Email is free. Or almost next to zero cost.
Whether you send an email to one person or to a million people the cost is typically the same. It is an extremely effective tool for communicating with prospects and customers.One major draw back is using it as an illegitimate marketing tool, spamming. Everyone hates receiving Spam and resent those that send it.
Building the List
Based on your business niche, acquire a relevant list of potential customers or prospects. Built up a list from the beginning can be time consuming. But once someone request to be put into your emailing list, you can periodically send them messages to keep them informed of your products or services. These are referred to as opt-in lists. Most importantly is with these lists, you have their permission to continue communication.
With your newly acquired high quality list, make use of it wisely.These guidelines give you the Dos and Donts in making sure you produce results in the coming years:
Dont create a campaign that promotes scams or illegitimate businesses. Your offers and information should be legitimate, to create trust for a long time business.
Do make sure the content is as relevant to the request the list asked for in the first place when they opt-in into your list.
Do format your messages for easy reading.
Do make sure the subject line are short and to the point.
Do personalize the messages, like using the prospects first name.
Dont send too much or too often. They are annoying. Timed your messages, control the frequency. Prevents overusing.
Dont include attachments. Many people will avoids opening attachments as this is one of the most common ways viruses are distributed.
Do focus on the objective of your message.
Do creates urgency to response to your offers.
Do provide up sells, if the opportunity arise.
Do promise your prospects that information you gather through the opt-ins are safe, and their privacy are maintained.
Dont send your message to the entire list at once. Do some testing on a small number and monitor the responses.
Email Marketing will allows you to create an ongoing dialogue and established rapport with your prospects and customers. It can starts helping you to build those all-important relationships. And with this level of relationships that you have with your prospects and customers, it will determine your online businesss success in the future years.
About the Author:
This article is written by E K Gann. His aim is to work together and help others starting business online. Especially beginners who are facing problems and difficulties getting resources, and those in need for Personal Development; in marketing, sales, self improvement, motivation and continue education. He has been following the footsteps of a man who earns $3,244,842.32 in 27 months! You can do the same. Find out how he do it:
Sustainable email sending programs in an inherently hostile environmentnow require great care and planning. Before considering technicalcomplexities and marketing tactics, email senders must adopt this basicparadigm shift.
The five guidelines included in this series should becomewatchwords for ezine emailers as they incur the risk and responsibilityof sending newsletters or any other repetitive type of email.
Part 1 of 5: Treat Email as a True Risk and Cost Center
Part 2 of 5: Avoid Collateral Damage
Part 3 of 5: Use the Available (Legitimate) Tools and Tactics (M2M)
Part 4 of 5: Build Strong Relationships (H2H)
Part 5 of 5: Continuously Evaluate
Part 4 of 5
Build Strong Relationships (H2H)
to keep your communications channels open
The term relationship in this seriesrefers to human-based interactions (H2H) that influence email and itsdelivery. This human side of the email process is essential. It alsohighlights several difficult facts about the email sending environmentencountered today:
The old market balance of buyer and seller, service and price,has been disrupted in todays ISP and NSP space. In the past,service providers would compete for your business; offer pricingadvantages and service guarantees and spend a lot of timeand effort to get your attention. This is still true today, but with atwist.
Now, receipt of even a very small percentage of emailcomplaints by your ISP/NSP, either directly from recipients or fromthird-party services, can cause your Internet service to be terminated.The decision to terminate is not made by the same people that expendedall that effort to get you as a client, nor by those with financialreporting responsibility to the ISPs shareholders. Lookinstead to a newly empowered group often designatedabuse administrators.
The current importance of abuse administrators, and theirextraordinary authority to terminate accounts, stems largely from theactions of a small group of third-party anti-Spam activists. The threatof reputation damage and collateral damage(indiscriminant IP address blocking), have pushed abuse administratorsto the forefront of ISP policy. Thus, while you pay your ISP to workfor you, one portion of the organization autonomously works toward theelimination of traffic that is alleged to be Spam. If that happens tobe your email traffic, for whatever reason, you have aproblem.
The defensive, and potentially adversarial relationship withyour ISP/NSP that this structure imposes has two basicconsequences:
1) Your relationship with your own ISP/NSP should be pushedto the front of your list of business concerns, with an active programof communications in place. Your bandwidth sources have moved beyondbeing a simple infrastructure cost of doingbusiness, into the area of risk and servicemanagement.
