Email marketing - A good website promotional tool for internet marketing ?

A few days ago, I mentioned that this blog was suspected by Blogger as spam. Well, email marketing has experienced a lot of negative reviews due to spams over the past few years too. How many of us have not receive mails that we never wanted ?

The explosion of spam, and the sheer volume of email people received ruined the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool. Even perfectly legitimate emails were being trapped by spam filters or deleted, unopened, by wary recipients who were concerned about viruses.

Yet there are still companies that, despite these challenges, manage to generate millions of dollars of profit every year using email marketing software.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, email remains the number one online activity of Americans - ahead of Web surfing and using search engines - and now that more and more people are able to receive email on their cell phones and PDAs, the opportunities for creative email marketing are only continuing to expand.

At the recent MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit in Chicago, Barry Stamos of Responsys.com even stated that people now spend more time reading email than watching TV!

Therefore, Email marketing is still a good website promotional tool for internet marketing. If anyone tells you that email marketing is dead, think again.....

eMarketer reports that email generates a much higher return on spending than methods such as direct mail and newspaper and radio advertising.

The challange now is to educate yourself on the best ways to collect, manage, and store email addresses, and only send out relevant emails that people will open without hesitation. Do these things right and you'll be able to profit from all of the new opportunities available to email marketers... and continue to enjoy the impressive ROI email marketing provides.

A word of advice here is not to buy any email list and start mailing........you can get into serious trouble as any report of spam could result in your ISP shutting you down.

Start clutivating your own opt in list by writing an opt-in offer for your web site and started to collect the names and email addresses of visitors who want to hear from you on a regular basis. These are people who have decided they like what they see on your web site enough to give you their email addresses.They are basically inviting you to sell to them!

Then,

Manage your "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests
It is important that people who subscribe are added quickly to your list as one of these subscription requests may end up being your best customer.

At the same time, never hide your unsubsribe link and always treat requests to unsubscribefrom your list seriously. You can find yourself in trouble with your ISP if people who aren't promptly removed from your list can accuse you of spamming them.

Remove duplicate addresses
There will always be some people who will subscribe to your list, leave your site, and come back a couple of days later to sign up again, forgetting that they have already joined. So, before you send any mailings, you'll want to make sure that you don't have any duplicate email addresses in your list.

People who received multiple copies of the same mail from you will just get agitated and may prompt them to unsubscribe from your list or worse yet, report you as a spammer!

Keep your list clean !
Keeping your list clean means more than just removing unsubscribes and duplicate addresses. Do not forget to remove "bounce back" to you after a mailing. If you continue to send email to an address that is invalid, you may be mistaken to bea spammers, and you may end up with a problem with the ISP receiving the messages.

Divide your list to conquer more subscribers
Using email to target different segments of your audience is one of the single most effective ways to market products or services on the Internet. In fact, email marketers practicing segmentation are currently seeing much better results than those sending undifferentiated mailings.
You can segment your list into
(a) existing customers, or
(b) visitors to your site who have simply opted in to receive your free
newsletter, eBook, etc.

Catch your recipients' attention by using their names
With the massive emails that people are receiving, not all mails may get opened and read. If the people on your list know that the message you are sending is something they want, they will open it!

The "secret" to getting email recipients' attention is to personalize the subject line with the subscriber's name. Nothing gets a person's attention faster than hearing or seeing their own name!

Personalizing your subject lines, you also make your email appear more authentic and safer to open, because recipients will be more likely to view your email as coming from a trusted source.

Despite the obstacles presented by spam and volume, email marketing can still deliver an exceptional return on investment(ROI) because of the massive amount of time people spend online, and the proportion of that time they spend checking their email.

You should not ignore the power of email marketing to grow your internet business.

You can find out more about how to manage and automate your email marketing HERE