The Smart Guide

To Email Marketing
Conversion

UNBOUNCE

www.unbounce.com

Whats in the ebook?

Email marketing evolved. Thats what this guide is all about. Its how smart marketers are combining email
campaigns with targeted landing pages to increase their conversions.
As well learn, the crux of effective email marketing is based on the principle of sharing, not selling. You do this by
leveraging your expertise through content marketing.

Why Email Marketing Loves Landing Pages

Growing Your Subscriber List The Smart Way
Building Mindshare With Great Content
Converting Your Subscribers Into Customers

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The Smart Guide To Email Marketing Conversion

Ever Experienced Click Fear?
Email marketing is the most effective, yet terrifying
marketing tool at your disposal. Why? Because once
you hit that send button to push your message to
hundreds or thousands of people, any mistakes
youve made will live permanently in the inbox of
your leads and customers.

This action is to send your reader to a targeted

landing page, where you have the space to really
tell your campaigns story. As youll learn, the
real crux of effective email marketing is based on
the principle of sharing, not selling. You do this
by leveraging your expertise through content
marketing.

Email Marketing, Evolved.

Welcome to higher conversions.
Theres a better way to do email marketing; one
thats designed to improve your conversion rates,
and at the same time simplify your emails. Instead of
exhaustive, long email content with too much detail
and too many links, you can create a short, easy-toread email with a single action to perform.

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Some Email Marketing Stats to Really

Convince you.
There have been many reports that email Open
Rates have increased in the last 4 years; However
Click-Through-Rates are down considerably
according to this study of 80 billion emails. This
is especially true for promotionally driven email
campaigns. Interestingly, when you compare
promotional marketing emails to editorial driven
emails (ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, blog
posts), theres a clear winner.

Q3 12 - Campaign Performance by Message Type

Message Type

Open
Rate

Click
Rate

CTOR

14%

1.3%

9.5%

Editorial

32.7%

8.3%

25.3

Marketing

21.8%

2.9%

13.3%

Other

20.4%

2.8%

13.5%

Research

24.7%

3.8%

15.5%

Service

49.7%

7.6%

15.2%

Acquisition

*CTOR (Click to Open Rate) represents the CTR

for those who opened the email.

Acquisition: Emails with little to no pre-existing relationship

Editorial: Emails which include content that provides value to the reader
Marketing: Promotional emails to drive a purchase or lead
Other: Emails which dont fit into the other categories
Research: Emails sent to gather opinions via surveys
Service: Transactional emails ie. sign-up, an order, or some other recent action

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Why Email Marketing

Loves Landing Pages
Email and landing pages arent a new concept, just
an underutilized one. This relationship is getting
better as marketers become smarter. Learning the
importance of optimizing your campaigns for higher
conversion rates is not only about improving open
rates and click-through rates - its about fine tuning
what happens after people leave your email and
thus impacts the overall success of your campaign.
The goal of your email marketing campaign should
focus on getting your prospects out of their inbox
and into your house. Your landing page acts like
your houses welcome mat. It should establish a
sense that a good click has been made, and that
theyre in good hands with your business.
Your landing page should be designed to achieve
the following:

1. Concise Email Copy: By moving content to

the landing page, you allow your emails to be
shorter, and tightly focused on a single, easily
digestible objective.
2. Message Match: Reaffirming your emails callto-action (CTA) by closely mirroring it with your
landing page headline reduces confusion and will
keep more people from leaving.
3. Expand Your Message: Your landing page lets
you provide the detail required to warm and
qualify relevance before you send them on to
the next stage in your conversion process. Here
you have the opportunity to include enhanced
design, media (like video) and use trust factors
(like testimonials).
4. Test: By performing landing page tests with
your email subscribers, you can optimize their
experience and more importantly, begin the
process of better understanding your customers
goals and needs.

