Email marketing the easy way
What is email marketing?
Basically, email marketing in plain English is direct mail via email. The goal of email marketing could be to advertise to attract new customers, introduce new products or services to an existing customer base, keep your customers up to date with a newsletter, etc. All of the above activities are very legitimate commercial endeavors as long as you follow certain unwritten rules and the list of emails you use is called "directed". In other cases, the names generally come from basic data generated by your marketing department that represents your current clientele, a carefully selected list of potential customers, or a list of people who have chosen to receive their messages.
If you use a list you bought instead (you know, "25 million guaranteed AOL email addresses for only 19.95 - plus shipping costs"), or if you do so without notifying the people in your list If you list or use suspicious methods, you will be considered a spammer and what you send is spam, bulk mail, unsolicited email, basically the main enemy of all virtues and life in general. Yes, friends, it is also easy to be classified as a spammer and it is very difficult to get out of it.
As soon as your message is considered unwanted, it will immediately be placed on millions of blacklists, along with those that promise you countless additional pieces of advice and hours and hours of ecstatic pleasure (only for 3 simple payments and some processing fees)).
Sounds pretty risky, why bother?
Obviously, optional email advertising is much more profitable than direct marketing through regular mail, home sales, or telemarketing. Paper, printing, envelope and shipping costs can quickly accumulate. The sale of houses requires the payment of commissions. Telemarketing generates remote calculations, often without great results, as people on the other end of the so-called cold call are increasingly looking for thirst for blood.
So why not use my personal email or my company's email server and email software?
In the early days of email marketing (before the art of penis enlargement), this was exactly what people were doing. They collected all of their emails in a primitive version of a spreadsheet, activated a mail merge program, connected it to their corporate email system and voila, thousands of emails flew away.
The scenario is certainly possible today, but let me explain in simple scenarios what can happen:
One of the many nonprofit groups that have decided to control the Internet will intercept that a large number of emails have been generated and sent from a nearby server (yes, they can). To protect the civilized world from those who spread spam, viruses and other bugs, they will put them on a list of threats to humanity. These other nice business people who were your recipients in the background have an IT department that is constantly shouted at by angry users who receive emails from naked people. Well, Mel, your computer scientist decides to set up an anti-spam system that links the nonprofit database of known spammers (oh yes, did I mention that you are now a known spammer?) And block your emails. Your emails can be blocked so well that your company is having trouble communicating via email and your IT staff is going crazy and / or getting fired.
Basically not that good. Other things can happen: you need to set up an acceptance / exclusion system. Some states have laws that make it easier for you to unsubscribe from your target audience. You have problems formatting your emails properly, visually, etc. ,
After all, sending thousands of emails and maintaining lists, subscribing and unsubscribing is tedious and simply boring. The only way to do this is to have the highest level of automation or, the best solution, outsourcing to a company that does it professionally.
My friends, I am known for promoting the concept of "internal execution" and I am not that good at outsourcing. But when it comes to direct mail.
I tell him to stay away and let the professionals do what they do.
If you're concerned about the cost, keep in mind that the tariffs you pay for email marketing services always cost less than the effort and cost of traditional options, not to mention the great options to reach a much wider audience. much faster (almost immediately).
What should you look for in an email marketing business?
1. Automate your subscription requests and unsubscribe
Many email marketing companies provide you with the exact HTML code you need to insert into your website to create a subscription form for your website. The best services also offer a link at the bottom of every email that allows subscribers to update their information or unsubscribe from a list, automating everything for you.
2. Email personalization
Another powerful feature of many email marketing services is the ability to use mail merge features to customize every email you send. The best services allow you to use custom fields in addition to the name and default name.
3. Management of returned emails
Bounces are emails sent to email accounts that no longer exist or that are full, blocked, etc. In essence, you will get a response indicating that your message was not sent. Any mailing list management software can handle subscription and unsubscribe requests and send messages. Without the integrated management of returned emails, however, all undelivered emails are returned, which is a considerable annoyance for your list. It is large. Ideally, the messaging software you use can process your bounces for you. Every time a bounce is received, the software notes the address. If another bounce is received, the email address is sent to an inactive list.
This deletion feature is extremely important because as a spammer you can be blacklisted if you continuously send emails with lots of bounces. You definitely want to avoid that.
4. HTML email
The ability to send HTML emails has been around for some time. Most email marketing companies support sending messages with graphics and formatted text. This is surely something you want to look for.
However, not all users can view emails in HTML format. This percentage is generally between 10 and 20%. Instead of seeing their aesthetic email, they could see a chain of meaningless code. With most mailing list management programs, these 10-20% of users open emails from you and are more likely to be referred to as spammers.
To avoid this, look for companies that use MIME Multipart to send messages. When you send a multi-part MIME HTML email, users who cannot see the HTML messages receive the email in the usual text format.
