network marketing industries

E-mail marketing is a potent way to market your product to your existing clients as well as new clients who fit your demographic profile. However, just like every other facet of online marketing, unscrupulous businessmen in search for a quick buck have found a way to corrupt this form of marketing and make is a less viable option. However, there are two silver linings around this enormous cloud. The first is that there are still legal and effective ways to conduct a successful e-mail marketing campaign and the second is that the stigma tied to this form of marketing has scared away a lot of young marketers, so if you have the right planning and approach, you can have success in a world of e-mail marketing with very little competition.

E-mail marketing has been around for so long that almost every conventional way of doing it has been tried repeatedly. I'm sure you probably delete several hundred a month yourself. E-mail spamming has become such an epidemic that the best of spam filters can’t stop them all. The University of California in Berkley did a study in late 2008 and found that 1 in 12.5 million spam emails generates a response.

Looking at those odds, it's in your best interest to market your e-mails properly. Like any form of marketing, e-mail marketing starts with a list. Who receives your e-mail? Is it an existing client list? If so, then these people should already be aware of your company and your product. You should treat these clients like superstars because they are worth their weight in gold. These are the clients who receive your product updates, product release emails, special deals and discounts etc. Do not send too many mails to these people or else they will get off your list. However, make sure that you do send them emails every once in a while, or else they will forget about you and mark you as spam. Most importantly, make sure that all your emails are valuable to them. It should have good information.

So how are you sending these people e-mails? Are you using your laptop and Microsoft Outlook? If you are, you should stop immediately. Use online services like IContact or Oprius to send out mass mails. These services are verified and abide by all anti spam laws. They all have an unsubscribe function at the bottom of every mail and keep you on track for following the law too. If you send out a mass mail from your outlook account and a few users errantly flag it as spam, it will take ages to get off their bad list. Your IP address could be blocked too. So switch to a service as soon as you can.

These services also track how many bounce backs you get, how many people open your email and how many times they open it. This is a great way to keep cleaning your mailing list as well.

Now, we come to the second list of people who will receive your e-mail. The list you don’t yet have. These are people who fit certain criteria and they are your target audience. Their names may be from a list that you purchased or they may have signed up for some service and you bought their names. First of all, you should be careful who you buy email addresses from. Always remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone is selling you a list of one million names for $20, odds are that the list is a fake. Reputed vendors are more expensive but can be verified easily.

Nowadays, most reputable vendors don’t even sell you lists. They let you know if they have lists of people who fit your criteria and e-mail them on your behalf. They will format the e-mail any way you like, but they send it out. That way, you can never really spam any of their lists or even sell it to others. Now, if someone responds to the e-mail, you will get their email address. So the only e-mail addresses that you physically have are those of people who are interested in your product. This system is safe, secure, reputed and gaining wide use. It is also effective since the leads know that they are not being spammed.

Once you have a list, you need to work on setting your auto responder. Unless you are going to be sitting on your computer answering e-mails all day, you need to set up an auto responder. An auto responder is a system that sends an automatic reply to any email that comes into your mail box. You can set it for every email that you get or for specific e-mails, for example only if the email has the subject line Brazil in it, will it get a response.

Your auto responders should not be used as a sales tool. When is the last time you bought a product based on an automated response? People are now savvy enough to know when they get an email from an auto responder. Instead, it should have valuable information, a good thank you note and direct the person emailing you to a proper resource. If you are just trying to tell them that you’ll get back to them later, do so in a polite way and make sure that in time you do get back to them.

So in a nutshell, a good e-mail campaign should have the following:

•  A good list.

• Quality content in your e-mail.

•  Occasional e-mails instead of multiple emails.

•  A good system of dispersion of e-mails. Outlook is for private emails, let’s keep it that way.

• A good auto responder.

•  Good follow up from you or a representative of your company.

Very often marketers forget that they are marketing to people. If you treat people with respect, they will treat you with respect too.

E-mail marketing is still a very powerful and personal way to get in touch with people. It is only growing with added ability for people to access email through their mobile devices. However, there are a lot of laws that are in place to arrest the abuse that has happened over the years. Make sure that you are not found on the wrong side of the fence here. With a little patience, good planning and lots of persistence, you can not only succeed in email marketing, you can master it.