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In this guide, well cover the following topics to help you become a smarter marketer:

Part I - Growing Your Subscriber List the

Smart Way
1. Create incentive with free quality content
2. Set up a list with your email service provider (ESP)
3. Build a high-converting landing page for your
content
4. Drive traffic to your landing page
5. A/B test your landing page for better results

Part II - Building Mindshare With

Great Content
1. Segment your subscribers
2. Style your email copy
3. Leverage evergreen content

Part III - Converting Your Subscribers

to Customers

2. Add a trial or demo link in your ebook content

3. Use the welcome email after someone has
download content to offer a demo
4. Co-author your content with a complimentary
company to gain exposure to their list
5. Set up an autoresponder to be emailed out 2-3
weeks following a download
6. Follow up after webinar
7. Run a 15 minute demo at end of a webinar
8. Contact customers that dont complete your
ideal set of activation steps
9. Email people throughout their trial with examples
of what existing customers have done
10. Ask customers nearing the free-trial end date if
theres anything you can personally do to help or
if theyd like a trial extension

1. Add a CTA in the footer of your email suggesting

they try a demo of your product/service

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What does the process look like?

To get started, heres a diagram that explains the basic workflow that were going to discuss through the ebook. As you
can see its a process that get repeated every time you do a new
Set Up List

REPEAT

Add To List + Groups

Create Content

Master List

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

Gather Leads

2 Create Landing Page

3 Drive Trac

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Part I - Growing Your Subscriber List the Smart Way

What value does email marketing have if you dont have anyone to market to? This section is all about how you can
grow your subscriber list so that you have highly qualified, information seeking subscribers.

1. Create incentive with free

quality content
Creating valuable and educational content about
your area of expertise is a great way to engage your
prospective customers, and is the cornerstone of
Content Marketing.
Though we wont tell you which type of content to
produce, here are some popular ways companies
produce content to build their subscriber list:
Informative Content: You may want to give
away an ebook, distribute a whitepaper or case
study to educate prospects about your area of
expertise.
Informative & Continuous Content: Some
companies produce content for a blog, a useful
or educational newsletter or an ongoing ecourse
which teaches some of value.

Invitations to Live Events: Live webinars,

Conferences, Workshops and Meet & Greets are
all great ways to build your list using content.
For further detail on producing these types of
content read Creating Content from the Content
Marketing Institute.

2. Set up a list with your email

service provider (ESP)
Now that you have the content youre going to use
as an incentive, youll need to set up an email list
with your ESP where youll manage the subscriber
data you receive.

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Your signup process will depend on the type of

content you create, but here are some important
considerations for your email list settings:
Will you require double opt-in?
Typically when you use a double opt-in
mechanism (provided by most ESPs), youll enjoy
a higher engagement rate, but some argue that it
deters subscriptions.
Will you be using a Welcome/Confirmation
email?
Welcome emails can be used to ensure that the
purpose of your list is clear to new subscribers.
As with double opt-ins, this can help mitigate
spam reports and ensure your subscribers really
want to be subscribed.
Will you be adding subscribers to a group
based on the content?
Many ESPs provide grouping or tagging features
which allow you to segment your list based
on a subscribers activity or communication
preferences. If you assign your new subscribers
to a group based on the content they are
requesting, later you can send relevant emails
based on this group or tag.

Will you use an Autoresponder or Drip emails

to send your content?
You may choose to provide your content
immediately after registering by redirecting
subscribers directly to your content, or you
could send your content by email using an
autoresponder. Moreover, you may choose to
send your continuous content this way over
days, weeks or even months.

3. Build a high-converting
landing page for your content
Now that your email list is ready to receive
subscribers, youre going to need to build a landing
page to begin collecting email addresses in
exchange for your content.
The goal of this landing page proves that your
content is not only worth of an email address, but
that your company is trustworthy and an expert in
your field. Your landing page conversion goal will be
a successful form submission.

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Here are some important considerations for your

landing page:

Landing page anatomy

Before designing your subscriber acquisition page,
you need to understand the page elements to
include to achieve your goal. Were going to take
a look at two use-cases for landing pages that
use different content types to acquire a new lead/
subscriber.

