Remember the traveling salesman that would put his foot in the door to keep it from being slammed in his face? Your emails can be like that, albeit a little more welcome.

You or your creative professional can design an email that is compelling and cross-platform compliant, but it is the subject line that makes or breaks a campaign.
The key to success is managing the recipient’s expectations when the email arrives.

Before anyone opens an email, they ask themselves the following questions:

Who is this?
Make sure that your email subject line identifies who you are and your relationship to the user. A line like “Thanks for signing up for the M19 MEDIA mailing list” properly identifies you to the user as someone that they know.

Why are you contacting me?
People generally don’t like surprises and are leery of opening emails for fear of viruses and all sorts of other bad things. Give them a specific sense of what the email is about before they open it. “Claim your small business social media marketing report for signing up with M19 MEDIA” let’s the user know what they can expect to find when they open the email.

How did you get my email address?
Many email marketers take too long to respond to people who sign up for their email mailing list. That time lag can allow your user to forget all about that form that they filled out on your site. Make sure that, even though they opted in twice, that you send them a reminder within a day or so to remind them that they did. Here, you can use the email client’s preview pane to accomplish that goal. Many email clients will display the first sentences of your email and here is where you can lead off with the reminder that they signed up in the first place.

What do you want?
Make sure that your offer or Call to Action is displayed in the subject line. Tiger Direct does a good job of putting some of their specials in the subject line. So even if I am not interested in a 21″ monitor for $200, I know that the email is about their special sales for that week. “Thanks for signing up for M19 MEDIA’s mailing list. Your 30% coupon is ready!”

Why should I care?
Your email subject line should that be relevant to the audience that is receiving it. This means that you may have to segment your list so that everyone gets an email that means the most to them. “Solve your small business lead generation with this white paper from M19 MEDIA.” should get the attention of a small business owner that is struggling with lead generation. That person will likely open my email.

Some other considerations:

Make the Call to Action time sensitive. Emails that feel urgent or require immediate action usually get opened more quickly, especially if the email arrives soon after the user signed up for the email newsletter.

Avoid spammy words. This should be easy when you are customizing your email subject line to resonate with your audience. Here is a list of words/phrases to avoid.

Stay tuned for a post about email content!

I ask a prospective client about his/her goals, and they invariably say something along the lines of “increase sales” or “get more customers”, but many small businesses don’t have a clue about how to keep the customers that they have or improve the relationship that they have with them in order to make them more than one shot deals, or, better yet, get valuable referrals from them.

It’s a known fact that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a new one, a fact that is lost on many small business owners.

The Customer Relationship Life Cycle

Essentially, the Customer Relationship Life Cycle works like this; every customer goes through these stages of engagement with your brand:

• Awareness
• Engagement or Exploration
• Familiarity
• Commitment
• Separation

Each of those stages is an event and requires event marketing. This is not to be confused with a Back To School sale or a newspaper ad for Mother’s Day. This is about the events on the Customer Life Cycle.

The basic idea is to keep your customers in the Engagement/Commitment phases as long as possible. It used to be a time where people became loyal to a brand because that brand was what they grew up with or was the only game in town. Not so any more. There is competition from all over the globe to provide the kinds of good and services that you do.

So you have to have a plan. Here are some key concepts to remember:

Acknowledge Engagement

Small businesses need to have a strategy to deliver a message to each customer when they reach a certain engagement milestone on the Customer Life Cycle. What do you tell a person when they make their first purchase? Their tenth? Their fiftieth? Or if they haven’t made a purchase in a very long time? Each of those events is an opportunity to deliver a customized message to that particular customer that a) acknowledges the event, b) thanks/rewards them for the behavior that led to that event and c) creates an incentive to continue said behavior. Keep doing this and that customer will advance onto the next stage of the Customer Life Cycle.

Create Customer Evangelists

So when you have rewarded a customer to the point that they are in the Commitment stage of the Customer Life Cycle, something wonderful happens. They start telling their social network (friend, family, coworkers, Facebook, Twitter) about the wonderful relationship that they have with your brand. Think I’m kidding? Stand in a group of men and tell them that you are looking for a mechanic. You know the response that you’ll get. Each of them will tell you that “their guy” split the atom.

Now you have a “sales force” working for you, bringing you even more business.

Develop a Multi-Channel CRM Strategy

Sit with your creative/marketing people (insert shameless pitch for M19 MEDIA here) and devise a plan to communicate with your customer base on a regular basis. Email is the cheapest way to do so, but don’t forget the other channels, like direct response mail. If you have a storefront, you can use postcards to bring them in. Likewise with lo-so media, like Foursquare. Create incentives for repeated check-ins or purchases. Or, if your base is small enough, call them! Whatever you do, communicate your gratitude and you’ll keep those customers for life.

When was the last time that you checked out your marketing? How long has it been since you produced a new brochure? Edited the content on your website? Changed up the messaging in your emails?

