Effective Email Campaign
Let’s face it, email marketing is effective. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be getting scores of spam everyday. Or attempted spam that is. Though spam, the affectionate name given to unsolicited bulk email, still proliferates on the internet, it’s much less of a hassle to the average user these days.
Most spammers are clandestine “boiler-room” operations who use guerrilla advertising tactics to get their emails to you. They may come up with a trick here and there to get their emails past your spam filtering, but eventually the spam filtering will figure it out and block them too.
So, how does an advertiser use email without having the email be construed as spam? There are several key ways to do this:
1. Build your own list of email addresses to mail to. This can be done several ways. Ask your current customers to refer friends and family to you. You should be doing this anyway. By giving your customers an extra incentive to share the love about you, you will almost always get them.
2. Offer your website visitors an incentive to get on your mailing list. This can be anything from a monthly drawing for a trip to Disney World, to a gift certificate to their favorite restaurant. The money you spend on premiums will be more than worth it when you find you have several thousand new people you can directly market to regularly with their permission.
3. “Piggy-back” your offer on another non-competing company’s mailing list. Many companies have solid, responsive lists that they will let you have a crack at for a piece of the action. The easiest way to give these other companies a piece of the action is by having an affiliate program in place. An affiliate program is a very effective marketing strategy utilized by major sites from Ebay to Amazon.com. Once set up as an affiliate, the company sending out the email will now get paid per sale or per click based on what your affiliate program stipulates. It’s an outstanding win-win situation, and with the responding leads you get, you can optimize a solid list of potential future buyers.
4. Use opt-in marketing companies - These companies put all their efforts into getting people to opt-in to receive their marketing emails. The result are highly qualified lists of email addresses. Usually by providing incentives of cash or premiums to do so. A good example is Inbox Dollars. Formulate an offer you want to provide via email and contract the company to make it happen. Again, most will work with you if you have a solid affiliate program, otherwise they will charge you for adding your offer to their emails.
Tags: Email marketing
