Secrets of Email Marketing

Of all the ways to get website traffic and make money online, nothing tops email marketing. One form of email marketing is unsolicited bulk email marketing or spamming, which I think is not worth the trouble. Another form is opt-in email list rental. This strategy can be profitable, however, to get good results you need to pay up and it can get quite expensive. If you want to try it, I recommend postmasterdirect.com. or yesmail.com The best bang for your buck in email marketing is email newsletter classified and sponsorship advertising" or ezine advertising. It is one of the most effective ways to get targeted traffic -- cheap.

Terry Telford who writes an ezine magazine suggests that you locate ezine magazines that your target market actually looks forward to reading. Just visit an ezine directory and search for ezines in your niche market. Subscribe to a bunch of free ezines and read them as they arrive. Look for larger circulation ezines that have a good following. If you like the content in any particular ezine, 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, that works about five times better than a regular classified ad! Here are two solid ezine directories you can scour and locate lots of ezines that target your particular niche...

Direct Email List Source
http://market.emailresults.com

Ezine Hub
http://www.ezinehub.

An even better way to utilize email newsletters to drive traffic and sales is to purchase "email newsletter solo mailings."

YourHomeJob.com Solo Mailings:

I think this is the most powerful method of online advertising available today. A solo mailing is one time mailing, of your ad alone, to an entire database of thousands of opt-in subscribers. The company I can recommend for this service is YourHomeJob.com. I think they have reasonable prices for this highly effective type of email marketing. Their solo mailing service provides the type of targeted, direct response advertising used by the big boys in the online world.

Tom Hespos in his article entitled "A Bleak Future for Email Marketing?" said, in effect, that when the "average" person receives direct email, he/she deletes it instantly if it a) appears commercial, and b) does not come from a familiar party.

Tom's conclusion is summed up in his article's title -- Are people so inundated that these offers are going to be instantly trashed and never opened? Is it only going to get worse? Solo mailings to newsletter subscribers offers marketers most of the same direct email benefits (it's essentially the same thing), while delivering to an audience via a trusted information resource.

The two most common ways of gathering a solo mailing audience are to make it part of the newsletter opt-in process or to install a secondary landing page with topic-specific special offers after the person has subscribed.

Here are some pointers from Todd Kellner in her article Solo Mailing: The Best of Both Worlds? :

The best way to ensure that your subscribers know where the offer is coming from is to put [Ezine Name] first in your subject line. Because most buyers are not familiar with the distinction between newsletter solo mailings and traditional direct email, CPMs are generally at a much lower rate, for now, than direct-email kingpins such as PostmasterDirect and yesmail.com are commanding. PostmasterDirect, for example, offers several "pinpoint" demographic settings, such as age and geotargeting, which are most attractive to buyers. For you to be able to command similar CPMs, you will need to be able to set up your list in a way where you can pull up the same information, and you will often have to split up your list for targeted deliveries.

If you are unable to do this, it does not preclude you from sending out solo mailings. Keep in mind that it usually will, however, mean a significantly lower CPM. Many buyers will still like the idea of an email with just their offer in it -- some feel that their offers get lost in an email newsletter's content, and they also enjoy more than 7 lines to pitch their product or service. Too many mailings to your subscribers may result in a substantial attrition rate. Keep your offers tasteful and targeted, and watch the frequency rate -- once a week is probably a nice place to start. If you receive an alarming rate of unsubscribes or a large amount of positive feedback, adjust accordingly. The last form of email marketing strategy which I've been using is "email newsletter network advertising." In a nutshell, you pay email 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 that finding each of the ezines yourself. Although this requires a larger initial investment than running ads in individual ezines, in the long run it is usually cheaper and it requires much less effort. The best advertising resource I've ever found on the web is an email newsletter network.

One last word about email marketing. For a fee, there are some companies which offer services from email templates to email tracking and reporting. One such company I like is SpeakUp! Email Marketing. They make it easy to create professional-looking emails—fast and with no technical expertise. They offer list management allowing you to add new contacts, import your current lists, store additional contact information, update information and group contacts by the criteria you choose. One of their features which I find useful is real time email tracking and reporting which lets you know how many emails were delivered, which addresses bounced, and why—within minutes of sending your email campaign. You also get reports on who opened your email, which links generated the most interest, and who clicked on each one. This valuable information will help you to determine your contacts' interests, the best day and time to send your email campaigns and much more such as how many contacts opted in or opted out and Unsubscribe Comment Box lets you collect comments on why people are opting out and what percentage of your contacts opened .