If you have a sign up box on your website that invites people to sign up for your email newsletter, congratulations — you’re a step ahead of many other businesses who are not doing any email marketing at all.

But email marketing is so much more than that.

First of all, you need to make a compelling offer to get people to give you their email addresses.  With the flood of SPAM and the overall increase in email volumes, it’s more important than ever to make sure you set yourself apart from the crowd.  Why should someone sign up for your newsletter unless there is some value in it for them?

One of the strategies to increase your email sign-ups is to offer an ebook.  Now before you worry about writing “War and Peace” consider that an ebook can be 5 pages.  This is assuming you know your audience and are giving them something of value that they want.

For example, a local bike shop we designed a website for wanted to increase their profitable triathlon business using email marketing.  To target that segment of their business, we created a 30-page “Triathlon Guide To the State of New Jersey” (where they are based) that was culled from several online sources.  Using all public domain information and listings, the guide included a simple list of all the triathlon races across the state, along with the type of course, the month it was held and information about where to register.

We turned the document into a PDF file and uploaded it to the website along with a graphic we designed that looked like a little magazine cover with the title on it.  We invited anyone who wanted the free triathlon guide to provide their name and address and the ebook would be sent automatically using an autoresponder.

The bike shop is now sending out targeted email newsletters featuring discounts on triathlon gear, reviews, nutrition, training tips, etc., to an audience that volunteered to be marketed to.  How much more effective is that than taking out a passive newspaper or Yellow Page ad? 

Speaking of print ads, the bike shop is taking the idea a step further and actually advertising the free triathlon book in all their print advertising with the deliberate strategy of getting people to signup for the newsletter and voluntarily enter their marketing funnel!

Remember:  email marketing, when done properly, allows you to own your own marketing rather than renting an audience from someone else.

Gene R. Sower is the owner of www.samsonmedia.net, an Internet marketing and website design firm based in New Jersey. More sample email tactics can be found at http://www.samsonmedia.net
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NOT ALL EMAIL MARKETING PROGRAMS ARE CREATED EQUAL
 
Contrary to what you may think, email marketing remains an effective and COST effective method of staying in touch with people who want to hear from you. Remember, we’re not talking about blasting out millions of emails to people who don’t know you from Adam. That’s considered SPAMMING. Effective email marketing is at the crux of RELATIONSHIP and PERMISSION marketing and is still effective when you email to people who volunteer to learn about what your business has to offer.

According to alternative marketing guru and Squidoo founder, Seth Godin, “By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message,” he writes. “It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange.”

This means that email marketing will INCREASE in effectiveness as a way to counter the growing ineffectiveness of more traditional methods of “intrusion” marketing.

But selecting the RIGHT email marketing tools is critical to both your success and your sanity. These are the email marketing companies and tools we recommend and those we don’t and why.

WHY YOU NEED TO USE A PROFESSIONAL EMAIL MARKETING TOOL

Well, it’s important to understand that if you’re going to engage in email marketing in any kind of a serious way, you need to sign-up with an email marketing company that will help you sign-up, grow and manage your list. While my company, Samson Media, develops the strategy and concepts for email marketing, even we use a third party company called iContact, to automate all the tedious but necessary tasks of managing a list of hundreds or even thousands of email addresses.

Professional email list hosting companies like iContact or the popular Constant Contact handle all of the imporatant tasks of growing and maintaining your list such as: Sign-ups Unsubscribes Duplicate management Deletes Undeliverables SPAM compliant Full reporting (deliverables, click-throughs, etc.) User-friendly email newsletter publishing tools and templates

A SHORT LIST OF EMAIL MARKETING COMPANIES — SIMILAR YET DIFFERENT

Most email marketing companies now charge by the size of your list and not how many times you use it (within reason). For instance, you can have 1,000 names on a list and pay less than someone who has 10,000 names on a list. And each one can send out once, twice or even 100 times in the same month and their costs are the same, fixed amount.

These email companies used to charge more the more you send but most have moved to al all-you-can-eat pricing structure based on list size. And when I said “within reason”, I think they actually do have a limit but it’s like one million. So if you have a lisy of a thousand or even ten thousand names and you’re anywhere close to sending them out a million times in a month —- well, you’re probably over doing it anyway and your days as an email marketer are numbered.

