I see my email copy ‘mentor’, Jay White, is surfing bigger waves with his Autoresponder Apprentice email copywriting program.

He’s teamed up with ‘American Writers And Artists’ (AWAI) to launch his program to their customers – minus the one-on-one email mentoring I received when I enrolled.

(As you can imagine, individual attention wouldn’t work with hundreds or even thousands of customers.)

No doubt other writers and copywriters will jump on a launch offer like this – especially as there looks to be a limited time discount – $100 off the retail $497 price.

Alas, AWAI’s affiliate program appears to be for US-based folks, otherwise I’d be promoting it here! (Memo to AWAI: And add Paypal payouts too. Paper checks are so Twentieth Century.)

That aside, I do recommend it for copywriters interested in how Jay writes his magic. Naturally, he’s worked hard for today’s success but some clues are there in his background as a catalog copywriter and as a writer of radio ad spots. (Tip to writers: Leverage your strengths and experience.)

And the secret autoresponder sauce?

Practice… practice… practice!

But what if you’re an online business owner interested in writing your own email copy?

Well, this program will definitely teach you a method for doing so. But the devil is in the details of creativity and in regular practice.

That’s probably where many owners will trip up… in not having time to craft their copywriting skills. However, if you’re committed to succeed, and on a tight budget, you can certainly write some good emails.

Of course, if you do have the budget and your time’s more profitably spent doing other tasks , there’s always plan ‘B’:

Hire a specialist email copywriter to do the job for you.

(If you think you meet the criteria described in the ‘Warning’ section of the link above, then please do get in touch.)

- Mark McClure

PS – The testimonial (in green at the top of this post) really is mine and is now on the AWAI sales page for Jay’s course. Get in quick before I cross the $500 per email rate too

65 years ago, on June 5th 1944, hundreds of thousands of Allied forces were preparing to invade Normandy from the sea and air, and begin the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis. (Yes, I’m not forgetting that the conflict on the Eastern front was still raging too.)

In the previous post (part 1 of 3) I briefly mentioned how a D-Day Battlefield Tours company might make use of an email marketing campaign to improve their response rate – and ultimately, to make more money.

And just as military campaigns are composed of strategy, tactics and a primary vision or ‘reason why’, your Internet Marketing efforts should be carried out in a similar manner.

For instance, the mission statement I recall General Eisenhower being given before he left the US was:

“Proceed to London. Invade Europe. Defeat the Germans.”

Everything else became subservient to that desired objective – coloured and distorted as it was by the ‘Fog of War’.

By the way, you do have a mission statement for your business? Something that pierces the marketing clouds of confusion and helps you to focus? If not, get it written down now on a single sheet of paper.

Assuming you do have one, then the development and execution of article marketing, press releases and email marketing campaigns etc must be carried out with your overall vision and mission statements for the business in mind.

So how does email marketing fit into the plan for this battlefields tour company?

Well, the overall email marketing campaign should have the objective of building one or more targeted lists of prospects and customers.

(Where possible, you should avoid having prospects and existing customers on the same email list as your marketing messages to newbies will not appeal to the old hands.)

The easiest way to start building your list is to have a sign-up box on most all the web pages. (Some sites request name and email as a minimum. Others are experimenting with only asking for email address. You can split test which works better in your case.)

Then when a prospect reaches the page they can be encouraged to sign up to your list.

How?

By some form of valuable giveaway – such as a limited time tour discount coupon or perhaps some unique online video clips/interviews from one or more of the tours. What works best will require brainstorming from you and feedback from your list (ask them!)

Then, having got people to optin to your list – and to confirm that optin by replying to a “did you really request to join my list” email from your autoresponder system – you can begin to market to them.

Notice I said “market to them.”

I did not say “sell to them.”

That’s a major landmine right there – and one of the reasons why many email marketing campaigns fail.

Because people H-A-T-E (well, most I know!) being sold to via email. It reeks of s-p-a-m these days.

So what do you do?

Well, let’s remember that most people probably don’t make time to read long emails (although you might want to test that assumption in your market!) and so we are looking at somewhere between 500-700 words per email.

With a brief intro, a conclusion and a PS statement at the end, that leaves just enough room for a short and relevant story or metaphor concerning some aspect of your product/service.

