If you plan to do Internet marketing to promote your business endeavor, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Internet marketing campaign. Many business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are spam.
However, this is not true, and not partaking in this type of marketing can cause your business to lose out on a great deal of business. By not appealing to potential customers via email, your business may lose a great deal of business to competitors using email marketing campaigns to reach customers worldwide.
The first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating an email distribution list. This article will discuss some popular options for doing this and should help the reader learn more about what is acceptable and what is not regarding email marketing.
Compiling An Email Distribution List
Once you have decided to start using email marketing to promote your business, you are likely facing the dilemma of compiling an email distribution list. This is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials.
One common way to gain a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors. However, this method is ineffective, and we do not recommend it.
The problem with buying an email list is that you have no way of knowing whether or not the list’s members would have any interest 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 be members of your overall target audience.
Buying Email Lists
When you purchase an email list, you may send your email messages to some users who might be interested, but this is largely coincidental and is not likely to be well received. Internet users quickly delete materials they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails.
Some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are deemed 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 adept at weeding out spam.
Therefore, you risk having your email marketing effort become a complete waste of time if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message.
Getting Customers To Register On Your Site
A better way to create an email list for your marketing campaign is to ask customers to register with your website. Then you can send them additional information about updates, your products and services, and any other information that might interest them.
This provides you with a database of email addresses from current and potential customers. These are people who are genuinely interested in your products and services and who want to learn more about what you offer.
E-Newsletters
Once you have a list of interested or potential customers, you can send emails or create an e-newsletter for distribution to the members of your email list. These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information and a soft sell pitch for your products and services.
This information will be valued by the readers and may help to persuade them to try your products and services. You might also want to include useful links to either your website or other websites that may interest your readers. Your content should also have a call to action (CTA) that encourages the reader to take a specific action, such as making a purchase or looking into a product further.