There may be nothing more frustrating when you are trying to build a strong internet marketing plan than to see your email promotions fall apart because of poor email deliverability. The formula of marketing is one that you should be able to believe in.
. You know you have a good product or service that customers will benefit from and that will bring you repeat business once customer relationships are found.. You know there is a market niche out there that are highly likely to patronize your business.. You know that there is a market need for your product or service so once the customers are aware of what you have to offer, sales potential is significant.. Marketing techniques should work to bring customers on board to get the sales moving and take your business to the next level.
Small wonder that you get frustrated because with all the elements in place, the problem is your marketing emails are not getting to the customers. So you have to spend additional money on email delivery monitoring and management services and additional time establishing relationships with ISPs just to get permission to push your emails through to the customers.
There really is no equivalent blockage in the non internet marketing world. It is as though you put a billboard up on the busiest intersection in town where customers you know can use your services drive every day only to find they closed the freeway and none of the customers will see the billboard. But you have to pay for it anyway.
Maybe it is time to rethink the equation. For one thing, email is one of the oldest forms of internet communications there is. Maybe it is too old. It is old enough that a culture of fear has been built around the whole spam problem and sophisticated tools are in use by customers, ISPs and spammers all at war about whether scam artists should be able to abuse internet customers through email.
But something has changed right under the feet of email scammers that has also altered the formula for internet marketing entirely. And that change may have made email as a less important internet marketing tool. The thing that has changed is WEB 2.0 which has changed the formula for how people use the internet and how people market on it as well. Because WEB 2.0 has changed the approach to the internet to make web site more than just online brochures but living "places" where people interact and the web visitor becomes a vital part of the web site itself, that changes how we might approach marketing to web savvy customers.
As odd as it may seem, email may be too slow as a mode of communication with your customers in this day of instant messaging, message boards and voice over internet communications. It isn't that people don’t use email any more because they do. But with the imposition of so many restrictions causing email deliverability to become a nightmare, a shift in focus to direct marketing to a very active internet community on your web site is in order.
This means that instead of throwing good money after bad trying to fix the email deliverability problem, maybe email marketing is no longer where the smart money should go. Instead the smart money might be better used to update your web site, to make your online "presence" a real place and to build and then capitalize on live and active web traffic as a far more dynamic way to conduct your marketing campaign.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Dump the Mass Mailings
What if you could drop a marketing email into 100,000 email boxes in one day and have 100,000 potential new customers see your marketing message and possibly become long term customers of your internet business?
That sounds pretty enticing doesn't it? That is the basic marketing strategy that many internet marketers have tried to use to build their online business. This is a methodology commonly called "Mass Mailings",. That is the polite word for this technique. The less complimentary term that email recipients use for mass marketing emails is simply "spam".
Mass mailing marketing has been big business on the internet. And it is unfair to say that it has been used exclusively by scam artists or pyramid scheme operators. Many legitimate business have tried mass mailings to build their internet business on the promise that the companies who offer these services have harvested tens of thousands of valid email addresses that they will send your marketing message to for a small fee.
Compared to the amount of emails that will go out, the fee seems fair. The marketing formula for success is also a reasonable one. Usually the fee for the mailing can be offset by a small number of sales, perhaps less than ten. And with 100,000 emails going out, the expectation that you might get a response of 100-1000 inquiries that could result in 10 sales is not unreasonable at all.
The problem is that for every 1000 customers who may have an interest in your product or service, you will have antagonized 99,000 others who see your email as nothing more than electronic junk mail otherwise known as spam. The spam epidemic has reached a level of crisis precisely because mass mailing services and software have made it possible for good business, scam artists and even virus producers to spread their bad emails to a vast audience if the spam is left untouched.
The result is that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to fight the spam epidemic. These companies sell software to you to fight spam emails by keeping up on the most up to date spamming methods and catching bad emails and sending them to your deleted box or a spam folder for future deletion. This sets in motion a vicious cycle of one one-upmanship in which the spam operators find ways around the spam filters and the spam filter providers continue to update their software to stop the newest tricks of the spam operators.
It has become a huge mess and the worst part about it is that you as a valid internet marketer of a valid product or service only want a reliable method to communicate with new and existing customers. Mass mailing seems like one way to do that. But when you decide to try your hand at sending a mass mailing email, you get in the middle of the spam war and you are then faced with dealing with sophisticated email delivery hindrance systems that are there to fight the problem of spam.
