Three Things You Need to Know About Online Email Marketing and Your Internet Business

Online email marketing is not hard to understand but it can get pretty dicey in determining if it is the right fit for your online business. In my opinion no matter what the circumstances online email marketing is a must for any internet business but still there are factors to consider.

1. Your target audience

Before you spend time, currency and effort into email marketing, you have to figure out how often your target audience will be online. An email marketing campaign is not worthwhile if people are not even online to check out your information. Find out if a market exists for your product or service. You can open your browser, type in any keyword search terms you wish and hit enter. Is there an audience? Next, use a keyword research tool to check out how often (per month) people are searching for information utilizing a general keyword and all the variations. This is powerful stuff. Knowing what and how your audience is searching for information can greatly help you determine whether you should start an email marketing campaign.

2. You’re Selling What?

Since we live in an advertising world that is 24/7, it is easy to get caught up in the hype. This goes for many email marketers who choose a product because it promises a big affiliate commission but they never have a clear understanding of what they are selling. This translates into not being able to explain in your emails why people need your product or service. It’s also important to remember sending people a sales letter in the disguise of an email will usually not work. Promote by providing quality information that people can utilize. Put together a small report consisting of five articles you write and give it away free to your email list. Integrate the product links into your report but use sparingly. Avoid trying to hard sell your readers. Let the report stand on its own merit while enticing people to find out more. Leave the sales pitch to the product sales page.

3. The Dreaded S-word

It is not hard to get accused of spamming these days. In the early years of email marketing you could send out unsolicited email as long as you didn’t overdo it. Guess what? Some people overdid it.

According to Anti-Spam Spam-Unit, “some researchers estimate that just under 100 billion spam messages are sent worldwide every twenty-four hours as of June 2007″. You cannot blame people for not wanting to open an email box full of spam but it’s gotten to the point that a straight forward email can now come under the heading of spam if the recipient wishes to complain. I have seen customers sign up to an email list then forget about it. When an email arrived promoting a product, they quickly yelled spam and wanted to know how the marketer had gotten their email address.

Even if people do remember signing up to your list, they have gotten so use to deleting emails without reading that getting them to open it is a science all to itself. This is why you want to give real thought to your subject line. Stay away from extravagant promises that will only trigger the spam filters. Keep in mind that certain topics (like money) in your subject line can also trigger the spam filters. Ask a question or create a top five list on the problems and or solutions to your topic. Think of your subject line as a strong push that gets your list to open your email so they can get more useful information

If you are having any doubts about incorporating it into your online marketing system just focus on your target audience by doing some keyword research, provide useful information that helps you to state the benefits of your product or service clearly and craft an email (particularly the subject line) that won’t raise a red flag with the spam filters. Email marketing is a powerful tool. Do not let any obstacles stand in your way to using it effectively.

Visit BusinessEnglishPod.com to view and download more videos on Business English for writing emails. In this episode of Email Tune-up we’re going to look at an email request to an external supplier asking them to speed up the delivery of a shipment.

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Do I Really Need Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a wonderful way to reach large amounts of customers in a short amount of time. This is a very inexpensive, but very effective, marketing method. It will result in getting more traffic to your website thus generating more sales. Email marketing can be used by any type of business regardless of the products or services they have to offer.

One huge advantage of email marketing is that it can be effective for both large and small businesses. When it comes to regular commerce, the larger company can afford to print up colorful fliers and ads. This is much harder for smaller businesses due to the expense. Email marketing can be done using software, so that even small businesses can create effective and professional looking email marketing campaigns on a small budget. This will hopefully help them increase their sales.

Email marketing is an effective way to deliver the information you want to get to consumers in the method they enjoy using. Almost everyone has email these days and it is common to log on and check for messages several times each day. It also allows you the opportunity to reach consumers around the globe. There are no boundaries when it comes to location with this method of marketing.

On average email marketing costs 78% less than other types of marketing. This saving is after the cost of research, testing, and sending the emails. It also takes the cost of consulting into consideration. Email marketing consulting is often less expensive than other marketing consultants. This means you can choose to save money or maybe invest more, but reach more people. In addition to saving money, you save valuable time. Your emails can be scheduled to go out at times when you are out of the office or working on other projects.

To appeal to your consumers, email marketing allows you to use graphics, games, music, videos, and other types of materials to gain their interest. This is something most other marketing concepts don’t allow. Yes, they offer one or two choices, but with email marketing concepts your imagination is the limit. Since you have the name and purchasing history of the individual, you can personalize the email. This makes the customer feel more trusting towards you as well as more loyal to the company. It is much better than getting a piece of mail at home that says dear customer. You’ll be able to create marketing lists that allow you to send a marketing campaign just to your target market. This is a very effective way of sending different campaigns to different customers.

The process of email marketing gives you tools for measuring the success of your marketing campaign. You can measure the click through rate, conversion rate, find out how a person linked to your website, and many more ways of analyzing data.

Customers can choose to opt out by clicking the link in your email marketing campaign. This saves you money by knowing who isn’t interested in receiving your information. There is no way to know that with other types of marketing campaigns. For those who are interested in your email marketing campaign, you will see the responses quickly. This is a great way of knowing what is effective for future marketing endeavors.

Email marketing is one of the most common as well as most successful marketing methods available. With the volumes of consumers on the internet everyday it only makes sense to use it from a business point of view. Email marketing is a great way to reach a volume of people quickly and inexpensively. Email marketing is a great opportunity to communicate with your customers. This is an effective way to be able to analyze your marketing tools so you will know what is working and what areas you need to continue improving.

There are many tools out there to help you with your email campaigns. A lot of them are free. Just enter something like “Free email tools” into your favourite search engine and try a few out. It could be the best days work you ever did. Do you really need email marketing? I’ll leave you to answer that!

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