Basically, email marketing in plain English is direct mail via email. The goal of email marketing could be to advertise to attract new customers, introduce new products or services to an existing customer base, keep your customers up to date with a newsletter, etc. All of the above activities are very legitimate commercial endeavors as long as you follow certain unwritten rules and the list of emails you use is called "directed". In other cases, the names generally come from basic data generated by your marketing department that represents your current clientele, a carefully selected list of potential customers, or a list of people who have chosen to receive their messages.
If you use a list you bought instead (you know, "25 million guaranteed AOL email addresses for only 19.95 - plus shipping costs"), or if you do so without notifying the people in your list If you list or use suspicious methods, you will be considered a spammer and what you send is spam, bulk mail, unsolicited email, basically the main enemy of all virtues and life in general. Yes, friends, it is also easy to be classified as a spammer and it is very difficult to get out of it.
As soon as your message is considered unwanted, it will immediately be placed on millions of blacklists, along with those that promise you countless additional pieces of advice and hours and hours of ecstatic pleasure (only for 3 simple payments and some processing fees)).
Sounds pretty risky, why bother?
Obviously, optional email advertising is much more profitable than direct marketing through regular mail, home sales, or telemarketing. Paper, printing, envelope and shipping costs can quickly accumulate. The sale of houses requires the payment of commissions. Telemarketing generates remote calculations, often without great results, as people on the other end of the so-called cold call are increasingly looking for thirst for blood.
So why not use my personal email or my company's email server and email software?
In the early days of email marketing (before the art of penis enlargement), this was exactly what people were doing. They collected all of their emails in a primitive version of a spreadsheet, activated a mail merge program, connected it to their corporate email system and voila, thousands of emails flew away.
The scenario is certainly possible today, but let me explain in simple scenarios what can happen:
One of the many nonprofit groups that have decided to control the Internet will intercept that a large number of emails have been generated and sent from a nearby server (yes, they can). To protect the civilized world from those who spread spam, viruses and other bugs, they will put them on a list of threats to humanity. These other nice business people who were your recipients in the background have an IT department that is constantly shouted at by angry users who receive emails from naked people. Well, Mel, your computer scientist decides to set up an anti-spam system that links the nonprofit database of known spammers (oh yes, did I mention that you are now a known spammer?) And block your emails. Your emails can be blocked so well that your company is having trouble communicating via email and your IT staff is going crazy and / or getting fired.
Basically not that good. Other things can happen: you need to set up an acceptance / exclusion system. Some states have laws that make it easier for you to unsubscribe from your target audience. You have problems formatting your emails properly, visually, etc. ,
After all, sending thousands of emails and maintaining lists, subscribing and unsubscribing is tedious and simply boring. The only way to do this is to have the highest level of automation or, the best solution, outsourcing to a company that does it professionally.
My friends, I am known for promoting the concept of "internal execution" and I am not that good at outsourcing. But when it comes to direct mail.
I tell him to stay away and let the professionals do what they do.
If you're concerned about the cost, keep in mind that the tariffs you pay for email marketing services always cost less than the effort and cost of traditional options, not to mention the great options to reach a much wider audience. much faster (almost immediately).
What should you look for in an email marketing business?
1. Automate your subscription requests and unsubscribe
Many email marketing companies provide you with the exact HTML code you need to insert into your website to create a subscription form for your website. The best services also offer a link at the bottom of every email that allows subscribers to update their information or unsubscribe from a list, automating everything for you.
2. Email personalization
Another powerful feature of many email marketing services is the ability to use mail merge features to customize every email you send. The best services allow you to use custom fields in addition to the name and default name.
3. Management of returned emails
Bounces are emails sent to email accounts that no longer exist or that are full, blocked, etc. In essence, you will get a response indicating that your message was not sent. Any mailing list management software can handle subscription and unsubscribe requests and send messages. Without the integrated management of returned emails, however, all undelivered emails are returned, which is a considerable annoyance for your list. It is large. Ideally, the messaging software you use can process your bounces for you. Every time a bounce is received, the software notes the address. If another bounce is received, the email address is sent to an inactive list.
This deletion feature is extremely important because as a spammer you can be blacklisted if you continuously send emails with lots of bounces. You definitely want to avoid that.
4. HTML email
The ability to send HTML emails has been around for some time. Most email marketing companies support sending messages with graphics and formatted text. This is surely something you want to look for.
However, not all users can view emails in HTML format. This percentage is generally between 10 and 20%. Instead of seeing their aesthetic email, they could see a chain of meaningless code. With most mailing list management programs, these 10-20% of users open emails from you and are more likely to be referred to as spammers.
To avoid this, look for companies that use MIME Multipart to send messages. When you send a multi-part MIME HTML email, users who cannot see the HTML messages receive the email in the usual text format.
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