I’m really getting irritated with the general attitude of e-mail marketers lately. E-mail marketing is a wonderful and effective way to promote products, but that doesn’t mean that you need to blast your mailing list every single day. I have some marketers that hit me up more than once a day, and it’s nothing short of infuriating!

The people at the other end of the e-mail addresses are still people, and it’s unlikely that they appreciate the multiple e-mails they receive every week about the same product launch or “hot deal”. What most e-mail marketers forget is that these people are going to respond based on logic, emotion, and common sense. Appeal to those three elements and you have yourself an excellent e-mail marketing campaign.
Logic
If you e-mail your opt-in list more than once or twice a week, it’s probably too much and the list will begin to notice. You’ll start to see a drop off in your subscriptions and your conversions will begin to nose dive.

Don’t e-mail your list until you have something worth offering. Give them something that you would be interested in yourself. If you feel confident that you would not be annoyed by receiving the e-mail you are about to send, then send it. Otherwise, hold off until you do.

Appealing to your list’s logic is unlikely to be successful if they are annoyed with you, or if they have decided to stop paying attention to your e-mails. If your opt-in list is primarily internet marketing related, try sending them an e-mail with an article on hosting or marketing methods, with a small, passive blurb about the offer you are promoting. Many people will oversee the sales pitch, and instead see it as a good recommendation. Your conversions will likely increase as a result.

Emotion
Getting your readers fired up about something is a good way to increase your conversions. I noticed a massive increase in my conversion rate when I sent off three our four e-mails that hyped up an offer a little bit, yet did not have an affiliate link in them. The last e-mail I sent was all about the offer, where to get it (my affiliate link), and how to make it work. That one e-mail made me more money than any other e-mail I had sent prior.

When someone falls in love with something that they want, it doesn’t matter what is preventing them from obtaining it: they will eventually purchase it, or commit to whatever process required in order to obtain it. This is why a car salesman gets you to test drive the car as quickly as possible, as they know that if you really like the car while you are driving it you are much more likely to jump through whatever hoop required in order to buy it.

Common Sense

This is the same basic instinct that everyone has. You know, the fundamental rules that each person just knows. Common sense, though sometimes not really all that common, is the biggest barrier between a prospective conversion and a conversion.

You need to get around this barrier in your e-mail in order to experience success. One way that I have found to be successful is to make the particular offer than I’m promoting sound as if I’d be stupid not to have it. After all, who wants to make the dumb decision?

Figure It All Out

At the end of the day, you need to test and test some more. Tweak your mailing campaigns, split test e-mails, and generally just work at figuring out which works for you. Regardless of the tactics that you use you will find that there is no replacement for good old fashioned testing.