Tips on Marketing Your Own Site

E-mail Marketing How-To's

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract website traffic and make money online. Of course, e-mail marketing in itself means different things to different marketers. After all, it can take on quite a wide variety of formats.

In this issue, we cover the various forms of e-mail marketing available to online businesses and reveal what works and what doesn't.

The following will be discussed:

• Unsolicited bulk e-mail marketing
• Opt-in e-mail list rental
• E-mail newsletter classified and sponsorship advertising
• E-mail newsletter solo mailings (TEXT and HTML)
• E-mail newsletter network advertising
• Opt-in "series" e-mail marketing

Unsolicited bulk e-mail marketing

This is often classified as a dangerous endeavor. Sure, you can get some website traffic using bulk e-mail. But the 10% response rate some companies promise to give you turns out to be more like 0.01%.

You can tackle the rigors of unsolicited bulk e-mail marketing yourself, but you'll need lots of ISP connections because they'll be canceled quickly! If you don't want the hassle, you can hire a company to do the dirty work for you, but the fact still remains, unsolicited bulk e-mail angers a huge percentage of recipients and your risks can be rather high.

Your domain will end up being blocked by many ISPs and you could even face legal battles. Thus, unsolicited bulk e-mail is not worth the trouble. Read on and you'll find that bulk e-mail marketing isn't really necessary either.

Opt-in e-mail list rental

This is a much "cleaner" version of bulk e-mail marketing. There are plenty of companies on the Web that will rent you e-mail addresses that have opted in to receive commercial e-mail. Actually, in most cases, they are not really renting the addresses; that is, you never see the addresses. Instead, they charge you a per-e-mail-address fee for mailing your message to a list under their management. But does it work?

As long as the recipients are not being paid to read the messages and they are genuinely interested in the offers they signed up to receive, this strategy can be profitable.

The problem is that in most cases, you'll pay from ten to twenty cents per address and mailing to a list large enough to get great results can be quite expensive. But if your budget can handle it, you can generate some great targeted traffic.

Some companies that offer opt-in e-mail services are postmasterdirect.com which has millions of addresses in a huge variety of categories, and bulletmail.com, targitmail.com and htmail.com.

E-mail newsletter classified and sponsorship advertising

This option is seen as a more reasonably-priced e-mail marketing solution. Many believe that this gives the best return for the marketing budget, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

E-zine advertising is still one of the most effective ways to get targeted traffic and it is quite cheap. It works best when you locate e-zines that your target market actually looks forward to reading. And that's not difficult to do... Just visit an e-zine directory and search for e-zines in your niche market.

Subscribe to a bunch of free e-zines and read them as they arrive. Look for larger circulation e-zines that have a good following. If you like the content in any particular e-zine, then hundreds or thousands of other readers probably do, too.

Place a classified ad and if your site and offer are up to snuff, you'll make a profit nearly every time. If you can swing a top sponsorship ad, it works about five times better than a regular classified ad! Here are three great e-zine directories you can scour and locate lots of e-zines that target your particular niche.

Direct E-mail List Source: http://market.emailresults.com/

E-zine Hub: http://www.ezinehub.com/

WebScout: http://webscoutlists.com/

E-mail newsletter solo mailings (TEXT and HTML)

An even better way to utilize e-mail newsletters to drive traffic and sales is to purchase "e-mail newsletter solo mailings." There are both TEXT and HTML solo mailing versions and some e-zine publishers really underprice these.

Many have found HTML e-mail to be especially effective, returning 4-5 times the cost of the ad in most cases. Once again, the list should be tightly targeted to your niche audience for best results. Use the same directories above to locate e-zines that reach your best prospects and you'll undoubtedly find some that offer this type of advertising.

E-mail newsletter network advertising

This form allows you to pay e-mail newsletter management sites to run top sponsorship ads across their network of newsletters. The traffic can be targeted to just about any niche and it's faster than finding each of the e-zines yourself. Although this requires a larger initial investment than running ads in individual e-zines, in the long run it is usually cheaper and it requires much less effort.

Opt-in "series" e-mail marketing

Finally, we'll tackle one last e-mail marketing strategy that very few Internet businesses use, and use properly. The opt-in series e-mail marketing is a secret weapon many of the big name marketers prefer not to talk about much.

You offer an attractive and irresistible freebie at your site, (in most cases this works best via a pop-up or pop-under) and when your visitors claim their freebie, they are required to enter their name and e-mail address. They are then subscribed to your series of personalized, scheduled e-mail messages that you have pre-written.

The best type of series is one that offers free valuable help and information about the subject they were looking for help on in the first place.

A well-written e-mail series will form relationships with your best prospects, something that holds more value than most online businesses realize. The best part of this strategy is that once you do the set-up work, everything is completely automated and personalized.

There are a number of sites that offer follow-up e-mail autoresponder services. You can also use a software solution such as http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop/ -- which is cheaper in the long-run.

No matter what solution you use, when used properly, and with a bit of originality and flare, this e-mail marketing strategy can be one of your top sales producers

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