Your First E-Mail Marketing Campaign.
by Ed Rivis.

Here’s how to get in a position to send your first ever professionally engineered e-mail marketing campaign. Note this is just for small lists.

If you want to get into e-mail marketing seriously then I strongly recommend you get a Dedicated Server to run campaigns from. Get my book for more details.

OK, first of all you need to buy an e-mail marketing software package.

The software I recommend is instantly available because you can download it from the web any time you choose.

The specific software package I use myself (and recommend and have my team implement for the majority of our private clients) is ‘Gammadyne Mailer‘.
 
It’s an extremely powerful e-mail marketing package and yet at the time of writing it’s only about $150 US Dollars which at current UK exchange rate is about £85.

If the sales offer in your first e-mail is compelling enough — and you have a good relationship with a high percentage of people who will receive your e-mail then I fully expect most businesses -— even very small ones — to recoup the cost of e-mail marketing software the very first time they perform an E-Mail marketing campaign.

The caveat to Gammadyne Mailer is that at first glance it can appear quite complex. It sports quite an unusual interface—certainly not the type of standard interface most Windows software presents.

But don’t let this put you off!

To conduct a basic E-Mail campaign you only need to use a very small set of the full facilities it provides.

Step 1) First, click the following link and go and buy, download and install Gammadyne Mailer.

http://www.UltimateWebStrategy.com/ext/gammadyne.htm

Step 2) When Gammadyne first loads it’ll give you the option of increasing the size of the fonts and/or colour schemes.

You could simply click the OK button to continue past this screen unless you want to change the defaults at this point. (And you can always change those settings later anyway).

3) When the ‘Welcome’ screen appears click the ‘Create New Project’ icon.

4) Click the ‘Mailing/Send Operation’ icon.

5) The next screen to appear will be the Mailing Wizard.

Answer the simple questions and keep clicking the next button.

Here’s a quick guide to each question…

Question #1: Enter your E-Mail address or the address you want the recipient to see the message was From (e.g. your own E-Mail address could be Jo@MyCompany.com—but you may instead elect to have the message appear as though it was sent from Sales@MyCompany.com)

Question #2: Enter a single line of text for the subject that you want your E-Mail to have (to increase the likelihood of your E-Mail message being ‘opened’ by the recipient you need to have a snappy subject line—it acts as the headline that hopefully compels the recipient to actually open and read the message).

Question #3: Click the ‘In the Project’ option—some of the other options are where Gammadyne’s true power is but it’s beyond the scope of this publication to explain them all here.

See Gammadyne’s own help file for information on the other options presented here.

(Note: because you chose the simplest option among those presented in Question 3, Gammadyne will skip over questions 4 through 8.)

Question #9: Choose plain text (again, the other option - HTML - is more powerful but unfortunately too complex to explain in detail here.)

Question #10: Choose ‘I’ll Enter it into the Project’
(Gammadyne will now also skip question 11)

Question #12: Skip this question by clicking the Next button—unless you want to attach one of more files to your message. If you don’t want to — or if you don’t understand the question at all don’t worry just skip over it by clicking the next button again.)

Question #13: And finally for question 13 click "Directly".

(Gammadyne will suggest you click the other option but it’s prone to cause you problems and for the purpose of this mini-tutorial I want to show you the easiest possible way of successfully conducting an E-Mail marketing campaign.)

Finally, click the ‘Finish’ button and save the project when asked.

(Note: Don’t just call the file "email" or similar. Give the filename a description that identifies what this particular e-mail marketing campaign relates to.

That way if you want to repeat it in future you’ll be able to see which campaign is which simply by looking at the filename.)

OK, that’s configured the campaign.

Now we just need to type in the offer (the sales copy) and enter the E-Mail addresses we want to send the E-Mail to, then we’re done.

So, to finish off and send…

1) Click Recipients menu option down the left hand side of the screen.

2) In the large white box that appears on the write enter the E-Mail addresses you want to send to—put each E-Mail address on a new line, or separate them with commas. (For the purpose of this experiment you could enter the E-Mail addresses of a few friends or colleagues and warn them about what you’re doing and to expect the message.)

3) Click the ‘Text Body’ menu option down the left hand side of the screen and type out the message you want to be sent to everyone you typed in the list of E-Mails.

(Another absolutely feature of Gammadyne that I don’t have room to cover here is that it will allow you to mail-merge.

So for example each E-Mail can contain the first name of the person it’s sent to … ‘Dear Jo’, ‘Dear Mike’, ‘Dear Bob’ etc.)

For this simple demonstration though you could just type out ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, but I strongly recommend you read Gammadyne’s help file or get my book that explains how to mail-marge.)

So here’s a very basic example message…

Dear Sir/Madam,

I’m pleased to announce the launch of our new line of XYZ Widgets. For further details please call our office now on freephone (0800) 12345 or visit our web site at http://www.ourwidgets.com/xyz
   Regards,
   Harry.

   Harry Smith
   Managing Director
   Widgets Unlimited Limited

Please Note: OK, that’s actually a very poor E-Mail sales message! It’s unlikely to result in very much response or sales, because it fails to adequately educate or inform the recipient about the main benefits of the new line of Widgets mentioned.

If you want to know how to write effective, persuasive copy (text) I also cover web page copy-writing in my book. Or do a search on Googe — there’s tonnes of free copywriting resource out there.

4) Now press the F5 key (at the top of your keyboard) and then click the ‘Send Messages’ button at the lower bottom left of the screen.

(Note if you’ve not bought Gammadyne yet then it’ll warn you you’re using the Shareware version - if that’s the case then make sure the recipients of this campaign are not actual customers clients or patients!)

Congratulations!  You’ve just sent your first E-Mail campaign!

Note: If Gammadyne was unable to deliver any of the messages then it’ll give you a warning message. And there are a ridiculous number of reasons why E-Mails don’t always get to their destination so I won’t try and explain them all here. Suffice to say—if a good percentage of your messages got through then you can sit back and wait for hopefully some good response!

Happy e-mail marketing!

Ed Rivis is author of The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy which covers e-mail marketing in a lot more detail than he does here.
Download it from here:
http://www.ultimatewebstrategy.com