An Example of a Webinar Page

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To make this type of page successful, you need

to add use-case specific elements, all designed to

5. Registration count stating how many people

have already registered can create a sense of not

support the desired conversion goal (in this case, to

get someone to register for a webinar).
6.

Webinar registration page elements

A successful webinar landing page should have
these 11 components:
7.
1. Descriptive title that communicates exactly
what will be covered in the webinar.
2. Photo of the hosts/guests, they should be
looking straight ahead to establish a connection
with potential registrants.
3. Short bio of the presenters that speak to their
expertise. This is important for those who have
not heard of the presenter before.
4. Urgency generators to encourage people to
register right away. An example of this is to limit
the number of virtual seats, e.g. Register now
as seats are limited to 500. To make this even
better, have an updated count of how many seats
remain.

8.

9.

wanting to miss out on a popular event. (You

would want to wait until you had a fairly high
number before using this tactic.)
Ask questions in advance on your form if you
are doing a Q&A portion in the webinar. This
can help you structure the session around what
people really want to know.
Date and time of the live webinar, ideally listed in
multiple time zones.
How long the webinar will be, so that people
know how much time to set aside for it.
Remember that people are busy and on average
only about 30% of registrants will show up. Being
as transparent as possible will help raise this
number.
Strong form header and call to action that
explicitly asks people to register for the webinar.
Not sign up or submit.

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10. Safety net statement for those who

miss it. Its standard practice to email
the recording to all registrants after the
event. By stating that they will get it
even if they cant make it, youll increase
the number of registrants.
11. Privacy policy to enhance trust. This
should be placed next to the email form
field.
For more details on effective webinar
landing pages read 10 Reasons Smart
Companies Use Webinars For Lead
Gen.

An example ebook download page

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Ebook download page elements

A successful ebook download landing page should
have these 10 components:
1. Title and optional subtitle of your ebook.
2. Balanced and clear section titles that state
whats in the ebook, and how to get the ebook.
3. Overview of the benefits youll derive from
downloading the content.
4. Breakdown of content in your ebook - often a
list of the main chapters.
5. Professional imagery that illustrate what the
ebook will look like once downloaded.
6. Preview a short portion of the ebook (often
chapter 1) - this lets people know the quality of
what they are getting. (I know, I know, theres no
preview in this example).
7. Short form to collect the email. As well discuss
shortly, you need to ensure that you are asking
for an appropriate amount of data (which differs
depending on the content you are giving away).
8. Privacy policy to enhance trust.
9. Descriptive call to action such as Get the
ebook.
10. Social proof such as a testimonial from someone
who has read and benefited from the book.

As you can see from this example, you can mix the
conversion currency by allowing people to buy
your ebook in different ways. In this example we
provide the option to get the ebook by tweeting
about it. This creates a viral feedback loop, where
people see your ebook on Twitter and are enticed to
click, arriving on this page where you now have the
opportunity to gain another lead.
As the primary purpose of your page is to gather
emails, you have to weigh the use of a tactic like this.
One of the key benefits of this approach is that your
campaign can have an extended lifetime by virtue of
its circular nature. You could also run an A/B test, so
that 50% see just an email form, and the other 50%
see both options, allowing you to ensure a steady
flow of emails while also seeing a steady flow of
social engagement.
For more detail on this concept read the pay with a
tweet vs. pay with an email case study.

