Email Marketing: What To Do And Not To Do

The wonderful thing about marketing on the Internet is that there are many ways to do it. You have everything from pay per click to solo ads to classifieds to you name it. But many marketers are missing out on a big piece of the pie by either leaving email marketing out of the equation or not using it properly. I don't know which category you fall in, but if you're not making a solid income through email marketing, you're missing out big time. This article is going to give you a few tips to improve your efforts in this area.

Email List building is one of the marketing strategies that must be implemented in every small business promotion campaign. Many online marketers do not understand the importance of building a quality targeted email list, or the best way to achieve it. You must gain your prospects' trust and capture their contact information in order to build a list. Through this list, you can advertise your site or product to your prospects and later on turn them into paying customers. According to many of the famous online Gurus and Blogs that I have studied, research shows that people will keep ignoring your advert until they have seen it at least seven times.

That kind of leads in to the next area where you can improve the results you're getting. People aren't going to respond to you if you don't give them something of value. Nobody wants to just open up and email and read a sales pitch. That want something for their time. A free e-course or report or something along those lines will bring about a much better response than a sales pitch. There is plenty of time to pitch these people down the road AFTER you have gained their trust. Give them something of value first.

No spam, please

The first mistake one can make is to send unsolicited messages. This is called spamming, and is the bane of many email marketers and Internet users. This is basically the sending of advertising emails en masse to people who have not asked to be informed in such a manner. This clutters up inboxes, causes massive loads on mail servers, and worse, serves as a vehicle for computer viruses and malware for the unscrupulous or careless marketer. This will seriously reduce the popularity of ones product or service. Though there may be some who do take up the offer, most people will simply delete the message without even glancing at the subject matter. Avoid spamming at all costs.

A trickle, not a flood

Email marketing should not be obtrusive or too pushy, in terms of selling a product. People tend to have trust issues towards marketing via electronic means, since they have no real guarantee that what they see is what they will get. Avoid hyping up the products or services too much, or they may think that it is too good to be true and end up not buying at all. As a general guideline, once a week or once every two weeks should be good, except if you have a special message on limited offers. Remember not to flood in boxes, and youre good as gold.

Options for trust

Users have the tendency to unsubscribe from your email marketing service. This is often overlooked by marketers, and scares away the more Internet-savvy users. The fact that they can opt out of your informational messages is a good foundation for trust, since they will feel that you are simply offering a service with no strings attached. Building trust in the informational phase will translate into more purchases and of course better profits later on, so take note.