One of the big problems I see in advertising today, particularly on the Internet, is the believability factor. When I see an advertisement, email, or sales letter that sounds too good to be true, I instantly ignore it. There is so much snake oil being sold in the world today, especially on the Internet, that when I see big claims made for anything, I ignore them as being junk.

For example, today I received an email with the subject line saying, “How to double your business.” My instant response was, “yeah sure, BS” and I hit the delete key. Then I received another email with the subject line saying, “FREE CHEAT SHEET: My 10 Most Important Business Insights This Decade.” My response was, “yeah right, if you are such a business genius, why are you sending out spam emails like this instead of having a cover story done on you in the Wall Street Journal?” Delete.

Many marketers seem to think that for their advertising to get a person’s attention, they have to make huge claims about their product/service being the best thing since the invention of the automobile and that it will change the world. The problem with that type of marketing is, NOBODY BELIEVES YOU! People are becoming so desensitized to big claims that they ignore them.

So, as a marketer what do you do? How do you mark your marketing and advertising more believable? Well, first of all, stop saying what you have is the best the world has ever seen. It’s not. And even if it was, people would not believe you. Every company says what they are selling is the best, so there is no believability any more. It is just corporate hype and goes in one ear and out the other.

The second thing you can do is tone it down a bit. Saying you can increase a company’s manufacturing output by 6% over 10 months is far more believable than saying you will increase a company’s manufacturing output by 50% in a week. The first claim sounds like it could possibly be true. The second claim sounds too good to be true, so it will in all likelihood be ignored. Do not use whole numbers. An increase in profits of 6.2% sounds far more believable than 10%, 15% or 20%.

Another marketing tactic you can use is to include testimonials where your customers state how your product or service helped them. For example, “I bought the XYZ Widget from ABC Company and now my zipzopadoodler is not breaking down anymore and it is producing 3.8% more zibblyboos each month. Thank you ABC Company for making a great product I can rely on. Joe Doe, COO, Zibblyboo, Inc.” And finally, use brief case studies that prove quantitatively how your product or service has helped a customer. It does not have to be long; 3-4 paragraphs is fine. The key is that your case study is believable and not over-hyped so your prospects can put themselves in the shoes of your clients and say, “I have that same problem and it sounds like this product/service is exactly what I need.”

About the Author

Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm. Peter develops and implements strategic marketing programs for businesses of all sizes with a specialty in law firm marketing. For a no-obligation quote, contact The Geisheker Group marketing firm today. www.geisheker.com (920) 471-1638.

Email marketing is one tool that an increasing number of businesses have latched onto within the past couple years as it is an amazing opportunity to double or even triple profits. If you have decided that this method of marketing to your customers is a strategy you’d like to tackle, plenty of resources are out there to help you get started. However, it can be difficult distinguishing among the many different email marketing companies. Here are several characteristics of a reputable email marketing service.Building the Opt-In Permission-Based Mailing List

A crucial part of email marketing is having easy-to-use contact list management features. First and foremost, an email marketing service should allow you to be able to important your existing mailing addresses from a file on your computer. This is often the preferred method when adding a lot of contacts because manually entering your existing contacts email address one-by-one is more time consuming and leaves lots of room for errors to occur.

Second, one of the characteristics of list management that an email marketing provider should contain is a feature that allows your list to be segmented into multiple groups. As you build your email list, you’ll see why the segmentation is important. Remember, not each contact is the same and having different segments lets you treat them differently.

A third feature that your provider should have is the easy-integration of a sign-up box on your website. Being able to use a sign-up box from your email marketing service is perhaps the most important feature you should be looking for. A sign-up box that’s strategically placed on your site acts as an automatic marketing tool that works on autopilot adding subscribers as soon as they enter their email address.

Sending Emails

An automatic email service should offer a variety of options when it comes to sending out your emails to subscribers. There should be pre-designed HTML templates, image galleries that you can use if you want to include images, and there should also be the option to customize your own design. In addition, there should be guide points along the way and systematic instructions to help if you get lost. An intuitive, user-friendly, and easy-to-use interface is what you ultimately need in an ideal email marketing service.

Tracking Tools

An important part of the marketing process is tracking your efforts. In order to know the success of your efforts, you need to know what your subscribers do with the information contained within those emails. A reputable email marketing provider should contain such data like how many emails were opened, which links your prospects clicked on the most, and how many emails bounced because of invalid or full email addresses. In addition, important subscriber statistics that you should have access to include what your email-list growth rate it as well as how many subscribers have been added and removed. Ideally these reports will be updated in real-time so that you don’t have to wait to gauge your success.

All of these issues are important to look out for when attempting to choose an email marketing service. The ability to customize emails, easily maintain your list, and have data readily available at your fingertips are all features that will help you succeed at the highest level with your email marketing efforts.

About the Author

Rudy Barell is a Senior Account Executive with Elite Email, the #1 email marketing program used by businesses around the globe. Experience how easy it is to build your mailing list, create eye-catching emails and track your success using detailed reports with the complete email marketing software. Try it free!

Give your customers a new reason to buy again. Offer the service or product they have bought before, but this time with an added incentive. You not only design the web site, but also promote it for the first month.

Big discount stores like Kmart and Walmart have discovered the truth in this system. You’ll notice they go wide but not very deep. Instead of selling six different styles of can openers, they sell just one or two types of 60 different kitchen utensils.

Use this same principle to maintain your business’ niche focus while bringing existing customers more and more related products.

Each time you add a new related product to your line, blast out another email to your customer base announcing your addition .

Kevin Nunley provides marketing and copy writing. Read all his free tips at DrNunley.com Reach Kevin at kevin@drnunley.com or (801)328-9006.