Email Marketing

Email marketing is the number one method for increasing traffic to your site and sales.  Many of the super marketers online use this technique consistently to sell in the millions per year.  However, opinions are divided as to whether it should be used or not.  Some website owners are against this method and consider it a "black hat" marketing technique.  Personally, I feel if it's good enough for the major corporations and departments stores, that certainly validates it's use and effectiveness for me.  Simply put, it IS extremely effective and I suspect that even many that protest against it, may actually use it and just want to keep it under "their hat".

The trick is to use a reputable lead company that sells optin leads.  In fact there are very few actual lead generating companies out there, most are brokers reselling leads that they buy.  It's expensive to generate leads in any volume and volume is what it takes. What is an Optin Lead?  Optin leads are individuals that have agreed to receive more information in particular areas of interest, most specifically business opportunities or health related items being the most popular.

To utilize these leads you will need to develop a winning set of sales letters.  This is extremely important.  You cannot pull qualified prospects and makes sales unless you start with an outstanding sales letter.  If you don't have experience writing sales letters, don't do it alone.  Yanik Silver is the King of sales letters and he has a program that will help you develop sales letters that will work for your business.  Learn more here.

Then you need an autoresponder.  This will send your sales letters over a period of several weeks to your leads.  Repetition is key to the success of your email marketing.  Statistics tells us that a prospect must receive your sales letter an average of 7 times before they respond.  An autoresponder does the work for you.  However, not just any autoresponder will do.  It has to be an autoresponder with a great track record and high deliverability.  I tend to have several in my arsenal.  However, this autoresponder is among the best I have ever used.  Click here to learn more.

Now I take extra measures to ensure the safety of my site.  My host is ammenable to email marketing, but some are not.  In fact there are even some domain registrars that will hold your domain hostage because they disagree with email marketing.  GoDaddy is one of the most notorious for this.  I use Namecheap.  They have features that actually help with my marketing efforts.  I also purchase a second domain name to use in my sales letters and then have that domain redirected to my main website.  That is VERY easy to do at NameCheap.com.  If your domain registrar is not NameCheap.com you can have it transfered very easily. I also use the WhoIs guard at Namecheap on all my domains.

Additionally, you must comply with the CanSpam act which legalized email marketing but put the lid on spam.  Spam is email to individuals whose email addresses have been harvested on the Internet.  Some unsavory individuals have software that can pull emails from websites which is basically theft.  This means that those individuals did NOT agree to receive email about anything.  This is NOT an optin lead.  So, you must be certain you are not buying those types of leads.  Optin leads will come with the IP and time/date stamp of when the individual signed up to receive information.  This should come with all of your lead files. 

All of your outgoing sales messages must have your name and physical address in it.  Your messages must also have an unsubscribe link.  If you use a reputable autoresponder service they will automatically insert the unsubscribe link and manage that aspect for you.  Your return email address must be real.  I do use a free email like Yahoo Email for this.  It's much easier to manage your campaigns if you use a free email address for each of your campaigns. 

Now if this all seems a bit uncertain to you, take heart.  It's actually a ton of fun and you meet some really great people with email marketing.  It doesn't matter what type of online marketing you choose, there are always going to be a small percentage of terminally grouchy people that want to take all the fun out of life.  Do what is best for you and your business

If you need help getting started with an email marketing campaign, call (435.723.7825) or write to me, anne@write-promotion.com.  I'm happy to help you.