After months of working with numerous start ups, I have come to the conclusion that some particular clients think the Internet is going to make them rich over night. What happened to sound business plans and planning for the future? All to often, a client believes they can set up an Internet marketing campaign and double their company revenue in one week with little to no effort.

1. Have proper expectations. The Internet is a marketing channel and not a get rich quick platform. You will lose faith quickly if you think the Internet is your only means of a marketing plan.

2. Realize that your target market will find you in the offline world. I literally had to remind someone the other day to not forget networking in their business community. Face to face relationships are very important - still!

3. Understand that setting up a Google or Yahoo PPC campaign doesn’t guarantee that your target audience will click on your ads and convert into a lead. Markerters can create and write compelling ad copy, but we can’t make people click on your ad. If PPC isn’t right for your business we will know and try something else. Keyword - try something else. Everything Internet marketing avenue is not a for sure thing.

4. Understand the basics of email marketing. No you can’t buy a list of emails from a slime company. That’s called spam. You have to build an opt-in or permission based list. By spamming people you are literally breaking the law and just plain ol standard business ethics. People open emails from senders they trust and more importantly you’ve sent them something in the past that contained value. Here’s a great write up at WilsonWeb on this.

5. Understand the bare bone basics of how much traffic your website is actually getting.I speak to hundreds of businesses a month about improving their online strategy. If you don’t know where you are now, how in the world will you know what to improve.  You may be sitting on a gold mine and not even know it.

We were recently working with a client who was blasting out to 50k subscribers. Over lunch, we were discussing all the steps they were taking prior to sending out the email blast. The content was very relevant to the audience, but the open rate was around 5-10%. Not very good!

After digging a little bit more, I realized that they were not testing different subject lines prior to sending the email blast. The subject line of your email is free advertising. It should be compelling, could have a call to action, a promotion or a the title of a headline article. The existing subject was "Date, Company Name, Newsletter. Not very compelling to say the least. We began brainstorming on the different subject lines they could test. Keyword here is - TEST.

Prior to sending to 50k subscribers we recommended they test 3 or 4 subject lines with a smaller portion of the list. This measures what subject line is resulting in the higher open rate. This way the official newsletter launch date is 2 times more effective when it comes to the open rate of the actual email.  This was pretty important  to the client  as they have some high paying advertisers in the newsletter.

So in closing, try something different when it comes to your subject lines. Test with a small sub group of your subscriber list. We’ll talk more later on how you can segment your lists in order to send even more relevant copy.

Chow!