To that end, here are some of the main email marketing companies we know of and have some degree of first hand familiarity:

iContact (the service we now use) Constant Contact (very popular) Topica (we still use them but we hate it) Vertical Response (an industry stalwart) Emma (stylish and pricey) Elite Email (does it Old School — prefers to charge per email sent)

WHY WE USE iCONTACT
It’s All In The Details – Why Not Get As Many Included Features For One Low Price?
Granted, whether you choose Constant Contact, iContact, Topica, Vertical Response or the others,they all do the tasks listed above and are similarly priced (relatively speaking), but here’s what separates the men from the boys in my opinion:

THE WINNER IS…

The winner in terms of features, price and service is iContact hands down.

iContact has several features that the popular and more well-known Contact Contact does not offer, such as:

FREE ARCHIVING: Every newsletter you send out automatically gets posted on an iContact hosted page that’s unique to you and your business. As you begin sending out newsletters you’ll see how powerfiul this is. Because as you begin to build a history of newsletters, all you have to do is add a link to your webpage that says something like “CLICK HERE To Read Our Back Issues” and all of your past newsletters will be listed and viewable. Constant Contact offers this for an additional $5 a month, the others don’t offer it at all, and at iContact it’s free. You also get search engine traffic back to your own site from these archived newsletters – a double bonus!

AUTORESPONDERS: Constant Contact, amazingly does NOT offer autoresponders at all. Even if you don’t know what they are, trust me – you’ll want to have the ability to use them, especially if it’s included in the price. Autoresponders are a highly powerful email marketing tool that allows you to preset and pre-create an advanced email marketing strategy that allows you to offer multi-part reports and series. Topica also offers this feature but it’s not nearly as user-friendly.

TECH SUPPORT: All things considered, especially compared to Topica which I’ve used for over 10 years and still use today for older lists, iContact actually answers the phone. With a human being! Really!

So comparing, price, features and support, iContact is the email newsletter and hosting service champ!  But more importantly, which ever compnay you choose, definitely choose one.  Sending out hundreds of emails from your Outlook or desktop email client is not only ineffective and will get you labeled a spammer, but it’s a huge waste of your valuable time.

ll things considered, especially compared to Topica which I’ve used for over 10 years and still use today for older lists, iContact actually answers the phone. With a human being! Really!

So comparing, price, features and support, iContact is the email newsletter and hosting service champ!  But more importantly, which ever compnay you choose, definitely choose one.  Sending out hundreds of emails from your Outlook or desktop email client is not only ineffective and will get you labeled a spammer, but it’s a huge waste of your valuable time.

Gene Sower is the owner of www.samsonmedia.net, a New Jersey-based website design and Internet marketing company. http://www.samsonmedia.net. You can find a free 14-Day trial of iContact at their website.
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In the modern world, people are receiving advertisements from all sorts of medium. The people get exposure to the advertisements in all forms. Advertisements are displayed in print, broadcast on television or radio or published on Internet. World Wide Web is a medium that has gained momentum with the advent of Information technology age. In the Internet, a visitor finds all sorts of advertisements in blogs, social networking sites, websites and much more. Email Marketing is one of such techniques that enable a marketer to reach his best prospects. Sending mails to the prospective clients is a popular technique devised by the marketers to get in direct contact with the prospective clients.

Advertisers devise these marketing techniques to promote their business successfully. Marketing through mails is one of such techniques. The advantage with marketing through mails is that it reaches the prospective customers. An advertiser is not dependent on a prospective customer to visit the company’s website or blog. A marketer can directly reach the potential customer through his electronic mail. This form of marketing is also successful as many people have access to the electronic mail. This is an easy medium to reach the customers. A marketer should know the basics of this form of marketing to derive effective results. Marketing through mails has the potential to elicit relevant queries from the customers. It can also offer an opportunity to an advertiser to generate sales for the organization. An advertiser can encourage download trial of the products by the prospective clients. A potential customer can also get himself registered or give his email address and name for sign ups for newsletters. Registration or sign ups can pave way for sending newsletters of specific interests to the customers. The newsletters contain any kind of update or latest development about the company. Receiving promotional messages of various products and services is also beneficial for those customers who have busy schedule. It is time saving for a businessperson to receive the information of various products and services on his electronic mails.

Marketing through mails offers flexibility to an advertiser to customize the advertisements the way a customer prefers. Sending and receiving of messages is just a matter of single click of a button. Customers find it easier to reply to these mails. Email marketing is cost effective method even for a marketer.

Myself webmaster of emailsmartz.com provides email marketing software, email sender, email spider, email generator and much more for promote the business successfully

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