Website Promotion With Email Marketing by Jean Lam
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
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