I think that an email campaign is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.
There are some important rules for starting any email campaign
- Your own list
- Opt-In only
- No Spam
- Post your old newsletters
- No Blasting
Your own list
Your own list of customers and visitors who have asked for your newsletters are by far your most valuable resource. These are your core business. Very few, if any, lists that you can buy will give you people who are specifically interested in what you have to offer.
The main goal of a newsletter is to get people to actually receive, open and read your email. This is called deliverability. The best chance of this happening is to have recipients who want and have asked for your information.
One of the best ways to get your visitors to sign up is to offer them a gift. It’s pretty easy to offer something to download like a great report, helpful tips or perhaps an ebook that you have written or purchased the distribution rights to. These gifts can be presented as very valuable even though they don’t cost you anything or very little.
Another way to go is to give away something that costs you more. One of my customers Melosleep tried a limited time promotion where they gave away a free sample of their product to anyone who filled out a form. The freebie sites passed their offer around and in a very short time they had a huge amount of requests. It was expensive, but they built up a very large in house mailing list quickly.
A huge list can also be another expense as most web hosts will limit the amount of email any one account can send in order to keep the spammers out. For example this site is limited to sending 100 emails per hour max. There are programs like PHPList that will limit how many emails that it sends an hour, but if you have tens of thousands of names it would take weeks to send one newsletter.
In that case you probably need to use a commercial email sending (or hosting) company. A company with a good reputation so your email doesn’t get blocked even before it gets to your reader as being from a spammer.
Tomorrow – Opt-In only
.