Would you like to guarantee YOUR email campaigns are delivered to the in-box where they belong? Then you absolutely MUST implement these best practices because an email in the SP*M-can is a waste of your precious time and money.

1. Provide Valuable Content

Make sure all of your emails are relevant to your contacts. Send you customer and prospects an invitation, a tip or trick of the trade, a coupon, a friendly note, or an offer. Just make sure it’s something they’ll want to receive from you.

2. DON’T Buy or Rent Lists

Doing so almost guarantees you’ll be SP*Mming people. Did you collect the names? Did the people ask you for information? Nope? Then it’s SP*M!

“But where do I get names from?” you might ask. Well, start with what you’ve got, ask for referrals, put banners on sites, use pay-per-click-ads, get people to post about you, use lead generation tools, and use social networking. May sound like a slow start…buy boy does it beat paying fines for breaking SP*M rules.

3. Double Opt-in Your Contacts

That basically guarantees you have permission to market to them. Double opting-in requires your contacts to confirm their contact information BEFORE you start you email marketing campaigns. It’s an extra step, and yes, you will lose some of your potential leads. But the odds of being considered a “SP*Mmer” go way down!

4. Clean Your Contact List Every 6-12 Months

This means you take every contact that you haven’t engaged with somehow – no downloads, no requests, no new opt-ins – and do one of two things. Either delete them from the list or send an email that asks them to confirm their continued interest.

5. Know the CAN-SPAM Guidelines

The rules about SP*M regulate your header content, your subject line information, your opt-out requirements, and how you identify yourself. Know the rules so you can keep your money in your pocket.

For more information about improving your email marketing practices, click to download a free guide about Email Marketing 2.0

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Infusionsoft Versus a Marketing Assistant

Before you read this, remember that we created computerized solutions to save ourselves the work. In many cases we used to hire people to save ourselves the work, today we can choose either a biological solution (an employee) or a digital solution (a piece of software.) With that thought out there for your consideration, consider this…

In 2009, the median expected salary for a typical Marketing Assistant in the United States is $37,471 or $3,122.58 per month (excluding all the other costs an employer must bear.)

Assuming a typical 37 hour week this equates to 160 hours a month of “working” time, about $18.74 per hour. There are approximately 1600 working hours a year for a typical employee and 8,760 total hours in a year.

We work for about 20% of the year when you compare total time to work time. So it’s fair to say that if you made your marketing assistant work every hour of every day then you’d have to pay them about 5 times as much or about $187,000 a year!

Currently Infusionsoft Pro costs $499/mo or about $5,988 per year. Already this is about 6 times cheaper than the media salary of an marketing assistant but Infusionsoft works 24/7/365.

If you run the numbers you’ll find that Infusionsoft is about 30 times cheaper. Put another way, you’d need at least 5 full time marketing assistants to handle the workload. And frankly I’m unconvinced they’d match the speed and efficiency of a computerized system which operates at millions of cycles per second.

My point (for I know this is a somewhat “silly” comparison) is that if you think of Infusionsoft as a person hired to your team, they’re the best value you’ll ever get for your dollars. They won’t quit. They won’t get sick or demand a pay raise. They will not need vacations and won’t ask for double-time on statutory vacation days. And the quality of their work will remain consistent day after day, year after year.

Nope, for a mere $499 a month you’ll get the digital equivalent of staffing nirvana (or pretty close to it… nothing’s perfect!)

So, for those who wonder about the price consider this, $499 is the PRO level. If you are sending less volume through the system (upto 75,000 emails) you can pay $299 a month – it’s cheaper still. And if you didn’t want ecommerce, a shopping cart, affiliate management or sales force automation then you can use the $199 service (upto 25,000 emails a month.)

It’s really a no brainer when you look at this way.

http://CheckoutInfusionsoft.com for yourself, take it for a test drive and discover the power of adaptive automation

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