Email Marketing Strategy

A lot of people think that email marketing is dead or dying because of all the problems with spam filters, delivery issues and other problems. While email marketing may not be as problem free as it was 10 years ago, it is certainly still a viable form of making a living online. All you need is a game plan and some decent tools to work with. Hopefully, this article will give you some strategies that you can use for your email marketing campaigns.

The first thing you need to do is decide what kind of email marketing campaign you want to use. The one thing that I strongly suggest against is buying leads, loading them into an autoresponder and sending ads out to them. Most of these leads, unless you really know where they are coming from, are harvested from people who will have no idea what you're emailing you about. You will find out what spam complaints really are and most likely end up getting your ISP to shut you down permanently.

One strategy you can use is what I call the one shot strategy. There are many sites on the Internet, called FFA sites, that provide a service to ad posters where they allow them to post their ads for free. In return, they agree to get one email from each FFA owner. To own your own FFA page is a cheap solution. Some are a little as $10 a month. In return, you'll get to email hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people a day. It's one shot for each person, but if you have a good enough email ad, offering them something like a free report to get them into your autoresponder, you can actually build quite a nice list in this manner.

Another strategy is to simply go straight for the autoresponder series. To effectively utilize this strategy, you're going to have to use other forms of promotion in order to get people into your autoresponder series. This can be done by using the method described above, which is another form of email advertising, or you can do something like writing articles and submitting them to directories. In the bio boxes of these articles, you can direct people to a free report or ebook that they can get by subscribing to your autoresponder series. Once they're in, you would then send them a number of follow up messages in an attempt to sell them on your product or service. It's best though to give them a lot of good content in the process so that they don't feel like you're just selling to them.

In whatever email marketing strategy you use, you need to decide if you're going to try to sell to them directly or send them free information first in an effort to win them over. There is no right or wrong here. With solid products that really fill a burning need, you can probably sell people right off. But with most things, prospective buyers need to see your site about 7 times before they commit to buying. So it's probably best to get them into an autoresponder series. With a one shot "buy or die" email, you risk losing a lot of sales that you might have gotten down the road.

To YOUR Success