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Finalize your landing page

Now that you have architected your page using the
components listed above, you need to consider the
basic requirements of an optimized landing page
to give it the best chance of being successful. The
following rules should be applied to every landing
page you create:
Message Match
A critical part of your landing page is to match the
call-to-action from your inbound source (blog,
social media etc.) with the main message (typically
the headline) of your landing page. This lets your
visitor know theyve arrived in the right place and
youve delivered on the promise you made when
they clicked.
Continuing with the ebook example, an appropriate
call-to-action to arrive at this page would be:
Download the Ultimate Guide to Landing Page
Optimization ebook. Then upon arrival, they see a
headline to match creating the mental connection
needed to keep them on the page.
Use Forms to Collect Lead Data

Clearly these pages would be pointless without a

form, but there are couple of things you need to
know to set them up and make them successful.
1. Get a form set up on your page
To collect an email you need two things: somewhere
to store the data (your ESP), and a way to collect the
data (your form). You can either use the form code
provided by your ESP and manually add it to your
landing page, or better yet, connect your email list
with your landing page using a remote integration
(with Unbounce, you can send leads from any
landing page to MailChimp, Campaign Monitor,
Constant Contact or Aweber).
Now that your form is connected with your email
list, its time to make the data youre asking for,
appropriate for the pages purpose.

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2. Balance the size of the prize

This concept relates to a fair exchange. Your visitor
is giving up their precious personal data, including
their email address, so you need to give them
something of equal value in return. This is no time
to be greedy. For an ebook download, all you really
need is an email. For a webinar registration you can
ask for extra information such as the size of the
company, or if you have the need for an extended
sales cycle, a phone number may be required.
3. Data validation
Its important to ensure quality data for three
reasons:
You dont want your list to be full of bogus
data (falsely boosting your numbers)
To ensure that legitimate people are actually
receiving what they are asking for. This is the
reason companies often ask for your email
twice, to prevent you accidentally typing in
something wrong.
You also want to make sure that an email is
correctly formatted for the same reason of
correct delivery.

Privacy Policies/Statements
This is an important trust factor. Not many people
will click on your privacy policy link, but seeing it
will put them at ease. There are a couple of ways
to achieve this. You can link to a full legal page that
explains how you will use their email, or you can
add a statement that says that you wont ever spam
them. Whichever tactic you choose (both is best)
you need to place it right next to the email form field
- not at the bottom of the page where people might
miss it.

4. Drive people to your

landing page
This is where your experience as a marketer gets to
shine. Here are the usual suspects for driving traffic
to your landing page:
Social media
Website placement (end of blog posts,
popups)
Outreach to partner or complementary
companies & contacts
Guest blogging
Pay-per-click ads

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Important note: If your traffic sources are different (your own contact list vs. social vs. paid search vs. guest post) its a
good idea to build a separate landing page for each. This lets you measure the effectiveness of each of your inbound
channels.

5. A/B Test your landing page

for better results
When you run an A/B test, you compare one page
against one or more variations that contain one
major difference in an element of the control page.
After a set amount of time, or visits, you compare
the results to how the change affected your results.
A/B testing is actually a nickname for a variety of
testing that involves single element changes across
multiple variations, so it might actually be A/B/C/D
testing, but it is still called A/B testing and if you
see A/B/n or Split Test that is just a more accurate

The data approach uses statistical data like

bounce rate, exits, conversion stats, and funnel
analysis. Data driven hypothesis use tools like
Clicktale, Google Analytics, Omniture, and
CrazyEgg.
The people approach employs tools like
Qualaroo (formerly KISSinsights) and SilverBack
to gather user feedback. These are all about
addressing the quality of the experience on your
site or specific pages.

expression of one control with many variations.

Develop a hypothesis for your test

The first step in any A/B test is to create a hypothesis
for what will make the page perform better. There
are two very common approaches: one revolves
around data, the other involves people.

Your most effective hypotheses will come from

combining both the data and people approach.
Again well use the webinar example from earlier to
develop our hypothesis.

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An example hypothesis
We think that by adding the statement Even if you
cant make it, register anyway and well send you

The diagram shown demonstrates the workflow of

an A/B test with variant B having a conversion rate

the recording below the form button will increase

the number of registrants.

of 75% vs. 25% for variant A. Thats a 300% increase,

bam!

