Getting Started with Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing?

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as way of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing.

Commercial E-mail Marketing is also known as Permission Based E-mail Marketing as the sender needs to have permission from receiver in form of opting in. The receivers of commercial emails need to submit the information themselves in a form provided by the sender.

How to start Email Marketing?

Starting an email marketing campaign is easy; however, you’ll need some tools and ideas to start. You’ll also need to know what’s legit and what’s not.

1. Make a Solid Plan:

Before you start, make an outline of your campaign. What you want to offer your customers and what you want to achieve. Also, you need to have a budget to cover the campaign.

2. Email Marketing software and Autoresponders:

You cannot send promotional or commercial emails using free email services like GMail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. They have strict restrictions and limitations for commercial usage and they do not comply with the CAN-SPAM Act for email marketing.

There are several commercial services available, but the people’s choice is Aweber. You can create unlimited campaigns, autoresponder and follow-up emails with very little cost. Most of the top affiliate marketers I know uses Aweber and are satisfied with them.

Click Here to signup with Aweber for just $1

3. Building an Email List

An Email List is the list of email addresses and other details of your customer, such as Name, Phone Number and Address etc. The process is called List Building. There are lots of ways to build an email list. Like, adding an optin form in your website, signature, offline collection etc. Aweber provides thousands of pre made optin web form templates in ready to use condition.

One of the common mistakes in list building is purchasing email addresses from third party vendors. This is a strict no-no in email marketing and it may ban your email account due to spamming.

4. Understanding the CAN-SPAM Act

CAN-SPAM Act is introduced in the year 2003 to protect people against email spamming. All email marketing software provider follow the guidelines made by the act and no exception is permitted.

A CAN-SPAM compliant commercial or promotional email should contain Postal Address of the sender and a unsubscribe link on a visible position in the email body.

5. Sending out emails and monitoring it

Once you have the list and a CAN-SPAM compliant email body, you are ready to go. Email marketing software can provide invaluable data about open rates, unsubscribes, etc. The trick is to use this data to your advantage by tweaking your message or mailing schedule to see what types of content, subject lines, or times of day generate the best response rates. (Aweber provides some extreme tracking of sent emails)

That is all you need to get started. Always remember, like all other business, email marketing is also need hard work and dedication. Email marketing is proved to return a high ROI in past and that still continues.

(Click Here to signup with Aweber for just $1)