We’re human and we get bored easily. It might be a reason we become obsessed with collecting  a lot of stuff. Well, your customers are human, too. If your website hasn’t changed in the last 6 months, it’s time to change it up. If you’re saying the same thing over and over in your email marketing, your audience won’t even open your emails anymore because they already know what you’re going to say.

Keep it fresh to keep their attention. Challenge yourself. Find a new way to interpret your brand or a new way to get their attention. A great way to do all of those things at once is to revisit your website. Is it still working for you? If not, then change it. When you do, you can send an email to your customer base telling them so and voila! You have something new to talk about.

In short, figure out what is working and polish it, what is not working and discard it and you’ll breathe new life into your customer relationships. Good luck and drop us a line if we can be of any help with cutting the wheat from the chaff.

I check most of my emails to get information about the state of the medium. I have found that emails are getting longer and longer and LONGER. They present so much material that my eyes glaze by the first scroll. I say keep is short, sweet and digestible. Give me the main message and let me get on with my day. I’m sure you concur.

Enter the owner, who has spent months or years in the trenches.

Enter the marketer, who knows that the only reason that he’s there is because the owner is desperate and out of ideas.

I usually let them talk themselves out and only occasionally poke holes in their logic. Then I go into my schpiel. I talk about their current situation and what I see that can be changed. I talk to them about what other companies are doing. I talk about other projects that have worked. And then I sit back, watch and listen.

As a marketer, one becomes a priest or therapist of sorts for the small business owner. I found myself as much a student of human behavior and body language as I am a marketing guru. Listening and responding appropriately got him to trust me and really let his frustrations out. If you listen closely, you can get a lot of information from the potential client that will be helpful when you are preparing your proposal.

The client was more than an hour late to the meeting. That told me that he is harried and needs something taken off his plate. I offered to be a solution to his time problem. I offered that we divide the labor: He defines and defends his brand, I become person who makes the world see him as he wants to be seen. BTW, no one ever went broke cutting a business owner a little slack.

The client didn’t face me for most of the meeting. Maybe his back was bothering him? More likely, he is uncomfortable that his marketing efforts to this point have failed and my presence represented that reality. I don’t know any entrepreneur that is comfortable with the concept of failure, especially after he has built so much. I didn’t take it personally. My response was to remind him that he has the right goals, but hasn’t found the right path to them. When you absolve them of that responsibility, they open up, as he did.

The client was angry that customers/the target market/prospective clients didn’t behave the way that he believed that they should have. That’s a tough one. Again, I reminded him that I was there because those people let him down with their “I’ll call you tomorrow” lies. We’ve all done it. Some people really believe us! I encouraged him to manage his expectations and that a deal is only a deal when the check clears. I have learned that the hard way. I comforted him with the prospect of a multi-channel campaign that didn’t put all of his eggs in one basket.

The client wanted to make me a “partner”. This tells me that he is averse to risk or he is broke. And as we all know, marketing involves some form of risk and there are no guarantees for results and broke clients are bad clients. As the head of a service provider, I can make those calls that save the contract and delay gratification. If you are a small firm like M19 MEDIA, then work with them. I told my prospective client that we would charge outright for the website redesign, but that we would work on a percentage basis on the social medial channel. He felt better, and we get the bulk of the project paid for in cash.

He thought that a 1.3% conversion rate from an email blast was bad. What?!? He sent out an email to 900 people and 12 walked in the door. That is awesome for a brick and mortar business. Many small business owners don’t realize that their target market isn’t sitting at their desks waiting to pounce on their next awesome offer. Chances are, they are getting 20 of those awesome offers per day. The fact that 1.3% of those recipients opened, read, and acted on his email is pretty damned good. I educated him of that fact.
He felt better.

As a small business that works with other small businesses, remember why who you got into your vertical in the first place. It’s because you love what you do! Well, your clients and prospective clients do too. You have to acknowledge that their business is the culmination of a dream and a LOT of hard work.

Don’t go in overly critical. Mention lost opportunities, not screw-ups. Talk about possibilities instead of tasks. Romanticize the project. Make it the part of their dream that they left out. Under no circumstances use your knowledge as a weapon or tell them that their site is crap because chances are that they had a heavy hand in its construction. When you get technical, remember to circle back to what it will do for their bottom line. Mention how closely their brand is tied to them as individuals. They’ll get that since they have truly poured their heart and soul into their business.

NO small business owner ever changes their website as much as they say that they will. Consider that before your blow their budget with an expensive CMS.

M19 MEDIA may not get this contract, but the client certainly knew that I got what he was saying and empathized with his frustration. Perhaps that is what will get him to sign on the dotted line…he felt understood for once. He’ll remember that when I am telling him that his assumptions are wrong…it’ll come from love and understanding.

Do-si-do your partner….and Promenade.