BUT – and I stress this – each email’s written specifically to get your reader to take action and CLICK through to a specific page on your website.

That’s it’s only purpose!

So, for example, your market research might show that US visitors prefer to visit places where US servicemen fought in Normandy – Utah and Omaha beaches, St Mere Eglise village etc.

Whereas the British and Canadians may be more interested in Sword/Juno beaches and the area around Caen and Bayeux (home of the famous tapestry).

In those cases you would probably have different email lists (each with a unique landing page) and the desired click through would be to get an info packet or place a specific online tour order.

The actual email content might be things like a short anecdote, or a client’s story, or before/after photos of the famous St Mere Eglise church where the dangling US paratrooper ‘played dead’ etc.

Now there is some story-telling art here in how the email is structured and the reader then transitioned into choosing to click through. It might take some digging through the customer feedback to find what really interests the type of person who comes on battlefield tours. But it could be done.

And how many waves of emails should you send?

Well, for a new prospect to (say) the US beaches mailing list, maybe 5 to 7 emails spaced over 10 to 14 days would probably work well. (We’d have to test to be surer.)

Remember the whole idea is to get the prospect to take action on every one of these emails and CLICK through to your main site.

Of course, not everyone will do this.

Some (only a few, I hope) will read every email and do absolutely nothing.

Some will unsubscribe. Fair enough. (And ALL your emails should ALWAYS have a visible and one-click way for them to easily unsubscribe. You do NOT want alleged spam complaints because they couldn’t find your unsubscribe button.)

Some will delete the emails or they’ll be lost in their ‘spam’ folders (it does happen, alas, despite our best efforts to educate subscribers to ‘whitelist’ emails they want to reach their actual In-box.)

And some will maybe only take action after 5 or more emails.

That’s why you need to send successive waves of these email landing craft – as many are literally sunk before they can reach their target (the target’s the prospect’s computer mouse clicking finger haha!)

And after the 7 ‘new prospect’ emails have been sent?

Well, I don’t advise you to go into radio silence mode and send nothing ever more.

What you can do is to (for example):

• send a periodic newsletter (every month or so.)
• send a ‘broadcast’ email if you have a special tour offer or announcement (e.g. a participating hotel has a 25% room rate discount if you book tour ‘X’ before May 1st etc.)

You can also start a blog and automatically have a short email reminder sent to your list each time a new blog post appears.

And then we have the internet marketing equivalent of the US 101st Airborne or the British ‘Red Devils’ paratroops – the 140 character microblogging tool, Twitter.

Imagine tweeting ‘live’ from a battlefield tour with links to photos and possibly short video clips throughout the day. You simply email your list and invite them to follow you on Twitter – and hey, it’s like a remote reconnaisance mission for people who can’t (yet) be there in person.

But we’ll talk about Twitter another time – else this blog post will resemble the 3 hour movie about D-Day, “The Longest Day” (which incidentally, I did require my 2 cycling companions to watch before we boarded the Portsmouth to Cherbourg ferry back in the early summer of 1990!)

And the call-to-action of this post?

It’s very simple.

If you want to have an ace email copywriter create a ‘get-the-click’ email marketing campaign for your product or service, I encourage you to enlist (sorry, force of habit. I mean ‘visit’!) my email autoresponder copywriting service.

- Mark McClure

PS – In the 3rd and final part of this brief series we’ll secure our email beachhead by looking at how the big guns of article marketing, blogging and press releases can drive traffic to your landing pages (where the email signup box is waiting for them!)

I should really sub-title this post: “All Year Round Internet Marketing.”

That’s because your online business presence can educate, entertain and yes, even captivate, prospects and customers 365 days a year.

How?

By using the big guns of Internet Marketing:

• Email autoresponders
• Blogging
• Articles
• Online Press Releases

You may remember that in a previous post I described how controversy sells.

Here’s another example of that with a topic I’m personally interested in – the D-Day Landings of 6, June 1944 and the subsequent Normandy campaign.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper mentions a military historian’s new book in which he presents some rather startling claims about the heavy French civilian casualties as the British and Canadians advanced on the town of Caen.

