Better Email Marketing
By James Dowden
A Time for Action and a Halt to Email News Letter Overload!
If you are an aspiring Internet marketer with a PC and an email account, and you’ve visited web sites where you have left your name and email
address, chances are that you receive promotional material and email newsletters from those sources.
All companies or marketers are keen to grab your attention and/or are hell-bent on parting you from a little more of your hard-earned
cash! But don’t think badly of them. They are only doing what every business and entrepreneur worth their salt should be doing – increasing
sales revenue in whatever legitimate way that they can. And email news letter marketing is an extremely effective way, currently, to achieve that
objective.
Email Marketing Campaign
In the case of online retailers, you may receive the occasional “Special Offer” alert. The delete button is not far away and an
email marketing campaign from this source seldom causes problems. If you have subscribed to anyone’s newsletters, however, then it can be a
different story, altogether!
Unless you are naive, you won’t have any doubt that a good number of these newsletters to which you readily subscribed will contain
advertising and promotional material. There is no harm in that. On the contrary, it is often through these email marketing campaigns
or ‘pitches' that you get to hear about really first-rate products and upgrades that are essential to online businesses and individual
marketers.
But, and this is a BIG but, if you do not manage this well, the initial trickle of marketing email news letters of varying frequency and
content will soon grow to a deluge of Monsoon-like proportion. Not only will it feel like you’re wading through a flood of murky waters to
reach the few clean, dry spots, here and there, but spending time sifting through these emails may, also, seriously delay or stall your
plans and endeavour to build and launch your own website business. And then, you may be tempted to throw out the proverbial baby with the
bath water by un-subscribing from the lot of them!
Instead of going from one extreme to another, you may find it useful to organise matters so that you make the best use of this source of
information to which you may want to refer at some future date, especially if the newsletters come from experts whose opinions you have come to
respect and trust.
- Open up a free email account with ISPs like Yahoo, AOL, BT, Gmail or with any other free ISP of your choice. If you already have an
account, free or not, then set up a separate, free email account so that newsletters and promotions from various experts can be delivered,
there, rather than in your main Inbox.
- If you use just one account for all incoming correspondence, then your personal email account may get overloaded very quickly (within
days)! As a result, you may find that urgent and personal emails fail to arrive! When you subscribe to newsletters, use the free
email address set up for this purpose.
- Set aside a few minutes, each day, to go through your emails from various experts. But be very disciplined. Avoid getting
sidetracked by clicking on links and heading off at a tangent, even if the expert's email conveys a sense of urgency! Instead, scan
quickly through each one and print off a copy of those emails that appear to have useful content or interesting product promotions. Those
that don’t have anything of value to you, delete immediately.
- Create a Resource File or two (ring binders will do) and insert index cards to separate the different classification of documents.
File away the printed copy of a given news letter under the appropriate category for future reference, when you need to install and use the
product, or when you’re ready to learn and implement a particular strategy.
- Once you know “Who’s Who” in the Internet marketing and online business world and whose email marketing campaigns consistently deliver
material of value, stick with these (setting a maximum of 12 experts, overall) and then un-subscribe from the list of all the rest!
- By stemming the flood of unnecessary email newsletters, (you don't need emails in duplicate, triplicate, regurgitated info or alerts for
the same product), you will have, at your disposal (in your Inbox and Resource Files), only such information that you know will come in
useful at appropriate times.
- Allocate half an hour or so, each day (could be first thing in the morning, while enjoying your coffee) to reach for your Resource File
and read newsletters and reports on a specific issue that may be relevant and timely to consider for your business.
- When you do go to a new website to subscribe or buy a promoted product, remember to un-subscribe from this list as soon as you discover
the news letter content and frequency to be less than desirable or is below the standard you’ve come to expect from your favourite
experts.
And when you’re ready to engage in email news letter marketing of your own, then do bear in mind all the things that irritate and drive you nuts,
now, when you think of some of the less attractive email campaign practices adopted by others (daily bombardment of news letter
emails that say little).
Make each email news letter worth the time people spend to read them and ones your subscribers and customers may look forward to
receiving from you. Don’t cause them to call a halt to any email news letter marketing campaign of yours. This will not only be bad
for business, but it will, also, reduce your most valuable business asset, your list!
Copyright © 2007 James Dowden - All Rights Reserved
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