E-mail marketing

You have to make sure you gather the email addresses in the proper fashion. Using a service like Aweber will allow you to have all your subscribers opt in to receive your emails. This means you will almost always hit the inbox with all your future emails too.

Have you been living under a rock for the last 10 years?

E-mail marketing is the cornerstone of online marketing. As Jamie says, you have to make sure you collect emails in the correct fashion, ie you have consent and they understand what they will be used for.

But sending bulk email is very effective, and stands little chance of diminishing in the near future. You know if you are sending actual spam, but others may perceive marketing upsells or promotional emails as spam. Trial and error. If you get loads of complaints, then your copy is crap If you really are sending spam, then expect to get buckets of complaints and booted off your ISP.

We sent out 60,000 yesterday, and got a 24% open rate, 80 unsubscribes, a few moans and one abusive reply. But made a few quid, and generated plenty of genuine enquires.

We personalise with the business name in the subject or content, but steer clear of names, dear fred etc. In our sector, Frank might list a business for Nancy, who delegates emails to bob, so we just stick with the biz name.

But obviously if you can target an individual and personalise then that's better.

Imagine in the future with a slick database and clever software, "hello Mary, hope you enjoyed your holiday last month, and is the dog feeling better?"

Maybe one day

Emails still seem to be down to the subject line though. I delete 90% of mine without opening, the subject tells me if its spam or unimportant. No doubt everyone else is the same.

It depends on your business type, if you have 1500 clients who may rebuy your services, then that can be pretty profitable, but that would be more likely a newsletter communication than full on sales promo.

We run a freemium model, so it's all about up selling to people who take out a free listing, and yes we collect details from the sign up process via our t&c's. our membership lists grow by about 200 per day, but we are dealing in lower price products than most, so for us it's volume.

You need to do what works best for your biz model.

We use interspires emailmarketer, but run and send from our servers. Very easy to use, and also has great reporting tools.