Ask Joanne's Articles
Email Marketing: Options and Obstacles
Email Marketing is a very effective way to stay
in touch with customers and generate new business.
There are several software and service options
for email marketing. Following some basic guidelines
can help avoid some of the obstacles involved
in email marketing.
Some of the options available for email marketing
(eNewsletters) are:
* Do it yourself with your current email program
* Subscribe to an emarketing service
* Buy software for email marketing
Do it yourself. You can create email distribution
lists in Outlook, Outlook Express, ACT! and many
other contact tracking software programs. By creating
a distribution list you can send emails to large
groups of people without having to choose each
address individually. Outlook and ACT! both have
some facility for using HTML in emails so that
you can make your newsletters a little "dressier"
than plain text.
Subscribe to an email marketing service. There
are several services available. One of the more
popular is Constant
Contact. This service allows you to manage
your email distribution list online, and to create
email newsletters and other correspondence from
a variety of colorful templates. Constant
Contact will also track statistics, such as
how many recipients actually opened your mail
and how many recipients "clicked through"
a link to your website contained in your email.
This can be very useful information in determining
the effectiveness of your email campaign.
Buy software for email marketing. There are several
software packages available that allow you to
import data from your email program to manage
your email distribution lists. They also come
with hundreds of fully customizable templates
for every kind of email correspondence. One of
the best of these packages I have found is: High
Impact Email.
There are a few obstacles in email marketing.
* Hosting company limits the number of email
recipients
* Being perceived as a spammer
* Content too long, involved, or otherwise hard
to read
Some web hosts will limit the number of emails
you can send at one time because they suspect
that you are spamming. This can be overcome by
choosing a web hosting company that allows sufficient
disk space for large bulk emails or by using an
email marketing service.
Avoiding being perceived as a spammer is worth
your time and effort. SPAM is defined as unsolicted
bulk commercial email. The easiest way to avoid
being labeled a spammer is to make sure that you
have obtained permission from all the people to
whom you send email. For information from the
FCC on UCE (unsolicited commerical email) see:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm
If your content is too long or difficult to read,
you will have lost all the benefits of email marketing.
In order for a newsletter to be effective, people
have to read it.
Some tips:
* Keep your content to about half the amount
that you would put in a print publication. One
or two paragraphs is best.
* Put the most relevant information at the top.
* Use short sentences, clear language and bulleted
lists to improve readability.
A great resource for information on the new generation
of marketing is Seth
Godin's Permission Marketing.
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