So what can we do about trying to build our online businesses with this huge battle causing serious disruptions to email deliverability? For one thing, abandon the use of mass mailings entirely. They don't work and they put you in the distasteful company of spammers and internet criminals.
There are far better ways to communicate with customers such as web site memberships, newsletters and contests that the customer can opt in on. Build your relationships with the customer from the customer out and you will be able to avoid the entire spam deliverability wars and side step the email deliverability issues as well.
That sounds pretty enticing doesn't it? That is the basic marketing strategy that many internet marketers have tried to use to build their online business. This is a methodology commonly called "Mass Mailings",. That is the polite word for this technique. The less complimentary term that email recipients use for mass marketing emails is simply "spam".
Mass mailing marketing has been big business on the internet. And it is unfair to say that it has been used exclusively by scam artists or pyramid scheme operators. Many legitimate business have tried mass mailings to build their internet business on the promise that the companies who offer these services have harvested tens of thousands of valid email addresses that they will send your marketing message to for a small fee.
Compared to the amount of emails that will go out, the fee seems fair. The marketing formula for success is also a reasonable one. Usually the fee for the mailing can be offset by a small number of sales, perhaps less than ten. And with 100,000 emails going out, the expectation that you might get a response of 100-1000 inquiries that could result in 10 sales is not unreasonable at all.
The problem is that for every 1000 customers who may have an interest in your product or service, you will have antagonized 99,000 others who see your email as nothing more than electronic junk mail otherwise known as spam. The spam epidemic has reached a level of crisis precisely because mass mailing services and software have made it possible for good business, scam artists and even virus producers to spread their bad emails to a vast audience if the spam is left untouched.
The result is that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to fight the spam epidemic. These companies sell software to you to fight spam emails by keeping up on the most up to date spamming methods and catching bad emails and sending them to your deleted box or a spam folder for future deletion. This sets in motion a vicious cycle of one one-upmanship in which the spam operators find ways around the spam filters and the spam filter providers continue to update their software to stop the newest tricks of the spam operators.
It has become a huge mess and the worst part about it is that you as a valid internet marketer of a valid product or service only want a reliable method to communicate with new and existing customers. Mass mailing seems like one way to do that. But when you decide to try your hand at sending a mass mailing email, you get in the middle of the spam war and you are then faced with dealing with sophisticated email delivery hindrance systems that are there to fight the problem of spam.
So what can we do about trying to build our online businesses with this huge battle causing serious disruptions to email deliverability? For one thing, abandon the use of mass mailings entirely. They don't work and they put you in the distasteful company of spammers and internet criminals.
There are far better ways to communicate with customers such as web site memberships, newsletters and contests that the customer can opt in on. Build your relationships with the customer from the customer out and you will be able to avoid the entire spam deliverability wars and side step the email deliverability issues as well.
Draw Customers to You Through Web Events
Email delivery problems has put an urgency to the priority of changing how we communicate with customers on the internet. At one time, you may have conducted virtually all of your marketing and customer interactions via email. Not that long ago, there was a time when email was so dominant as a form of communication that we all depended on it almost exclusively because it was the only thing that was truly interactive about the internet.
Two developments in how the internet works has changed that scenario significantly. From a negative point of view, email delivery has continued to grow as a bigger and bigger problem every year. That means that more and more online merchants have struggled with how undependable email communications has become. The problem, of course is that spam as relentlessly eroded how much anyone can depend on email except for private communications. So to avoid having to make email delivery a second career, many online merchants and retailers are looking for new and up to date modes of communication to replace email.
The second development is more positive and it is the WEB 2.0 evolution of the internet which has changed how the internet works. Whereas business web sites used to be nothing more than online brochures, all web sites are now migrating to the WEB 2.0 model which means web sites themselves are seats of customer communications which takes the emphasis off of email as a sole line of communication with customers.
These developments bode well for providing an escape for online merchants with the cumbersome overhead of trying to keep up with email delivery issues from month to month. But it doesn’t mean you will abandon email entirely. The one aspect of email that has yet to be totally replaced is its ability to remind a customer of your products and services. Just having a highly interactive web site is good but internet denizens are notoriously short in the memory department and they need a reason to come back to your web site from time to time.
