Learn why Email Marketing is Still Important for Your Online Advertising Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the best ways of advertising your business online. As the number of email users is growing rapidly, more and more businesses are choosing email marketing as their primary advertising campaign, because it’s a great method of reaching global audience for their target market.
Email marketing is cheap, easy, fast and most important – effective. Even the biggest skeptics, saying that email marketing is dead, should be convinced. It still works and brings good ROI (Return on Investment) for internet marketers.
If you are planning to start an internet business or if you already have one, it’s a must to implement email marketing into the overall process of your web business promotion. A well planned email marketing campaign can bring tremendous success by boosting sales for your on-line or off-line business.
Opt-In Email Marketing vs. SPAM
Before starting your email marketing campaign, you should clearly understand the difference between opt-in email marketing and spam. If you fail to do that, you may hurt your business and reputation for a long time.
Spam is very unethical way of internet marketing. Simply stated, it means sending promotional email messages to people who didn’t ask that. If you try to spam, you may be banned by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and never be able to send messages from your email account again. That’s strong reason why you shouldn’t spam.
A much better method is opt-in email marketing. Contrary to spam it is permission based, which means that people have agreed to receive emails from you. This way of marketing is preferred by many businesses and it brings very good results. Some top marketers have achieved as much as 40% response rates using opt-in email marketing.
Another advantage of opt-in against unsolicited email marketing is that last-mentioned brings very low response rates. It’s not targeted, which means that email message goes to anybody, those who are interested in your offer and those who are not. But majority of people will not even look at your email, so it’s impossible to reach good response rates using unsolicited advertising.
Opt-in method is targeted though. When you send a message to a list of email addresses, you know they are interested in your offer. That’s why they’ve subscribed in the first place right?
4 Major Ways of Using Opt-In Email Marketing
Now you know the differences between permission based advertising and spam. It’s time to look at a couple of ways of using opt-in email marketing. Consider these below:
- Buying Ads in Other Ezines
This is one of the fastest ways to promote any product or service with email. It is best for small business owners, because it doesn’t require high budget. - Renting Opt-In List
This method is fast and responsive. Renting a list can be quite expensive, but if you have a budget, then you can expect good ROI with this one. - Buying Opt-In List
Very good way of increasing a subscriber base and achieving quality results is to simply buy a list. It is expensive, but can be very effective. - Building Your Own Opt-In List
Last but not least, is building your own email list (some call it in-house list). Actually, it’s the best method of all mentioned above. It will require some time, but the results will greatly outweigh the efforts.
All the methods above have some advantages and disadvantages. Some are more effective, others are less. You should choose the one that fits your needs and budget. But if you have enough money, try them all and decide which one is the most effective for your internet business.
Writing Email Promotion Messages
One of the most important elements of your email marketing campaign is your promotional message. Learning how to write an effective ezine ad or follow up email message is crucial step of your email marketing campaign. Badly written message could waste your money and harm your reputation.
In order to write a good and effective promotional message, you must learn a few tactics of copywriting, because the best written sales letters or ezine ads are a result of good copywriting. It takes times to master the art, but you can start with these tips below:
- Targeting
Write your message to those people who are interested in your product or service. Decide who’s the person that will buy from you and where to look for him or her. - Personalizing
Write your message not to the crowd, but to one person and put his or her name in the message. Like “How are you Lucy?”. This will be better and more personal than just “Dear Subscriber”. - Headlines
Write interesting headlines (subject lines). These are seen first. If your headline isn’t interesting, your message will be deleted. Make sure that your headline is attractive and eye catching if you want your message to be opened. - Unsubscribe
Give your prospects the opportunity to unsubscribe from your list. If you keep them against their will, you may be accused of spam. You really don’t want that. So put the removal instructions at the end of your message all the time. - Test and Track
Testing is very important. If you don’t track all your campaigns, you’ll never know what pulls the profit and what’s not. Every successful internet marketer tests results in order to avoid bad tactics and implement the good ones.
Summing Up
Email marketing is a great way of developing a long term relationship with your target market. It allows you to communicate with your potential clients and customers to promote your products or services. If you serve their needs and treat them respectfully, in return they’ll become your loyal customers and friends for life.
If you are really serious about your on-line or off-line business, you should pay attention to email marketing, because it could be your most profitable advertising method you’ve ever used.
