Email Marketing

Email marketing is an online direct mail method used by companies to deliver advertisements to prospects or to communicate with existing customers. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spend on email marketing campaigns in the US alone. You can advertise practically anything but some popular business uses for email marketing are real estate, mortgages, software products.

Benefits of Email Marketing

E-mail marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies because:

  • By using a targeted email list you can easily distribute your message at a very low cost
  • Their are no printing or postage costs and the message can be sent and received almost immediately by prospects and customers
  • Tracking makes quantifying a campaign easy. You can get statistics on open rates, read rates bounce rates, feedback, unsubscribes and click through rates
  • A very high number of internet users check email at least daily
  • Email marketing is also environmentally friendly

Legitimate companies must take care to only use permission marketing with their email marketing campaigns. Permission marketing is when a marketer asks permission before they send advertisements to prospective customers. An email marketing list requires that people first "opt-in". A term that refers to any subscriber that has specifically requested an email newsletter. If they have signed up through your web site and are on an email list in your database, they are opt-in. There are 2 kinds of opt-in, single opt-in and double opt-in. Legitimate companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with their customers and prospects who have opted-in, but some other companies send unsolicited bulk e-mail, also known as spam.

You can create and maintain your own opt-in email lists using an in-house database or you can outsource to an email marketing service provider. Some email service providers are Benchmark Email and iContact. You can also choose to rent targeted opt-in email marketing leads from other companies such as MeMail, Advertising.com, Bulletmail, Targ-It, E-Target, Htmail, PostMaster Direct, The Direct Email List Source.

There is no such thing as FREE email marketing.

By using good email marketing software such as Constant Contact or aweber you can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and maximize your ROI. This software can also provide statistics including bounce rates and clickthrough tracking. You much also ensure FTC CAN-SPAM compliance (CAN-SPAM Act of 2003). iContact, Constant Contact, or MyEmma can help insure compliance. Today email can consist of text, html, and even video. You need to make sure that your email marketing solution can support all three.

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