A web event is a great way to create excitement and to make your customers want to come to your web site at a specified time to be part of the big event. A big sale, a special speaker, a musical performance or an interview with a notable celebrity from your field of expertise is just the thing to draw people to your web site to experience something new and interesting.
The more you can get away from using email reminders and communications, the more you get away from having to worry about deliverability issues. This is especially true with a web event. If you go to the effort and expense of scheduling a big event for your users, to have email deliverability problems stall or lose your reminders resulting in a failed event would be a disaster.
So to build your clientele for the big event, promote it interactively on your web site. You can use your blog, message boards or chat rooms for promotion and to create excitement. Then from each of those web site pages, take interested customers to a sign up page for the event and do an email verification of their sign up. That verification can be used to encourage those customers to add a specific email address to their preferred users list. Once that is in place, you have much more leverage to email your users about this and other events and drive your customers back to your web site for events, sales and for you to do your marketing dynamically and interactively, the WEB 2.0 way.
Two developments in how the internet works has changed that scenario significantly. From a negative point of view, email delivery has continued to grow as a bigger and bigger problem every year. That means that more and more online merchants have struggled with how undependable email communications has become. The problem, of course is that spam as relentlessly eroded how much anyone can depend on email except for private communications. So to avoid having to make email delivery a second career, many online merchants and retailers are looking for new and up to date modes of communication to replace email.
The second development is more positive and it is the WEB 2.0 evolution of the internet which has changed how the internet works. Whereas business web sites used to be nothing more than online brochures, all web sites are now migrating to the WEB 2.0 model which means web sites themselves are seats of customer communications which takes the emphasis off of email as a sole line of communication with customers.
These developments bode well for providing an escape for online merchants with the cumbersome overhead of trying to keep up with email delivery issues from month to month. But it doesn’t mean you will abandon email entirely. The one aspect of email that has yet to be totally replaced is its ability to remind a customer of your products and services. Just having a highly interactive web site is good but internet denizens are notoriously short in the memory department and they need a reason to come back to your web site from time to time.
A web event is a great way to create excitement and to make your customers want to come to your web site at a specified time to be part of the big event. A big sale, a special speaker, a musical performance or an interview with a notable celebrity from your field of expertise is just the thing to draw people to your web site to experience something new and interesting.
The more you can get away from using email reminders and communications, the more you get away from having to worry about deliverability issues. This is especially true with a web event. If you go to the effort and expense of scheduling a big event for your users, to have email deliverability problems stall or lose your reminders resulting in a failed event would be a disaster.
So to build your clientele for the big event, promote it interactively on your web site. You can use your blog, message boards or chat rooms for promotion and to create excitement. Then from each of those web site pages, take interested customers to a sign up page for the event and do an email verification of their sign up. That verification can be used to encourage those customers to add a specific email address to their preferred users list. Once that is in place, you have much more leverage to email your users about this and other events and drive your customers back to your web site for events, sales and for you to do your marketing dynamically and interactively, the WEB 2.0 way.
Don’t Look Like Spam
There is an art to email delivery that really is not that difficult to understand when you put your private email communications in context. Most of us encounter email delivery problems when we start using email for marketing purposes and we are sending out a lot of emails to many customers. You may have noticed that very rarely do you encounter email deliverability problems with your private emails to friends or even with business emails.
That is because spam filter software has become very adept at telling the difference between a professional email that could be spam and private communications. So naturally that tells us something important about how to go about avoiding email delivery problems when constructing marketing communications. You just have to work to make sure your marketing emails do not look like spam and look more like a private email so they fly right through spam filters and get to your customers.
In addition your marketing emails must act like private emails. That means if you have a well developed mailing list of perhaps several thousand of email addresses or more, do not manage that from your private email service. For a mailing of that size, it is best to utilize the services of a professional autoresponder service. The cost is nominal and could be by the mailing. They can send out your emails in such a way as to not draw the alarms of the spam filter software guardians. And they often offer additional services such as deliverability reports, retransmits of bounced emails and reports of bad email addresses that can save you a lot of time and make you more efficient as well.
One of the ways that spam filters often identify spam is by the level of graphics that is used in the marketing email. While very attractive emails do send a message of professionalism to the customer, they don’t send that message if they end up at the bottom of a spam quarantine folder. So avoid the use of graphics altogether. Just say what you have to say to your customer and then draw them to your web site with a link where they can see your professional graphics.
