By Herman Drost
Website Promotion With Email Marketing
Author: Jean Lam Article: Email marketing is a way
of directly communicating with a target audience to
market your website or increase awareness about an
upcoming promotion connected with your site. In general,
the term "email marketing" is used to refer to any
emails sent to customers or potential customers in
relation to your website. Email marketing can be a
very effective tool to inform customers of future
events, or attract new customers by increasing awareness
about what your site offers. Success in email marketing
does not come from thoughtlessly blasting out email
ads without working to build your own customer base.
The basis of successful email marketing is to build
existing in-house customer lists, augmenting them
by outreach through outside mailing lists. Your own
email list allows you to develop a long-term relationship
with your online audience -- to communicate with and
market to them over and over. Generally email marketing
can be implemented with these 3 objectives in mind:
(1) Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire
new customers or persuade existing customers to buy
again (2) Sending emails designed to encourage customer
loyalty and enhance the customer relationship (3)
Placing your marketing messages or advertisements
in emails sent by other people Of course, it seems
easy to collect hundreds of thousands of email addresses
and send everybody an email about your website. Unfortunately,
it isn't quite that simple. Essentially, you require
the permission of the email recipient to send them
info about your site otherwise it may be regarded
as "spam" which is unsolicited bulk email. In the
marketing industry, spam is definitely a four letter
word and something that should be avoided at all costs.
If you are accused of spamming, there could be direct
consequences such as damage to your reputation, your
website may be shut down and your email accounts closed.
In conjunction with this, there is a strong argument
from successful marketers that long-term email campaigns
only work consistently when they are based on permission
in the first place. There are plenty of acceptable
ways to market your website by email, don't be tempted
to take shortcuts because chances are it could be
your downfall. It's important to stress that anyone
considering email marketing must read up on the subject
of permission and spam. If you don't understand the
importance of permission and the risks of ignoring
it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.
Don't panic, though. It's actually relatively easy
to ensure that the address lists you use or build
yourself are permission-based. Below are 3 possible
ways to do that: (1) New Content Notification You've
probably seen sites that offer to notify you whenever
they have new information, products, or content. To
tell you the truth, this is probably the least effective
kind of opt-in list, simply because most people won't
sign-up. Instead, they'll bookmark your site thinking
they'll just come back from time to time - but don't
count it! Of course, there are certain kinds of sites
that CAN benefit from this form of opt-in list. For
example, if you have a site that runs contests, you
can offer to notify people whenever a new contest
begins. (2) Free Report Another kind of opt-in list
involves the offer of a free report, or series of
reports. However, be careful with this! By offering
a free report, you are restricting the number of times
you can mail to your list, it's not a good idea to
capture the names and then bombard them with a continual
stream of sales material when they were only expecting
one or two reports. This would be considered spamming!
If you offer a free report, it should contain "real"
information and a reason for them to visit your website
again. (3) Free eZine/Newsletter - A great way to
build an opt-in list is by offering a free subscription
to an electronic newsletter or ezine. Newsletters
are a really good way of regularly reminding your
subscribers about your website and products. By writing
a newsletter that contains copy which is both informative
and compelling, you draw subscribers back to your
website again and again! Having an ezine/Newsletter
is one of the best ways to build credibility and rapport
with your readers and customers. If you understand
the value of a "Lifetime Customer", then you know
exactly how powerful an ezine or newsletter can be!
So now that you know how to get your opt-in mailing
list, it's time that you learn how to run your email
promotions effectively when you do it. Below are 6
tips to consider for successful email marketing: (1)
Perhaps the most critical step in guaranteeing the
success of your e-mail promotions is that you e-mail
a targeted list of opt-in subscribers who have specifically
requested to receive information on a particular topic
from you. You'll be wasting your time and energy if
you don't. (2) Personalize each and every email. A
phrase like "Dear John" will have more impact than
just "Dear customer". For that person assumes you
know him. (3) Write benefit-oriented subject lines
or you can ask a question or trigger curiosity.. Subject
lines are very critical in ensuring whether your email
gets opened or not. (4) Make it easy to read. Check
grammatical errors and proof read everything. Keep
paragraphs short, between 4-6 lines. (5) Give the
opportunity for your readers to opt-out of your mailing
list. At the end of all e-mail you send, it's extremely
important that you give people the opportunity to
opt-out or be removed from your e-mail database. This
is really, really important! (6) Test your email promotions.
