Basic Considerations for Running Email Marketing Campaigns
If you plan to promote your business on the internet, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your marketing campaign.
A lot of business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam.
This is not true and neglecting email marketing can cause you to lose out on a great deal of business.
By not appealing to potential customers via email, you may lose a great deal of business to competitors who are using email marketing campaigns to reach customers around the world.
The first step of an email marketing campaign is to create an email distribution list, in Internet Marketing jargon simply referred to as “list” and “listbuilding”.
Once you have made the decision to start using email marketing to promote your business you are likely having the problem to build a list.
A list is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials.
One common way to build a list is to purchase email addresses from distributors.
But this method is not very effective at all and i do not recommend it.
One problem with purchasing an email list is that you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of the list would have any interest at all in your products or services.
This is very important because while you want to reach a large audience with your email marketing you also want this audience to belong to your target audience.
When you purchase an email list you may be sending your email messages to some users who might be interested but this is largely coincidental. And your message is not likely to be well received because it was not a solicited offer.
Because of this circumstance you might find yourself accused of spamming as well.
Internet users are very quick to delete materials they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails.
Also a lot of Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are deemed to be spam. These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding out spam.
Thus you run the risk of having your email marketing effort turn out to be a complete waste if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message.
A much better way to create a list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services as well as other information which might be of interest to them.
This way you can build a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers with a genuine interest in your products and services and who are interested in learning more about what you have to offer.
To be in compliance with legal requirements like the CAN-SPAM Act, you should implement a “double opt-in” mechanism, by sending the sign-ups to your list a verification mail and only add them to your list after they have “opted in” and confirmed their interest to receive your offers once more by replying to your confirmation mail.
There are professional email marketing services available - like for instance Aweber.com or GetResponse - that provide the necessary infrastructure to build such a double opt-in list.
Another advantage of such a service is that it will send out the mails to your list too. They will mail in your name, but from their servers. Which avoids getting in trouble with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) in case of spam accusations.
Often these services claim to have a high delivery rate of the sendouts into the recipients inboxes.
Although my recent experiences make me wonder if this is still true today. Because from my own tests and from tests of my peers it seems that mails send out via professional email marketing services are no longer guaranteed to bypass the spam filters and reach the majority of recipients
A further disadvantage of using professional email marketing services might be their cost. Mostly you will have to pay recurring fees for their service.
If you want to avoid these cost, you should consider investing into you own email marketing infrastructure.
Some web hosting companies - like Thirdsphere - have integrated email marketing functionalities into their hosting offers.
If your web hoster doesn’t offer such features, you could buy a good email marketing script like Ultimate Autoresponder and install it on your server.
Another option would be to run all the tools needed for successful email marketing campaigns from your desktop pc or your notebook. The most complete suite of tools is offered by Atomic. Alternative software is provided by Infacta. Trial downloads are available for both solutions.
While building your list you should carefully craft the emails or e-newsletters for your email marketing campaign.
Whatever you plan to send out should contain more valuable information than sales pitches. Because if the info you send will be valued by the readers, it may help to persuade them to try your products and services.
Thus a “soft” sales pitch for your products and services along with the info would be ok.
You might also consider including useful links to websites which may be of interest to your readers.
Your content should also contain a portion which urges the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or at least investigating a product further by asking for more info.
In copwriting this is referred to as “call for action”.
In order to measure the effectiveness of your campaign, the action you call for should be trackable.
Tags: Business Building Basics, Email Marketing, email marketing campaign, email marketing tools, Internet Marketing, Listbuilding
1 comment
Email marketing promote s a lot of business through internet.We can do this process to start email marketing. I have my own website that sales some products. Now what I is my idea that I want to send email to my register customer about latest products?
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