eMail Marketing System
Want to reach a lot of people with the click of a SEND button?
Thinking of buying “a targeted” email list with 50,000 names on it and try your luck with some “spray and pray” emailing?
There are people who are able to sell or promote products and services with random email blasts. Whether that is something you would want to do is a decision you will need to make – I would not recommend it. (Photo credit: Zige Zhao)
I have written about email marketing system elsewhere. A simple search on the category “eMail Marketing” (at the bottom of the page) will bring up related posts. While there are no hard and fast rules about what methods you should use, here are my recommendations, based on email best practices.
3 Things Not To Do with eMail marketing
1 – Do Not buy email lists no matter how targeted they claim to be because:
– These people have not give you permission to send them emails.
– They do not know you and will not read your mails even if you reach them.
– They are not interested in what you have to tell / sell them and will delete or mark your mail as spam.
2 – Do Not automatically sign them up to your email list or newsletter:
– Even if you allow them to opt-out this is not permission-based marketing.
– Nobody likes to be forced into anything.
– Even if your stuff is great, let others sign up on their own free will.
– Because if you automatically signed them up, they may not know or remember who you are and will not be interested in your mail. You are at best wasting your precious time and resources.
3 – Do Not sign them up again after they have un-subscribed. This seems obvious but I am amazed how many times I am re-subscribed back into lists that I have opted out of. Do respect your readers’ preference and practice permission based marketing.
This applies to you even if you are not using email marketing system. If you are sending unsolicited emails to others without explicitly having their permission to continually send them mails promoting one thing or another, you are likely to be spamming.
Your email account could be suspended, blocked or black listed and your mails will likely not reach your audience.
There is not much benefit in having a big database if the people in the list do not know you and they have not expressed interest in the topic / product or services you talk about.
Your return on Investment (with time and money) will be very low and you may even end up needing to pay more to your email system provider for maintaining such a big list. And you will be lucky if your email provider does not shut down your account if you send mails without explicit permission from recipients.
eMail best practices recommends that you regularly clean up your email list and concentrate on only the people who want to hear from you. The better your list knows you then more likely they will open up your mails and read them.
In coming posts, I will talk about what you can do to start building your database of subscribers. Having 500 eager readers is better than having 50,000 people whose email addresses you bought – anytime.
More posts on eMail Marketing here and here.