Having established your hypothesis, youre now

ready to build a new version of your page (based
on your hypothesis), which youll test against your
original page.
Build your test variant
Using your hypothesis as your guiding principle, you
now need to duplicate your landing page and make
the change you think will increase conversions. In
this case adding the register anyway statement
below the form button.
Run an A/B test & measuring performance
In your test, every visitor will see one version of the
page or another, and youll measure conversions
from each set of visitors. A/B tests allow you to test
different versions of copy, images, forms etc. against
another. Layout choices such as where you place the
elements can also be tested, or functionality choices
like when and how you show error messages.

VISITORS RANDOMLY DISTRIBUTED

VERSION

VERSION

VERSION

VERSION

VERSION B IS BETTER THAN VERSION A

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Start a new test

Add, rinse, repeat. Its now time to document your test results and begin work on a new hypothesis for your next test.
Remember testing should be an ongoing series of experiments.
For further reading on A/B Testing get The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing.

Part II - Building Mindshare With Great Content

Your ultimate goal is to acquire new customers, but after only receiving one piece of content, your subscribers wont
be ready for the hard sell, in fact, they may never be. They may be purely interested in your content - but this is
ok as it can lead to word of mouth recommendations and awareness creating more potential subscribers and
customers in the future.
Continuously producing great content is an effective way to build mindshare in your company. The more quality
content you produce, the more you will be the go-to company for your area of expertise. When it comes time to
make a buying decision, you will be front and center.
The point at this stage is to keep your subscribers warm (and in your sphere of influence) until they are ready to
become a customer. If they become cold by a lack of attention from you, they are less likely to open your emails, and
more likely to unsubscribe from your list.
With that in mind, here are some guidelines for creating your new content:

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Segment your subscribers

Whenever someone downloads or registers for
something and they are added to your master email
list, also add them to a segment or group relevant
to the action they performed. For example, if they
downloaded your How to Design a Logo ebook,
you would flag them in a How to Design a Logo
ebook segment. This allows you to segment in the
future, so that you can send them another relevant
piece of content (and prevent sending them the
same thing twice).

Using the example above: Thanks for downloading

our ebook How To Design a Logo we thought
youd like our latest one, How to Choose The Right
Colors for Your Website.

By emailing this group a suggestion to download a

new ebook called How to Choose the Right Colors
for Your Website, you are helping to establish your
reputation as a relevant source of great content.
Subscribers who download the second ebook get
placed in a second segment. The more content they
consume, the closer they likely are to becoming
a customer, and the more likely theyll be open to
viewing a demo of your product or service.

Keep your email short and simple with one action

to perform, people dont have time to read long
emails when their inbox is stuffed. Make it easy to
evaluate if your email is relevant to them.

Style your email copy

When writing your email, bear in mind you are
building a relationship, personalize as much
possible.

When you send your email reader to a landing page

with a form which asks for an email (which you can
use to add them to additional segments of your list),
be sure to pre-populate the form -- after all, you
already have their email address, its just common
sense to remove those barriers.

Leverage evergreen content

Repurposing older or evergreen content to your
new subscribers just makes sense. Youve got it,
and it might be quite relevant to them. Using an
autoresponder or drip campaign based on what
content of yours theyve enjoyed before (which
content they downloaded, which webinars they
attended etc.) makes it easy to imagine how you can
really get your content working for you.

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Dont stop
The lesson learned here, Dont stop creating great content...

Part III - Converting Your Subscribers to Customers

Now that youre collecting new qualified subscribers every day, you may be thinking How do I turn them into paying
customers? This is tough, as content marketing is based on a very soft approach, and you dont want to turn people
off by suddenly switching gears in a way that comes across as salesy.
The 10 tactics below are designed to achieve your goal of converting your subscribers into active and happy
customers. Take advantage of what you learned in Part II about groups and segmentation, to further segment your
email marketing based on customer behaviour and their position in your product or service usage funnel.
1. Add a Call-to-Action in the footer of your email suggesting they try a demo of your product/service
This should go to a landing page where they can either watch a video of your demo, or they could register for a
live session webinar with Q&A.
2. Add a trial or demo link in your ebook content
There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to include it in the footer of each page. A more effective way is to
dedicate a page at the end of each chapter that suggests trying a demo or signing up for a trial.
By having a dedicated page, you can include a few benefit statements to encourage people to click.

