* How to create urgency. * What type of promotional vehicle you can use to create urgency. * Content that excites, educates or entertains your customer.

A direct e-mail should be content driven, with an offer. The offer needs to create urgency and that urgency needs to relate to an expressed need that customer has. To create urgency, you need to have a time limit associated with offer. Your offer may be any of following:

1. Discount on products or services 2. A value added purchase 3. Discount on complimentary services 4. Sweepstakes

We have listed types of promotional vehicles you can use, in order that Western Consumers prefer. Recent studies indicate majority of on-line shoppers prefer a discount on products or services over any other type of promotional vehicle.

1. Example of a discount on products of services:

"Receive 10% off on this product if you purchase before October 15th!"

This is a discount on service or merchandise, with a defined time frame. The customer must make a purchase within that time frame, in order to take advantage of discount. If you choose this method, make sure your on-line shopping system is programmed with new price and discount. Do not give discount after defined time frame expires (ex: October 15th). The consumer must believe their window of opportunity is a limited time frame and they will not receive discount unless they purchase within that time frame.

2. Example of a value added purchase:

"Purchase this item before October 15th and receive a similar or complimentary item for free!"

This is a great strategy to use, if you have a new item you would like to introduce to your customers or if you have an old item which you would like to eliminate from your inventory. The customer has to believe there is good perceived value to "value added item" or else there will not be any urgency created and your promotional e-mail will be unsuccessful. This type of promotional e-mail offer, can be very successful but usually is not as successful preceding method.

3. Example of a discount on complimentary services:

Take for example those of us who use email on our jobs. We often have an email address for work and one for personal stuff. There are times when we are at home and need to check our email from work and vice versa.

Online marketers are a special breed of Internet users. People who have been doing online marketing for any length of time often have several email accounts. They have a couple of POP email accounts, and often have several web-based email accounts.

Now, if you are sitting at your computer reading this now and wondering what point of having multiple email addresses is, then I will answer that for you now.

As a marketer with a website, you will want to submit your site to search engines. Unfortunately for us, each time we submit something to search engines, search engine companies want to send us first a thank you message and then they want to follow that up with more email that advertises something for one of their clients. After all, search engines are supported these days primarily by advertising dollars.

Most new marketers on web have an additional inflow of email to contend with. Not understanding that FFA sites will not help their businesses, they post endlessly to these sites to try to get word out. A single submission run to FFA sites could avalanche your email account. Generally, FFA site owners have an autoresponder attached to their FFA site. When you make a submission to their site, they in turn send you an email hawking their wares. Sometimes, they will send you several follow-up emails for your one submission.

For FFA site owner, it is not really spam because they told you at their FFA site you would be added to their mailing list when you submitted. Since you likely used software to make submission, you did not know that.

Though possibility exists that you can get one email for every FFA site submitted to, reality is that you will get one email for every six sites submitted to.

Now here is a trap that even experienced marketers fall into. Some software packages and websites advertise they will submit your URL to hundreds of thousands of "Search Engines." The URL submission industry is notorious for making this one misrepresentation. The truth is that there are not hundreds of thousands of search engines!

According to http://www.searchengineguide.com/, there are 3,681 engines in their directory. Granted, they may not have every search engine on planet listed, but I am willing to bet that they are close. Further, majority of search engines you will find listed at SearchEngineGuide.com are specialized search engines that will not list every kind of site on web. That means that of 3,681 search engines available to be listed in, only a portion of those are available for your own use.

So, you must remember that when you hear a website or a software company suggesting "that they will submit your URL to hundreds of thousands of Search Engines," they are misrepresenting their product. When you note someone making this sort of claim, you can bet they are submitting your URL to primarily FFA sites, if not only FFA sites.