Email Marketing

Email marketing has been one of the best sources of internet traffic form the beginnings of e-commerce. But with the advent of SPAM, some strong hatred has grown for email marketing techniques. Great care must be taken when conducting email marketing campaigns. This involves sending out emails to lots of people, in the hope to raise awareness, gain traffic and promote your site. If your emails are classed as SPAM you'll be in big trouble, more worrying legitimate email marketing campaigns can often be mistaken for SPAM, and your site can end up on a black list it doesn't deserve to be on. (SPAM is illegal and doing this type of marketing will result in the enforced closure of your site.)

So what is the answer? Email marketing cannot be ignored completely, there is far to much traffic and profit potential. You need to conduct your email marketing campaigns with great caution following strict guides. We'll guide you through safe methods, and what to avoid.

Step 1. Starting a mailing list

The first step is to start your own mailing list. With your own mailing list you know exactly how the email addresses have been collected and where they have come from. You'll need to install a script to handle the mailing list on your site. The script will allow you to add a form to your pages (asking for their name and email), that captures their name and email and puts them into a database. You can them contact everyone in your list at the click of a button from the scripts administration area. You can get a free mailing list script from CosmicScripts.com. It's capable of running a basic mailing list. If you want more features, and the ability to manage all your mailing lists from one central program then CosmicMailer mailing list software from CosmicPerl.com will do everything you need. Depending on what ordering system you have you'll want to get your mailing list tied in to your order form so that new customers can select to be automatically added to your mailing list. If you have a custom order form or your current system doesn't have this capability then custom script work can be ordered from CosmicPerl.com. Which ever product you choose, follow the program documentation to setup the mailing list script on your site.

Step 2. Sending your newsletter

Now that you have your mailing list you'll want to send out a regular newsletter. Try and get an interesting article or two in each newsletter. Include any current offers or promotions you are offering. We've found fortnightly or monthly newsletters to work best. If you inundate your list members with repetitive 'Buy Buy Buy' mailings then they'll be off your list in no time. Don't have complete articles in the emails, instead have the first paragraph or two and a link to the article on your site. This will increase the click through's to your site and also give your site more content for the search engines to spider. Also try to keep the mailing personal with 'Hi NAME' at the top and always include the name of the mailing list at the bottom such as 'You are receiving this email because you joined the CosmicMarketing Mailing list'.

Step 3. E-zine advertising

Safer than buying an email list is putting an advert in an E-zine. An E-zine is a regular email newsletter sent out to subscribers, a kind of Electronic Magazine. There are multiple e-zine's for all kinds of topics on the internet. You can buy an advert placement in an e-zone or often write an article to be included in the e-zine. Many e-zine's also offer solo ad mailings, which we do not recommend as many of these look like SPAM. To get the most out of e-zine's writing an article should give the best results, and it's often free. But if you want them to consider your article it's got to be something impartial, not a load of sales blurb for your site. Of course an article can be quite time consuming so placing an ad could be better for you. We recommend only taking the top ad position. Lot's of the e-zine members won't read past the first page of the email, so if your ad is at the bottom it'll never get seen. We've got a short list of E-zine directories where you should be able to find some appropriate e-zine's to advertise in. Depending on what kind of mailing list you are creating you may also want to list your mailing list in these directories.

We have created a small ezine list spreadsheet for you to use to collect information on the e-zine's you are looking at advertising in. This will help you choose which e-zine's are worth while are which are not. Not all e-zine's offer a good deal, some will try to rob you blind. Join the e-zine's you choose and see what sort of newsletter they put out, and what sort of ad or article appears to be working best.

Step 4. Buying lists

If you feel you need to buy email lists then you need to be very careful. Make sure you are purchasing Opt-in lists from reputable companies. Also see if the company will give you a mail server to send the emails through. You don't want to run the risk of your IP address being blocked or your site being taken down. Use the Alexa toolbar on any site you find to see what sort of comments have been left. Buying email lists isn't something we recommend as the risks can be to great.