Website Promotion With Email Marketing 
by Jean Lam


Email marketing is a way of directly communicating with a target 
audience to market your website or increase awareness about an 
upcoming promotion connected with your site. In general, the 
term "email marketing" is used to refer to any emails sent to 
customers or potential customers in relation to your website. 
 
Email marketing can be a very effective tool to inform customers 
of future events, or attract new customers by increasing 
awareness about what your site offers.
 
Success in email marketing does not come from thoughtlessly 
blasting out email ads without working to build your own 
customer base. The basis of successful email marketing is to 
build existing in-house customer lists, augmenting them by 
outreach through outside mailing lists. 
 
Your own email list allows you to develop a long-term 
relationship with your online audience -- to communicate with
and market to them over and over.
 
Generally email marketing can be implemented with these 3 
objectives in mind:
 
(1) Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new 
customers or persuade existing customers to buy again 
 
(2) Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and 
enhance the customer relationship 
 
(3) Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in 
emails sent by other people
 
Of course, it seems easy to collect hundreds of thousands of
email addresses and send everybody an email about your website. 
Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple. Essentially, you 
require the permission of the email recipient to send them info 
about your site otherwise it may be regarded as "spam" which is 
unsolicited bulk email. 
 
In the marketing industry, spam is definitely a four letter word 
and something that should be avoided at all costs. If you are 
accused of spamming, there could be direct consequences such 
as damage to your reputation, your website may be shut down 
and your email accounts closed. 
 
In conjunction with this, there is a strong argument from 
successful marketers that long-term email campaigns only work 
consistently when they are based on permission in the first 
place. There are plenty of acceptable ways to market your website 
by email. Don't be tempted to take shortcuts because chances 
are it could be your downfall.
 
It's important to stress that anyone considering email marketing 
must read up on the subject of permission and spam. If you don't 
understand the importance of permission and the risks of 
ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.
 
Don't panic, though. It's actually relatively easy to ensure 
that the address lists you use or build yourself are 
permission-based.
 
Below are 3 possible ways to do that:
 
(1) New Content Notification 
 
You've probably seen sites that offer to notify you whenever 
they have new information, products, or content. 
 
To tell you the truth, this is probably the least effective kind 
of opt-in list, simply because most people won't sign-up. 
Instead, they'll bookmark your site thinking they'll just come 
back from time to time - but don't count it! 
 
Of course, there are certain kinds of sites that CAN benefit 
from this form of opt-in list. For example, if you have a site 
that runs contests, you can offer to notify people whenever a 
new contest begins.
 
(2) Free Report
 
Another kind of opt-in list involves the offer of a free report, 
or series of reports. However, be careful with this! 
 
By offering a free report, you are restricting the number of 
times you can mail to your list, it's not a good idea to capture 
the names and then bombard them with a continual stream of sales 
material when they were only expecting one or two reports. 
 
This would be considered spamming! If you offer a free report, 
it should contain "real" information and a reason for them to 
visit your website again. 
 
(3) Free eZine/Newsletter - A great way to build an opt-in 
list is by offering a free subscription to an electronic 
newsletter or ezine. 
 
Newsletters are a really good way of regularly reminding your 
subscribers about your website and products. By writing a 
newsletter that contains copy which is both informative and 
compelling, you draw subscribers back to your website again and 
again!
 
Having an ezine/Newsletter is one of the best ways to build 
credibility and rapport with your readers and customers. If you 
understand the value of a "Lifetime Customer", then you know 
exactly how powerful an ezine or newsletter can be!
 
So now that you know how to get your opt-in mailing list, it's 
time that you learn how to run your email promotions effectively 
when you do it.
 
Below are 6 tips to consider for successful email marketing:
 
(1) Perhaps the most critical step in guaranteeing the success 
of your e-mail promotions is that you e-mail a targeted list of 
opt-in subscribers who have specifically requested to receive 
information on a particular topic from you. You'll be wasting 
your time and energy if you don't. 
 
(2) Personalize each and every email. A phrase like "Dear John" 
will have more impact than just "Dear customer". For that 
person assumes you know him.
 
(3) Write benefit-oriented subject lines or you can ask a 
question or trigger curiosity. Subject lines are critical 
in ensuring whether your email gets opened or not.
 
(4) Make it easy to read. Check grammatical errors and proof 
read everything. Keep paragraphs short, between 4-6 lines. 
 
(5) Give the opportunity for your readers to opt-out of your 
mailing list. At the end of all e-mail you send, it's extremely 
important that you give people the opportunity to opt-out or be 
removed from your e-mail database. This is really, really 
important!
 
(6) Test your email promotions. Before sending your e-mail to 
your entire list, take an extra 15 minutes to test how it looks 
in a variety of e-mail clients like hotmail, yahoo, outlook 
express, eudora etc... 
 
Email marketing is an excellent way to increase the exposure of 
your website and advertise any special offers that are currently 
available through your website. Executed well, a targeted email 
campaign can have a dramatic influence on your traffic, 
acquisition of visitors and traffic behavior.


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Jean Lam publishes the Zine Guru monthly newsletter. To subscribe,
just send a blank email to mailto:zinegurunews@getresponse.com 
and instantly receive a FREE valuable ebook. Check out also his 
internet marketing resource site at http://www.zineguru.com for 
cutting edge marketing tips, tricks, techniques and secrets. 
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