2) Distribution of sourcing (and therefore risk) is key.Single source ISP/NSP relationships might look cost effective andeasier to manage, but they leave open the possibility of unexpectedservice problems without the ready ability to react quickly toproblems.
In the final analysis it must be remembered that ISPs are NOTpublic utilities, and that the regulatory and policy boundariesexpected from critical infrastructure suppliers do not apply to theirservices. Service access risk management, and the investment of time inbuilding a strong relationship with these suppliers should be a basicpart of every email sending program.
Relationships with major recipient ISPs
This is what Email Service Providers (ESPs) typically callISP relations. The most important function of anISP relations program is to avoid a termination of sending privilegesto one of the major recipient ISPs (i.e. AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo,etc).
Virtually all ESPs offer some version of ISP relations as afeature of their service. This feature is implicit in their own effortsto sustain their own sending channels in the face of potentialblow-back from the actions of any of their clients. Given theirenforced experience, many ESPs are good at this job. Publishers thatsend a significant amount of email also typically have a version ofthis program in-house, often initiated when they find themselvesblocked from sending to one of their large recipient ISPs.
ISP relationships means something verydifferent, and something very specific, at each of the large recipientISPs. Broadly, the requirements for a working ISP relations program areto:
The biggest ISP relations challenge for many ezines andnewsletters is coming up with the time and resources needed to maintainan adequate program of this type. This is one of the strongestnon-technical arguments that can be made for using an outside ESPprogram. Also see the Email PhD section for additionalinformation.
Relationships with the smaller local orcorporate networks and ISPs on your list
Relationship programs at smaller ISPs is an even morechallenging problem. Unfortunately, it is a process that inherentlyabsorbs increasing resources for decreasing benefit. Out of necessity,the approach most publishers take is to:
B2B lists are typically more problematic in that they canhave a very flat distribution, so the number ofdomains and contacts to be covered can be prohibitively large.
The most common solution to the few addresses perdomain problem is to take a classicalexceptions approach to management. The senderprimarily relies on technical sending strategies for their delivery,and uses some form of enhanced reporting (typically server level data)to identify problem domains. These domains can then be identified andtreated as exceptions. The ISP relations manager is thus looking forproblems to solve rather than trying to build continuing highmaintenance relationships with these smaller ISPs.
The ability to effectively take this approach resides largelyin the communications and reporting capabilities of the sending systemused, and in the data capture procedures set up by the ISP relationsmanager. Without having good capabilities within this area, asignificant portion of most lists will be subject to a variable andunpredictable delivery profile.
Relationships with Email Service Providers
Managers may again be surprised to find that traditional marketforces are disrupted in this seemingly basic relationship. You hire anESP to deliver and track your email. You pay them to do this (sometimesa lot!). It is a highly competitive market, so the ESPs appear toreally want your business (and if you ask them they will confirm this).Then one day they show up and say that they can no longer accept youremail.
The reason this happens is (unfortunately) obvious. ESPs,because of their position in the sending/delivery chain have become thenatural settling point for many of the worst problems in an admittedlytroubled industry. Because of this they have also necessarily becomegood at solving problems, or as the case may be, at cutting theirlosses. This may mean eliminating accounts that threaten theircontinued operation.
To get a good quality ESP to take on many of theorganizational, technical, and political problems of sending your emailnow often requires a strange role reversal. In this new paradigm yourcompany is the seller; selling its policies, protections, and itsresponsiveness to the ESP. That is because to a meaningful degree theESP is going to inherit everything that is wrong with you content, yourlist, or your sending strategy. And they do so for each client thatthey accept. If they dont manage this process verycarefully, they can be shut down (or worse, face a creeping decay ineffectiveness) for all their clients.
Because ESPs are so accessible and visible (unlike thehidden Spammer population) they generally take avery disproportionate share of the blame for the mail-box floodingproblem. They are subject to blocking and shutdown of their own andtheir clients email and Internet access, potentially on thebasis of a single instance of only one of their clientssends.
Some ESPs know a lot about how to get mail delivered whilestaying out of trouble. Others dont. Always investigate anESPs basic approach and strategy for delivery. If you find an ESP withthe expertise and skills necessary to handle your email deliveryrequirements, then you can expect to be required to be responsive andhelpful in resolving problems that occur because of your account. YourESP generally will be very good at defining what information they need,what policies you need to institute, and what channels of communicationyou need to maintain to keep the relationship productive andeffective.
