A lot of small business owners approach other business owners with their products or services via email.

Responses to this communication however can be varied, and many people get discouraged and get up.  If you feel like giving up on your email marketing, and looking only to other solutions, assess WHY the emails you send out are not getting you sign ups.  Let’s say you own a business where you collect emails from business owners, and send them an email asking them to sign up for your free website service.

• Do you address the business owner and make reference to a conversation you’ve had with a member of the staff, or are they generic?  If you personalize your emails, they are much more likely to get at least a cursory glance, rather than getting deleted as unsolicited spam.
• is the copy of the email addressing a specific problem they have to capture their attention, and offering a solution? Busy people usually have their brain half focused on how to solve an existing list of problems, if you tap into one of those problems they have already taking up CPU cycles in their brain, getting their attention is way easier.
• does your email have a clear “to do”?  Is there a clear next step you are asking them to take, or are you just dumping information on them? Without a clear call to action “Click here for your free report!” or “Call for a complimentary marketing evaluation!” you may loose their attention right at the end of the email, and you will not get any response.
• Is the email template you are using a visual marketing tool, or just plain text?  An HTML email with well designed graphics matching your site, will be more effective at marketing than a black and white text email.
• Are you tracking if the emails even arrive, and if so, how many times they are opened, and if they are clicking through to your site or not? A tool like Salesforce, which allows email delivery tracking and individualized emails based on an HTML template, combined with tagging click-through traffic from that specific person with Google Analytics using custom variables, allow you to see where the point of failure is.
• Do you have Google analytics installed on your site, to see what actions visitors are taking when they reach your site?  Is there a clear call to action on your website?

POSSIBLE POINTS OF FAILURE:

• delivery success (are the email addresses you are getting correct?)
• response to the content of the email (are they captivated, and paying attention? do they keep the email and open it more than once?)
• call to action (are they actually clicking through to your website from your email?)
• the response to the website once they click through. (read bounce rate, Analytics page overlay showing if they click through to the signup button, Hot page script overlay tracking mouse movement to see if they are even SEEING the sign up button, etc)
• finally, the signup process… install analytics on the various pages, to see if there is a point of failure in the process (where they start to fill out the form and give up at one point, or they take one look and run, etc)

Once you break down potential client responses into the four component parts, you’ll be able to identify your point of failure in the process. With this information, you’ll know where to focus your efforts to make changes.

Yes, it takes lots of work. But the tools are there to allow you to see where the problem is, if you take the time and effort to dig in.