposition that explains how the features of your product will benefit them will work.

This sounds simple, but I see so many e-mails that miss the target. For example, though it's easiest to write, "Buy the whizmotron vacuum cleaner because it has the same space-age technology NASA uses," the much better approach is to write, "Buy the whizmotron vacuum because you can clean your house in half the time."

Or consider this: Selling cosmetics at a discount isn't as motivating a message as saying you could buy an entire wardrobe with the money you save on these cosmetics. Clearly, answering this key question is the basis for creating a compelling consumer offer. Sometimes it takes time to come up with the right answer to the question -- I constantly improve the success of my e-mail ads by continually doodling headlines that present the value proposition in a powerful, provocative way. Time and again, I've turned ads that produced $0.40 CPMs into ads that produced $4 CPMs. Keep reading.

===================================================
Paul Soltoff is the chief executive officer of SendTec, Inc., the parent company of DirectNet Advertising (DNA) and iFactz, and has more than 20 years of direct marketing experience on both the client and agency side. SendTec provides results-oriented direct marketing solutions for acquiring, retaining and communicating to customers through digital advertising; direct response television; patent-pending e-mail/Web convergence technologies; performance media, and media buying services. SendTec represents clients and advertising agencies such as AOL, National Geographic, AARP, Grey Worldwide, Cosmetmque, DBD Needham, Shell Oil, National Geographic, and IBM. the librarian at The Success Library, a vast collection of ebooks, articles and resources to help you achieve online success. Get your library card at: http://www.thesuccesslibrary.co.uk Subscribe to the library's free newsletter Success Lines. Free course for subscribing & free ebook with every is ==================================================

Setting up an email follow-up campaign.

Any professional marketer will confirm that follow up action on previous prospects is very inexpensive in comparison with seeking new prospects. It is also common knowledge that it usually takes at least five or six emails to each prospect before they respond in an affirmative manner.

Experienced business owners also know that marketing isn't over once you've made the sale, for it costs much more to sell something to a new customer than to an existing one.

For those reasons, if you are not following up customers' enquiries and purchases, you are guaranteed of losing many sales. There is no excuse for that, now that email marketing software has made follow up inexpensive and, through automation, almost no time consuming at all.

Some tips to be applied when following up on a prospect or customer:

1- Set your "Thank You" letter to be sent immediately to the prospect after they have asked for information. It is critical to follow up with customers while the offer is still fresh in their mind. Set your follow-up letters to be sent on day 4, day 14, day 30 and then every 30 days after that or until the prospect unsubscribes.

2- Some days before a Special Price deadline, send a brief e-mail message reminding the prospect that the Special Price Offer is about to expire. The reminder can include an offer to send another copy of the original message if the prospect doesn't have it.

3- When a sale is made, the customer should receive a follow-up thank-you note within 48 hours.

How to send auto follow up with Mail Communicator?

Dynamic Mail Communicator includes a powerful feature that allows you to manage your follow up campaign automatically. simply follow the following steps (you can download Mail Communicator and try it for free at http://www.apexpacific.com/mailcomm.html ):

1. Create a "Send Rule" by clicking the "New / Send Rule" button from the toolbar.

a) Give a name to the follow up project

b) Specify when the follow up message should be sent as a number of days after the [date] field included in your mailing list.

Note: your mailing list must contain a date field as [Date].

For example:

[Email], [Name], [Date], [Company]

peter@customer.com, Peter, 12/05/2003, Umbrellas Inc.......

c) You can then choose between three actions to happen when the specified day comes:

- Send message

- Remove email address from the mailing list - this action will be used if you don't want to send message from this mailing list again.

- Move email address to another mailing list.

2. Attach the "send rule" you have just created to the follow up email. On the "Send Mail" window, click the "Send _____ message this session" drop down list and choose the "Send Rules" option, then select the "Send Rule" you want to attach with the mail. Once you click the "Send" button, the email will STAY in the "Outbox" folder, and check the "Send Rule" every day to send the message automatically when the condition is matched.

For more information about Dynamic Mail Communicator capabilities and download a free trial version visit http://www.apexpacific.com/mailcomm.html

Website Ranking Competition at CeBIT Australia 2003

May 12, 2003, Sydney, NSW--How well do Australians promote their websites?

At this year's CeBIT, Apex Pacific has been running a competition on Website Promotion: all visitors attending the exhibition were able to demonstrate at the Apex stand how well their or their company’s WebSites ranked on Australian search engines using Dynamic WebRanking.

As we expected, we saw many interesting and varied websites tested, large companies such as Ninemsn, Telstra, Canon or Webcentral entered the competition along with more than a hundred medium to small sized companies. Representatives from each company were able to choose three keyword phrases and points were awarded for those ranked in the top 20 positions of the search engine results for every keyword.

Successful ranking in search engines depends on a number of factors; one of the most important being page optimization for the right keywords. At the competition we found that large companies need to actively promote their websites in order to achieve a high ranking. Even for Telstra it was difficult to achieve a high rank for “data network” (Optus does though!), and surprisingly, Telstra is not listed in the first position for “phone Australia”. Eventually, smaller websites that had been optimized for more specific keywords and narrower markets obtained better results: www.congressrentals.com.au achieved impressive results for “simultaneous interpretation” and “conference microphones”, and www.datasonics.com.au for “music master”. www.netvantage.com.au and www.webcentral.com.au also performed very well considering the difficulty of achieving a high ranking for keywords like “web hosting Sydney” and “web hosting Australia”.

Finally, the winner was www.congressrental.com.au with its remarkable results for “simultaneous interpretation” and “congress products”. The prize consisted of an eMarketing software pack valued at AUD$1,300.

Drive More Traffic to Your Website for Free

As many of you already now, a couple of months ago we released the version 7.0 of Dynamic Submission which includes many new features and improvements that our customers had requested, such as

Apex Pacific recently released the version 7.0 of Dynamic Submission, including many new features and improvements that our customers had requested, such as

• Manual submission tool, to easily submit your web site to all the engines that are not accepted for auto submission, including Free manual search engines(such as AltaVista, DMOZ etc), Pay-Per-Inclusion engines(AltaVista, Yahoo, LookSmart etc) and Pay-Per-Click engines(Overture, FindWhat, Espotting etc)
• Scheduler which allows you to schedule your submission task to run the submission automatically at specific time with specific intervals.
• Send Submission reports via email automatically which is a powerfule feature especially for those who provide submission service to their own clients (this feature is available for Enterprise edition only)
• Keyword Library, which allows you to manage your collection of keywords easily
  
• FTP Upload Manager

Also you'll find improvements that have made more user-friendly and helpful the interface, help file and the rest of features of Dynamic Submission.

It is easy to upgrade from version 6.0 to version 7.0. When you install the new version 7.0 for the first time, the program will automatically detect whether you have installed Version 6.0 on the same PC. If yes, it will prompt you with the option to convert the web profiles from Version 6 to new Version 7.0 automatically.

more info...

Download your FREE trial version from:

http://www.apexpacific.com/

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