Have you ever scanned a full spam filter holding folder? If you have not, you should because it will tell you a lot about how spammers write. Just by scanning twenty or thirty of these spam messages, you can get a feel for the techniques used by spammers and you can avoid those methods in writing your own marketing emails. This falls under the "know thy enemy" category of doing battle with email delivery problems because it is the spammer that is the enemy here.
When writing an email that will go out to your customers or prospective customers, think of that customer as one person whom you are writing to as a friend. Be informal and avoid a lot of marketing "hype" and hyperbole. Spam filters are good at "listening" for the language of spam artists so if you write like a person writing to a person, it is very likely your email will go right on through because it will not be flagged as marketing at all. And the other benefit of writing like this to your customers is that it is a warm and personal style that will work well in communicating to customers.
Make a hobby of keeping up with how spam emailers work and how their messages change as they learn to get around spam filters. The spam filter businesses will be changing with them so be aware of any new trends in this stange part of cyberspace communication so you can alter how you create your marketing emails so you make sure your communications with your customers never look like spam.
That is because spam filter software has become very adept at telling the difference between a professional email that could be spam and private communications. So naturally that tells us something important about how to go about avoiding email delivery problems when constructing marketing communications. You just have to work to make sure your marketing emails do not look like spam and look more like a private email so they fly right through spam filters and get to your customers.
In addition your marketing emails must act like private emails. That means if you have a well developed mailing list of perhaps several thousand of email addresses or more, do not manage that from your private email service. For a mailing of that size, it is best to utilize the services of a professional autoresponder service. The cost is nominal and could be by the mailing. They can send out your emails in such a way as to not draw the alarms of the spam filter software guardians. And they often offer additional services such as deliverability reports, retransmits of bounced emails and reports of bad email addresses that can save you a lot of time and make you more efficient as well.
One of the ways that spam filters often identify spam is by the level of graphics that is used in the marketing email. While very attractive emails do send a message of professionalism to the customer, they don’t send that message if they end up at the bottom of a spam quarantine folder. So avoid the use of graphics altogether. Just say what you have to say to your customer and then draw them to your web site with a link where they can see your professional graphics.
Have you ever scanned a full spam filter holding folder? If you have not, you should because it will tell you a lot about how spammers write. Just by scanning twenty or thirty of these spam messages, you can get a feel for the techniques used by spammers and you can avoid those methods in writing your own marketing emails. This falls under the "know thy enemy" category of doing battle with email delivery problems because it is the spammer that is the enemy here.
When writing an email that will go out to your customers or prospective customers, think of that customer as one person whom you are writing to as a friend. Be informal and avoid a lot of marketing "hype" and hyperbole. Spam filters are good at "listening" for the language of spam artists so if you write like a person writing to a person, it is very likely your email will go right on through because it will not be flagged as marketing at all. And the other benefit of writing like this to your customers is that it is a warm and personal style that will work well in communicating to customers.
Make a hobby of keeping up with how spam emailers work and how their messages change as they learn to get around spam filters. The spam filter businesses will be changing with them so be aware of any new trends in this stange part of cyberspace communication so you can alter how you create your marketing emails so you make sure your communications with your customers never look like spam.
Customers and Their ISPs
Overcoming the spam filter problem so you can get a higher assurance of email deliverability to your customers is a tricky path to walk. It would be one thing if the end user customer was simply using Microsoft Outlook spam filtering. Under those circumstances, it is the end customer who is determining how to filter emails. And to put it bluntly, the Microsoft Outlook and other local email software spam filters are just not that good. Add to that the fact that your ordinary internet citizen is not interested in becoming a full time spam security artist and the local spam filtering issue comes apart pretty fast.
But there is another level of spam filtering that is really making email deliverability a much harder road to travel if you are using cold emails and mass mailings to large groups of customers. That is spam filtering at the ISP level. ISP providers have much greater resources and a much greater motivation to provide sophisticated spam filtering to their customers. The ability to control spam is a major marketing point for any ISP and if the ISP is unable to stop spam before it even reaches the customer, the customer can be easily lured away by a competitor who can get the job done.
