Email Marketings Tools

What is e-mail marketing?

2008-09-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience.

In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and
sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network e-mail and FIDO).

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US$400 million on e-mail marketing in 2006.

Is email marketing good or not?

2008-09-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

Email marketing is still the best so far until today on promoting your product or business. By history tracked, it is one of the best way for a good conversion rate applied on online marketing. That is the good right? But how about if you receive those emails hundreds time promoting similar product or business. What will you do?

Email marketing of course or any other types of marketing be it either online of offline marketing has it own good and bad side but we will focus more on email marketing bringing in an old issue towards effective email marketing.

A good effect on email marketing yields to a better conversion of your campaign. Means the percentage of profit is more than any other marketing campaign. Taking into account that for every email marketing you sent through 1K person 100 of them will look at your product and probably only 10 will buy the product in comparison to 10K impression on PPC with on one will buy. So conversion is one good factor. Next in reference to conversion is the amount of money spent over other marketing like PPC. But dont jump into the conclusion that “hey this is good, i must send to other emails too, like hundreds thousands or even more emails to have that conversion rate”. I tell don’t do that.

Have you heard of some news by just searching on major search engine about being jailed because of spamming. And this is the downside of email marketing. Spamming! And sending emails to person trying to gamble that the person might click and buy the product. Emailing to a wrong person just creates annoyances on your site and emails and blocking every possible existence of your email and site.

I am trying to point it out, why, because I receive those kind of mails everyday, different business and product marketing campaign. You see I talk some SEO or search engine optimization on this blog, though I know that I am just a newbie to it, still I receive those proposal and business letter, “Hey, I can rank your site high on search engine” ” We are a search engine firm in business for 5 years and can help your site in search engine”. Yeah, I know, is that what you have learned in 5 years one marketing and seo? Emailing a related theme help in ranking?

The lesson is better learn how this email marketing is being used before jumping in. Try to research further than speculation.

e-mail marketing software packages

2008-09-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

1. E-mail marketing software packages for broadcast and tracking
There are three main types of Email marketing software for creating, broadcasting and tracking your emails:
Desktop Email software packages
Server-based Email software
Online 'Application Service Provider (ASP)' or 'Email Service Provider' systems - not technically software since they are a web service. I recommend using the ASP email service provider systems since they usually have better capabilities

2. Email marketing bounce management systems
If you use one of the server based or ESP email software packages, it will have management of e-mails bounce built-in. However, if you are using an inhouse system it may lack those facilities.

3. Email marketing deliverability checking tools
Marketing e-mails can be blocked as a 'false positive' for two reasons - due to reputation of the broadcaster or due to filtering because of spam words or other features of the e-mails
Try these free E-mail spam word filter tools.
See Spam Assassin and Microsoft Outlook list of spam words in subject and body that can trigger spam filters (if total threshold point reached).
Real-time black list (RBL) checker- You definitely don’t want to be on one of these! But if your deliverability falls dramatically you should check here
Try this free Email sender reputation management tool - it is best to log in for this tool - extra reports are generated

4.Email marketing rendering checking tools
Emails will render differently in different readers or web mail platforms, and it is very time consuming checking out the way they appear manually. These are paid tools with free trials, but they will soon pay for themselves in time spent and improved quality of emails in the inbox. The latter two tools can also be used to assess how web pages render in different versions of different browsers.
Lyris Email Advisor
SiteVista
Browsercam

5. Email Marketing HTML templates
Creating Email templates using HTML is trickier than creating web sites using HTML. I would always use an agency or developer who has experience of this. Many techniques you may use like linked Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) won't work so you have to create in-line CSS. What works in one email reader may not work in another.

More Info About these here