Relationships with email regulatory agencies,industry associations and groups, and self-appointedwatchdogs
This may be the subtlest of the relationship categories, whereeach publisher needs to craft a unique strategy to fit its owncircumstances. Options here generally follow the old bureaucraticdictum that you either want to be on the inside, or so far outside asto be off the radar screen altogether.
Some large ESPs, for example, have opted to be on the inside;presenting themselves as major Spam fighters. Wherever that has beenresisted by the self-appointed Spam-policing community they havecreated a new inside (or organization) to make their position known.Many of the largest companies and ESPs have also rushed to becomecertified good guys through the use of reputationservices, but this trend has moderated somewhat due to what canconservatively be called complex political andpractical considerations. Generally there remains a vast gulf ofdifferences between the definitions, goals, and objectives of thedifferent power blocks within the anti-Spam political space.
Regulatory agencies:
The rules and requirements for compliance have become muchclearer with the passage of broad legislation in many nationaljurisdictions. In the US this legislation sets standards that attentivecompanies can, in most cases, readily achieve. By far the mostsignificant regulatory agency in the US for email senders is theFederal Trade Commission (FTC), and excellent guidance for senders canbe gotten from their Web site.
It is important for publishers to realize that the lawsgoverning email in different countries vary significantly from those inthe US, and that a compliance review should be undertaken beforesending any commercial email that lands outside the US.
Also see the Email PhD Compliancesection for additional information.
Industry groups and associations:
These advocates tend to promote standards and ideals that aresourced from industry, which in this environment usually means theanti-Spam software companies, the ESPs, or the large recipient ISPs.Often the standards for being a member in goodstanding have little to do with regulatory compliance.Usually, it has more to do with either supporting a particularcommercial agenda, or behaving in a way that makes sorting, filtering,and blocking email easier to accomplish.
Memberships within this level of organization also tend to berelatively expensive, but (again) because of the lack of consensus evenwithin commercial elements, these memberships often do not carry muchdemonstrable practical benefit (for example, membership in a majoremail industry association does not inherently confer a broad spectrumincrease in email delivery success), so cost/benefit should becarefully analyzed.
Self-appointed watchdogs:
Following the lead of many regulators and most of the majorcommercial interests online, publishers using email for digitalcommunications are virtually always best advised to keep their distancefrom this community.
From anonymous blacklists to vigilante style citizen actioncybergroups, these types of organizations represent an enormous rangeof diverse views about the proper use of theInternet, including, significantly, the types of individual actions andenforcement appropriate within a largely unregulatedcommons.
This is a space that is chaotic, with more than its fairshare of ideologues and frankly scary organizations. A prime difficultylies in the fact that many of these groups do not agree with current USlegislation, or even with the additional policies and tests imposed bylarge Internet organizations. In the tug of war of ideas that is takingplace online, this sector has developed a general reputation for beingconfrontational rather than cooperative, and negative publicity can beexpected from many such associations.
Unfortunately, it has become a minor badge of sophisticationand a recognized form of empowerment within the Internet literati tosupport and use radical blacklists and other resources that come fromthis community. IT employees at many major companies covertly run theSpam traps and host the honey pots that are in fact the source of somuch commercial email disruption. Many smaller network administratorspreferentially use information from within this community to informtheir filtering and blocking systems. It is safe to say that thisdissenting population will have a significant influence on emailsending and delivery into the foreseeable future.
Conclusions:
The network of human-to-human (H2H) relationships extending fromyour own hosting facilities to your recipients ISPs has become criticalto sustaining open channels of email communications. The algorithmicand programmatic systems in place to control email Spam are so fallibleand subject to error that without these H2H relationships anyonesemail channels can be expected to begin to fail. At a minimum, buildingand maintaining open and friendly ISP relations wherever possibleallows people to get in and adjust for theconceptual, design and implementation limitations of current anti-Spamtechnology.
Copyright by All Right Reserved.
Tim Starzl is the chief editor of Email Ph.D., an informational Web site dedicated to improving email delivery for all permission-based senders. With years of experience in email sending system design, high volume sending, and high precision tracking systems Mr. Starzl provides practical working advice for a difficult and rapidly changing environment.