Email Marketing SIMPLY Revealed

by Melvin Hill

Email marketing is a form of direct mail marketing using electronic mail to deliver your message to your audience. There are a number of reasons why email marketing is the preferred method of delivering direct mail.

The power of email marketing is in building an opt-in list of email addresses which you can market to via email.

To do this effectively you must have an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a program that you use in conjunction with your email list to effectively market to your audience. This tool is used to automatically email your customers at predetermined time intervals, with predetermined email messages and in a predetermined sequence of email message delivery. Specifically it can be used to confirm subscription to your email list, unsubscribe emails, and for ongoing communication and follow-up with your list.

Why is this important? Imagine having an email list of thousands. Now imagine having to manually, confirm subscriptions, unsubscribe and send emails to an email list of thousands on a regular basis. Not to mention determining who gets what emails, when to send those emails and also when not to send the emails that have already received a response. Again, imagine having to do this for thousands of email addresses, even if you did this for 100 email addresses it may still be too much for you to do alone. You would never get anything else done. An autoresponder handles all of this and more for you. I'm sure you will want to take advantage of this wonderful piece of technology.

Email marketing helps you become more effective and efficient with the following:

Selling to new prospects
Selling to existing customers
Promoting and advertising your or your affiliates product, service or business
Provide your customers with information, updates and upcoming events
For surveys, polls and other customer feedback

Reasons why email marketing is a direct marketers dream are as follows:

Cheaper to deliver

Eliminates the fulfillment cost of paper, envelopes and postage when sending direct mail

Easier to deliver

No waiting. No trips to the Post Office.

Quicker to deliver

Delivery is done at the push of a button. Therefore, you can email a list of thousands and as frequently as you feel comfortable.

Targeting Capabilities

Gives you the ability to target your emails by prospect, customer, interest, source and other possible distinctions.

Ability to track results of email

Track and measure the success of your email campaign. Learn what works and what does not by your CTR (click through rate). Determine what adjustments need to be made to have your emails convert better.

Create traffic to your website

When you send emails to your list you can provide links to send your prospects to anywhere you want on the web.

Builds familiarity, loyalty, trust and credibility

Your email list gets to know you better by establishing an ongoing relationship with you as you inform, entertain and provide value to your list.

An environment friendly paperless process

Not only can you save some trees, you can also save yourself some space in your office. The more files on your laptop, the less files on your desktop or in your file cabinet.

Things to consider when email marketing:

Spamming

Spamming is sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and unsolicited bulk email (UBE). Most folks views on UCE and UBE range from cautious, for various reasons, to just not being interested. Most SPAM gets blocked, ignored or deleted. To put this in perspective, ask yourself how many unsolicited emails have you read, commercial, bulk or otherwise? The conversion rate for spamming is not worth the risk for the trouble it can cause you. Spamming is against the law (See the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003) which can result in imprisonment, fines, a tarnished reputation and possibly a prohibition of working in the area of email marketing.

The practice of "permission marketing" helps prevent you from being accused of spamming. With permission marketing you get permission from your prospect to email them. This is most effectively done through a double opt-in method. With this method, the prospect initially opts in to your email list and then a confirmation email is sent to your prospect. Your prospect must then confirm subscription to your email before your will begin emailing them. However, at anytime your prospect wishes not to receive your emails you must provide them in every email with a link to unsubscribe from your email list.

Constructing your email

You want to construct a well crafted email that is going to get results. This is done by making sure that from the subject line to the post script your email is purposefully written to get results. Next, you shape, hone and fine-tune your emails to always increase your conversion rate, on an ongoing basis.

The basics of email marketing are building a list, crafting a message to that list and making sure your messages are received while doing all you possibly can to get your messages read and converted. The more advanced aspects of email marketing come in the form of tracking, analyzing and measuring the results of your email campaign.

An email marketing campaign is going to generate inquires, feedback, opt-ins, downloads, and sales. You can effectively handle these request with an autoresponder, there is no need to work harder than you must. If you want to save time and money then email marketing is very important and essential to your success when marketing via the internet.

There are other ways to promote your business on the internet but none as fast, efficient and cost effective as email marketing.

Article submitted Wednesday, July 22, 2009 & read 4 times.

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