When you are dealing with some of the biggest ISPs in the world, if you cannot enter into a relationship with that ISP to prove you are a valid internet service and to show that they should not allow their spam blocking software to block you too, you could see hundreds or thousands of your emails die before they even have a chance to go to the customer. So to protect their customer base who for many ISP represents a huge potential marketing audience for you, ISPs will authenticate vendors to weed out the spam artists and phony operators who just want to abuse the trust customers put in their email and internet providers.
The first step to getting to a relationship of trust with the major ISPs who control access to your customers is to prove to them that you are a valid internet business. They want to know that you are selling a bona fide product or service, that you have been in business a while and that you will be in business to support your customers after the sale. These are not unreasonable requirements to be allowed to use the email box of potentially thousands of email customers.
The second level of authentication that each ISP will require has to do with your integrity in the use of email as a marketing tool. It doesn’t take a lot of examples to demonstrate that email marketing is one of the most abused forms of business communications since the carnival barker. ISPs want to know you are not going to run scams through email to its customers and that you are going to treat customers with respect in regards to how you use your marketing privileges if they are granted.
The process of gaining approval is one you can learn about by entering into a dialog with one of the major ISPs through whom you hope to send marketing emails. In general, the process will be the same for most ISPs after that. So once you have walked through the process with one ISP, not only will you know the ropes but you will have the approval of that first internet business entity to show to the rest and your reputation will begin to grow with subsequent applications. So be patient and give this process proper care and attention because the payoffs of gaining the trust of the major ISPs in the industry can be huge.
But there is another level of spam filtering that is really making email deliverability a much harder road to travel if you are using cold emails and mass mailings to large groups of customers. That is spam filtering at the ISP level. ISP providers have much greater resources and a much greater motivation to provide sophisticated spam filtering to their customers. The ability to control spam is a major marketing point for any ISP and if the ISP is unable to stop spam before it even reaches the customer, the customer can be easily lured away by a competitor who can get the job done.
When you are dealing with some of the biggest ISPs in the world, if you cannot enter into a relationship with that ISP to prove you are a valid internet service and to show that they should not allow their spam blocking software to block you too, you could see hundreds or thousands of your emails die before they even have a chance to go to the customer. So to protect their customer base who for many ISP represents a huge potential marketing audience for you, ISPs will authenticate vendors to weed out the spam artists and phony operators who just want to abuse the trust customers put in their email and internet providers.
The first step to getting to a relationship of trust with the major ISPs who control access to your customers is to prove to them that you are a valid internet business. They want to know that you are selling a bona fide product or service, that you have been in business a while and that you will be in business to support your customers after the sale. These are not unreasonable requirements to be allowed to use the email box of potentially thousands of email customers.
The second level of authentication that each ISP will require has to do with your integrity in the use of email as a marketing tool. It doesn’t take a lot of examples to demonstrate that email marketing is one of the most abused forms of business communications since the carnival barker. ISPs want to know you are not going to run scams through email to its customers and that you are going to treat customers with respect in regards to how you use your marketing privileges if they are granted.
The process of gaining approval is one you can learn about by entering into a dialog with one of the major ISPs through whom you hope to send marketing emails. In general, the process will be the same for most ISPs after that. So once you have walked through the process with one ISP, not only will you know the ropes but you will have the approval of that first internet business entity to show to the rest and your reputation will begin to grow with subsequent applications. So be patient and give this process proper care and attention because the payoffs of gaining the trust of the major ISPs in the industry can be huge.
Bringing the Customers to You with a Contest
Internet citizens and anyone who has used email for any length of time knows that they have to be on the alert for unwanted emails. This suspicion is one of the reasons it is difficult to use unsolicited emails for internet marketing any more. Instead a far more effective method is to create excitement in customers you already know is through some promotion that they want to hear about in their email box. And when they are excited to see your emails arrive, they will be sure to add your business email address to their favored email contacts list and you will have circumvented the spam software problem that has been the cause of your email delivery problems all along.
There are many ways to generate excitement in your customer base but perhaps no other one is so additive for your customers as a contest. For the cost of a small prize, people will work tirelessly to satisfy the terms of the contest. And by structuring the contest so the customers must get their clues via email, you are opening that door of email communications for future promotions and marketing. That alone might be worth the price of the prize.
The great thing about creating a contest is you can structure how it works to take the customers to your web site or have them collect clues that are directly related to y our products or services and the contest itself can become a big marketing "commercial" that the customers want to be part of. A contest, along with the obvious value of helping to resolve your email deliverability problems, can serve to generate web site traffic and energize a sluggish site or a function on your web site that you want to see get more attention.