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3. Use a welcome email after someone has

download content to offer a demo
As soon as someone downloads your content,
you should send them an email to thank them.
Even if you provided a link to the requested
content already, you can provide another one
here. This is a good spot to add a demo link or
trial offer (linked to a landing page, of course).
4. Co-author your content with a complimentary
company to gain exposure to their list
By co-authoring an ebook, you are reaching a
broader audience. Agree to co-marketing terms
ahead of time. Some examples include:
Sending the content to each others
subscriber lists
Sharing the content on each others social
networks
Combining this with an offer to try the
other companys product - perhaps with
a discount coupon for extra incentive.
Likewise they do the same for their
customers to sign up for your product.

5. Set up an autoresponder to be emailed out 1-3

weeks following a download
For this, you will want to segment your list and
make sure to remove existing customers. Trying
to turn a customer into a customer is, as you can
imagine, counterintuitive. If however, you are
offering a demo instead of a signup, it should
be educational in manner, so that it appeals to
anyone.
6. Follow up after webinar
Make sure you email all of your webinar
registrants after the session with a recording and
potentially a link to some relevant content or
an upcoming webinar, to perpetuate the cycle.
Remember, that this is not just for attendees, but
for everyone who registered. You might even
want to segment based on whether or not they
attended, making your email that much more
personalized.

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7. Run a 15 minute demo at the end of a webinar

This can be a very effective way to establish
interest in your product, but you need to be
explicit and tell attendees that the demo will
happen, so that they are aware of it in advance and
have the option to leave. Many will stick around
if your webinar is compelling enough. Stay away
from mentioning or showing your product too
much during the webinar itself, after all, you are
getting to showcase it at the end.
8. Contact customers that dont complete your
ideal set of activation steps
Many companies who provide a trial period
have a series of steps that they would like to
see completed in order to consider a customer
activated. At Unbounce for example, during our
30-day free trial, we like to see 3 out of the 5
following actions, completed:
a. Running 200 visitors to a page in the past 30 day
b. Adding a new user to their account
c. Creating a second page
d. Creating a test variant page

e. Configuring a working integration with one of

our partners (e.g. MailChimp) to gather their leads
At that point we consider them an onboarded
customer. If they dont achieve your specific
goals, email them with helpful instructional
materials to guide them further towards being an
active (onboarded) customer.
9. Email people throughout their trial with
examples of what existing customers have
done
Firstly, always ask for permission if you are going
to show off customer work. Once you have this,
put together a landing page with examples of
work created (in the case of Unbounce, that
would be landing page examples built with the
tool) and testimonials that demonstrate the
business benefit of using your product or service
- this could be time saved, or an increase in their
Return On Investment (ROI).

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10. Ask customers nearing the free-trial end date if theres anything you can personally do to help them make
their decision
Sometimes people will sign up but wont be ready to start using your product or service. Giving them an extension
is a friendly way of keeping them close by and at the same time a gentle nudge to remind them of what they
signed up for in the first place.

In summary
Over the course of reading this ebook, we hope youve enjoyed learning about how email marketing can be done in a
smarter way, by utilizing content creation and the use of targeted landing pages.
As a brief reminder, we covered:

Why and how email and landing pages work together for smarter marketing
Growing your subscriber list by creating incentive with free quality content
List building tips
Building a high-converting landing page for your content, including examples of how to build effective ebook
and webinar pages - and the anatomy of each
Ensuring your landing pages are highly relevant to your emails, and are built using best practices
Driving people to your landing pages
How to A/B test your landing pages
Continuing to create content to expand your appearance as a subject matter expert and use groups and
segmentation to target content to relevant list members
10 Ways to Convert Your Subscribers to Into Customers

Use these techniques and youll find your email marketing more effective, measurable and durable.

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