Before sending your e-mail to your entire list, take
an extra 15 minutes to test how it looks in a variety
of e-mail clients like hotmail, yahoo, outlook express,
eudora etc... Email marketing is an excellent way
to increase the exposure of your website and advertise
any special offers that are currently available through
your website. Executed well, a targeted email campaign
can have a dramatic influence on your traffic, acquisition
of visitors and traffic behavior. © 2003 by Jean Lam
About the author: Jean Lam publishes the Zine Guru
newsletter. To subscribe, for cutting edge internet
marketing tips, tricks, techniques and secrets mailto:zinegurunews@getresponse.com
and receive a FREE valuable ebook. Check out also
his internet marketing resource site at http://www.zineguru.com
So how do you deal with it?
1. Create different email addresses using domain forwarding.
If you have your own web site, your web host allows
you to forward all your email from your domain (domain
forwarding) to an outside address (ie james@aol.com).
This is called your "catch all" address ie set up
your email aliases (info@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com
etc) so when you receive email from any of these,
they will be forwarded to your "catch all" address.
The limitation of this method is that you can't send
email from your alias addresses. It can only be sent
form your "catch all" email address.
2. Set-up separate email accounts. To
also send mail from each new email address, you need
to set up a separate email account for each address.
Usually your web host will give you a number of free
email (called POP3) accounts that come with your hosting
package. Create a new email account for different
categories ie firstname@yourdomain.com - for emailing
your personal friends. newsletters@yourdomain.com
- for subscribing to newsletters. articles@yourdomain.com
- for submitting articles. ads@yourdomain.com - for
advertising information ads1@yourdomain.com - a public
email address you use for forums, newsgroups and SPAM.
If the spam gets too much you can dispose of this
address and set-up a new one.
3. Create new inboxes for each of these
separate email accounts. Set-up your corresponding
email accounts (as above) in your email software (ie
outlook express, eudora etc). You will need this information:
incoming mail (POP3) = mail.yourdomain.com - incoming
mail server (SMTP) = mail.yourdomain.com or your ISPs
- outgoing mail server. account name = newsletters@yourdomain.com
password = the password you select Do this for each
of each of your email accounts.
4. Create folders and subfolders in
your inbox. ie newsletters - marketing tips newsletter
- web design newsletter - forum newsletter This allows
you to immediately categorize your incoming email
by dragging and dropping it into each of these subfolders.
Now you know instantly where to retrieve your past
correspondence.
5. Set-up filters (message rules) for
receiving different emails. Most email clients have
filters or message rules you can set-up to filter
your incoming email. For example to make sure you
don't ever receive emails from a specific email address
again, you can block the sender. To do this in outlook
express, highlight the email address you received,
go to message - block sender. That's it! For a more
extensive tutorial on setting up extensive message
rules in outlook express, go to: http://familyinternet.about.com/library/weekly/aa020603a.htm
6. Periodically delete your received
email. Soon you will get into the habit of automatically
hitting the delete button as you recognize email that
is obviously spam. This means your inbox will fill
up very quickly with deleted email and will slow down
your email software. Therefore clean out your inbox
at the end of every day. In Part 2 of this article,
I'll go more deeply into how you can effectively deal
with spam. This will help you to be more organized,
save time, frustration and enable you to be more efficient
in your online marketing adventures.
About the author:
Herman Drost is the author of the NEW ebook "101 Highly
Effective Strategies to Promote Your Web Site" a powerful
guide for attracting 1000s of visitors to your web
site. http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion
Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more
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