Caen D-Day Bombing

The journalist quotes Gary Weight, who runs Pegasus Normandy Tours, with his more measured opinion of the military’s decision to carpet bomb Caen.

Bingo!

Fantastic publicity for Mr Weight’s business – guided tours of the Normandy beaches and battlefields.

So, as an interested prospect, I google his site and, for a few minutes, proceed to relive my wargaming years (I had a D-Day simulation boardgame, Atlantic Wall, that covered an entire living room floor!) and a cycling tour that took 3 of us from Cherbourg to Bayeux in about 10 days, back in 1990.

We saw most of the US, UK and Canadian landing beaches, wiped away tears at the Omaha beach cemetery memorial (along with some kind German motorcyclists), drank ice cold calvados cider at the end of long cycling days and slept off wine, cheese and baguette lunches in the long grass by quiet country roadsides.

All those memories!

But once my imagination was stirred and I read through the website’s pages, (and I read EVERY single one of them. Hint: interested prospects are ravenous for information on their hobby/topic)…

… there was nothing to keep me coming back. (Unless of course I was ready to book a tour or decided to contact Mr. Weight’s team for more information.)

However, from experience I suspect (could be wrong!) that only a small number of first time visitors will do either of those – and an equally small number will take the trouble to bookmark the site for later visits.

Most 1st time visitors will simply hit the site and leave, never to return.

What I think Mr Weight and his partner should do is consider sending in the email Pathfinders!

That is, put together a short trip report (in pdf format) which describes the highlights of their tours with pictures, D-Day trivia, and personal annecdotes from clients (get their written permission to do so first).

To make it really exclusive they could include a discount off any tour for a 1st time customer (repeat customers would be on another email list) and perhaps a list of ‘recommended’ hotels in Bayeux and surroundings. (Cut an exclusive deal with a few of these establishments).

Then give that report away in return for the visitor’s email address – this can easily be automated with an email autoresponder service such as Aweber or GetResponse.

Put a big sign up box on the website which offers the report PLUS a 10 part ‘Pathfinder Tour’ by email.

Visitors will now know up front what they’ll be getting – a report and some followup emails.

Naturally, some people only want the report and will immediately unsubscribe from the mailing list.

That’s fine. They may or may not become future customers.
(Tracking these stats is important and the subject for a future blog post.)

As soon as visitors opt in to your list, the autoresponder immediately sends a thank you message and a link to the downloadable report.

Additional emails are then broadcast by the autoresponder – say at 2 or 3 day intervals.

And what’s the purpose of these emails?

To get the click!

Drowning in a sea of spam email, most people are not very tolerant to being sold by email.

In fact, they (and that includes me too!) HATE it!!!

This is where the savvy (and genuine) marketer can warm up prospects by building a relationship with them and providing helpful information on what to expect IF they choose to do business with them.

And for battlefield tours like this one, probably most prospects will have questions and logistics they want to sort out before making a booking.

So, in my opinion, the purpose of each email in the autoresponder series should be to excite and encourage prospects to click through to a specific web page where they can ask additional questions via email, a contact form or by phone.

Of course you can have a customized web page for each email in the series e.g. one for the famous and tragic parachute assault on St. Mere Eglise, another for Omaha beach etc.

All 3 contact choices should be clearly visible on the top half of these web pages (above the fold.)

When a prospect makes contact they’re several steps closer to being psychologically ready to buy – and the chances of a sale have increased considerably.

OK, that begs two questions:

1 - How many emails are enough in an autoresponder series?

2- What about blogging, articles, press releases and (chirp, chirp), the joys of Twitter?

Patience, dear readers, patience!

Email landing craft will come ashore in the next post.

And we’ll conclude the 3-part series with a bombardment of prospect resistance strongholds using heavy caliber article marketing, press release rocket launchers, blog post strafing and ack-ack tweets.

- Mark McClure

PS- This post’s title came from a book recounting the German side’s view of the D-Day landings. The English translation was “Invasion! They’re Coming” by Paul Carell. I must have read it dozens of times in the mid 80s.

PPS – Before you bombard me with emails asking where is my signup form for THIS site… plans are on the drawing board and they’ll be in action soon. The Samurai writer’s Operation Overlord, if you will.