Email marketing
Email marketing is a powerful one to many online marketing strategy that can generate amazing results at relatively low costs. Email marketing can be broken down into transaction emails, direct emails and trigger emails. Each type can be very effective and be part of a highly successful campaign.
In the email marketing Section you'll learn about different email marketing tools, effective list building, best practices and advanced email marketing strategies. You'll be able to read about ways to increase email opt-in rates, maximize email open rates & click through rates, create effective auto-responder sequences and improve email deliver ability.
EMAIL MARKETING: Your List
Whew, I could write an entire thesis on list management but let's look at the most important aspects.
Right off the bat, let's get some terminology out the way. You'll often hear of "opt-in" and
"permission-based" email marketing. Both of these mean that your subscribers gave you
permission to email them.
Permission can come in different ways, from being an active customer who gave you their email address to signing up on your website.
The key thing is that they gave you permission and that means you specifically. Purchasing or renting a list from a seller isn't opt-in, no matter what the list seller says. Also, if a reader signed up at mycoffeeshop.com then it's probably not a good idea to email them from myclothingstore.com.
While it's super important for you to grow your list, look at it like a recipient would. How do you feel when you receive marketing emails from businesses you don't recognize? Do you buy things via emails you didn't sign up for?
Probably not and neither will the folks you send to if they didn't sign up.With lists, bigger is not better.
It's common to see companies base their marketing worth on their massive lists. They're totally comfortable with high abuse rates (i.e., folks marking them as spam) and low read rates and they're worried about potentially losing out on a few readers. It's tempting to hold on to contacts who signed up 8 years ago even though they haven't bought anything in 6. It's hard to relinquish email addresses even if they've never viewed a single email and probably signed up with a throwaway address.
There's a lot of benefit to frequently "cleaning" your list.
From a purely monetary standpoint, the bigger your list, the bigger the costs. If 30% of your list is utterly unresponsive, why pay for it?
There's a more compelling reason to keep your list healthy...
Delivery!
Your delivery is affected more by your list health than anything else. I'm going to assume that you're not sending emails about illicit pharmaceuticals and "adult" services and so you'reprobably not going to run afoul of spam filters. If you're already sending via a reputable ESP like Mad Mimi, you're probably okay content-wise.
If your recipients have no idea who you are, they'll start calling shenanigans and marking your emails as spam. If your list contains "spam traps" or old email addresses from accounts that haven't been logged into in years, ISP's like Gmail, AOL and Hotmail pay attention to that. They start assuming the worst and then, they start sending your emails to the dreaded spam folder.There are no warnings or second chances so, you need to be aware of this from the start.
Like anything in life, there are no shortcuts and if you start things right, you'll build the right foundation. Starting your list off small and opt-in is far better than buying lists or using dubious practices. There are some hefty benefits - great delivery and saved $$'s!
