It’s said that the mind recognizes color quicker than it does written language.  When planning your landing page, use this to your advantage.  Subconsciously, different colors are connected to different emotions, give off different impressions, and elicit different responses from viewers.  Based on your product or offer, you can choose the best colors to reinforce its qualities and back up your message.

-Black gives off the impression of power, authority, and superiority. Black could therefore effectively be used to market any high-powered product, or support your stance that your product or service is the best.

-White is used by doctors to signify that their environments have been sterilized.  Because of this connection, white could be used to advertise any healthcare offer, or even any cleaning product.

-Orange makes people feel enthusiastic, which is exactly how you want them to feel when viewing your page.  And it’s the color of the Tennessee Vols – Go Vols!

-Blue elicits feelings of loyalty and dependability, and thus could be used to reinforce the fact that your product or service is worth the audiences’ time and interest.

-Brown gives people a sense of reliability.  It could be effectively used to drive home the point that your product or service will not let the customer down.

-Green brings to mind nature, as well as good health.  Because of its relation to the outdoors and health, green could be used to promote any outdoor service or healthcare product.

-Red is an intense color. Anything red is often where people look first, so use it to direct your audiences’ attention.

-Purple signifies wealth and luxury.  A shade of purple would be a good color to use when advertising spa packages, cruises, or high-end getaways.

-Yellow brings to mind the warmth of the sun.  However, yellow is the hardest color for the eyes to take in, and therefore should only be used as an attention getter in small amounts.

When using these colors to your advantage, you should also keep in mind how the colors you use look together.  You want your landing page to be pleasing to look at, and easy to read.  You want to choose a font color that can be readily distinguished from the background, and can be read with minimal effort so that your message isn’t lost in the process.  You also want to make sure not to use too many colors (or too extreme shades) as that could overwhelm the reader, and cause them to leave your page.

Coming up with an effective and successful e-mail marketing campaign requires the perfection of three main parts of the e-mail: the from line, the subject line, and the ad itself.  Your time spent creating an effective campaign can be made more productive by the use of some persuasive techniques.

In the from line of the e-mail, you want to establish your credibility.  You can do this by using your company name.  This creates a sense of trustworthiness on your part, and will encourage a higher open rate.  Once you have established your credibility, you can draw on Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to help with the rest.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is a five step process of persuasion:
1. Attention: present a problem, make an offer, or use legitimate statistics to gain your audience’s interest
2. Need: convince your recipients that a specific action must be taken to solve the problem/accept the offer
3. Satisfaction: tell your audience how your product or service can help
4. Visualization: show what will happen if they accept your offer, and what will happen if they do not
5. Action: tell the recipients exactly how to accept your offer or buy your product/service

Relating this to your e-mail marketing campaign. . .

The subject line of your e-mail is where you get the recipient’s attention.  Without losing your credibility, you should make an offer or present an interesting idea to your audience.  If advertising beauty products, a subject line that says “Get rid of wrinkles now – $25 worth of free products” would be more effective than a subject line that just said “beauty secrets.”  Knowing what subject lines to use and not use, can help raise your open rate.  Once you have settled on something that will make people want to learn more, you can move on to creating the ad itself.

This motivated sequence is meant to get people to take a specific action, which is what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign.  You should briefly show your audience they have a need that your product or service can satisfy.  Then you need to show what the effects will be if they accept your business, and what the effects will be if they do not.  Again, in the case of a campaign for cosmetics, this step could be achieved with a before and after photo.

Finally, you need to incite the recipient to take action.  The better your call to action is, the higher click-through rate you will have.  To do this you need to clearly explain to your audience how to attain your product or service, and where they can go to find out more information about it.  You could include a link that says “Click here now to receive your offer” so that there should be no confusion on the recipients’ end about what to do next.  Therefore, your audience will go to your website or landing page, and your campaign will have a higher rate of success.

The acronym PPC stands for “pay per click” and is a form of online marketing through which an advertiser pays a website or publisher for each click his or her ad receives.  The most common instance of PPC advertising is search engine marketing (for more on SEM and SEO, please visit here).  However, PPC advertising can be implemented within email campaigns and on websites as well.

The primary difference between search engine PPC and website or email PPC is the cost model.  PPC marketing on the search engines is based upon a bid system whereby keywords and keyword phrases specific to a particular industry, product, service, etc… are used to generate the ads displayed.  As mentioned in the article referenced above, the keyword popularity (how many other individuals/companies are bidding on it) determines the cost per click.  When one thinks of search engine PPC, typically one thinks of Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter, although there are other smaller search engines upon which one may advertise.

The cost model for PPC on websites and email campaigns is typically a flat rate model with predetermined cost per click (CPC) which is usually negotiable depending upon the site content, popularity of the page or email message, and so forth.  For example, one might choose to advertise on a discussion forum for, oh I don’t know, wedding planners!  Let’s say that there is a main forum for general discussion, along with several sub-forums: Choosing Your Wedding Photographer, Choosing Your Wedding Dress, Choosing Your Wedding Cake, and Choosing Your Venue.  Suppose that an author has written a book on choosing the ideal location for a wedding.  It makes sense that he or she is going to select the “Choosing Your Venue” forum to advertise the book in order to reach only those visitors to the forum who are interested in selecting a location for a wedding.  The CPC to advertise on this forum will likely be higher than the main forum, because the type of traffic is more targeted for the author’s audience.

The click-through rates and conversion rates tend to be much higher with PPC on search engines due to the more targeted nature of the ads, keyword selections, and visitors.  That said, the ease (and speed) with which one can spend a large sum of money using PPC advertising on the search engines is astonishing.  This is why developing a marketing strategy is so important to a successful PPC campaign on the search engines.  The potential ROI can be much higher than with website and email PPC, but only with a carefully implemented plan and regular analytics monitoring.