Do you have a blog that isn't getting enough traffic? Hide a clue on it and challenge the contestants to come and search for that clue. Want to see a banner ad get more clicks, let the contestants know the next clue is hidden behind that banner ad and then put the clue on your affiliates page. The clicks to that banner or affiliate link will skyrocket. You can often cover the costs of the promotion and the prize through the increased traffic to your web site entirely.
An online contest can also help drive business to a brick and mortar retail operation that you may be using your web presence to support. This is a wonderful way to meet your online customers face to face by using the contest to take the customers to your store to look for a clue. As they move through the aisles of the store, in addition to eagerly looking for the next step of the contest, they will be shopping and very often, buying things which is exactly what you are looking for.
A contest that you set off via email is also a powerful viral marketing tool. Your customers will naturally tell their friends and relatives about the contest. And as more people hear about the contest, you may see a surge of requests to join in on the fun coming through your online message services. Just be sure to take those customers to an email registration so you can harvest their email addresses and get your business email placed on their favored contacts list too. In that way you cleverly expand your marketing base while drawing new customers to your web site.
You may find that once you get started having contests via email and contests that incorporate every aspect of your online presence, it might become a habit you want to repeat often. The increased traffic, sales and expansion of your customer base can be so lively that there is no reason not to use this marketing tool often.
There are many ways to generate excitement in your customer base but perhaps no other one is so additive for your customers as a contest. For the cost of a small prize, people will work tirelessly to satisfy the terms of the contest. And by structuring the contest so the customers must get their clues via email, you are opening that door of email communications for future promotions and marketing. That alone might be worth the price of the prize.
The great thing about creating a contest is you can structure how it works to take the customers to your web site or have them collect clues that are directly related to y our products or services and the contest itself can become a big marketing "commercial" that the customers want to be part of. A contest, along with the obvious value of helping to resolve your email deliverability problems, can serve to generate web site traffic and energize a sluggish site or a function on your web site that you want to see get more attention.
Do you have a blog that isn't getting enough traffic? Hide a clue on it and challenge the contestants to come and search for that clue. Want to see a banner ad get more clicks, let the contestants know the next clue is hidden behind that banner ad and then put the clue on your affiliates page. The clicks to that banner or affiliate link will skyrocket. You can often cover the costs of the promotion and the prize through the increased traffic to your web site entirely.
An online contest can also help drive business to a brick and mortar retail operation that you may be using your web presence to support. This is a wonderful way to meet your online customers face to face by using the contest to take the customers to your store to look for a clue. As they move through the aisles of the store, in addition to eagerly looking for the next step of the contest, they will be shopping and very often, buying things which is exactly what you are looking for.
A contest that you set off via email is also a powerful viral marketing tool. Your customers will naturally tell their friends and relatives about the contest. And as more people hear about the contest, you may see a surge of requests to join in on the fun coming through your online message services. Just be sure to take those customers to an email registration so you can harvest their email addresses and get your business email placed on their favored contacts list too. In that way you cleverly expand your marketing base while drawing new customers to your web site.
You may find that once you get started having contests via email and contests that incorporate every aspect of your online presence, it might become a habit you want to repeat often. The increased traffic, sales and expansion of your customer base can be so lively that there is no reason not to use this marketing tool often.
A Good Mailing List for a Bad One.
If you have ever used a mass mailing email marketing campaign, you know how they promote their services. The appeal is that, in theory, the service has collected a large amount of valid email addresses that they guarantee will go to real potential internet customers. For a fee, they will take your marketing message and broadcast it to that large customer base and the outcome will be that you will see a percentage of those customers visit your web site or respond to the email and from that percentage, a smaller percentage will become paying customers of yours.
There are two problems with this marketing model. The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers. But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person.
Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted. So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place. Ironic, isn't it?
The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value. For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails. The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low. You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.
A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales. This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.
That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you. This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.
You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts. Through referrals, viral marketing, contests and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well. Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.
This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails. Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.
There are two problems with this marketing model. The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers. But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person.
Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted. So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place. Ironic, isn't it?
The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value. For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails. The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low. You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.
A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales. This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.
That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you. This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.
You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts. Through referrals, viral marketing, contests and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well. Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.
This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails. Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.
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