Internet Marketing for Wealth Creation

Lesson 9: Promoting your Website

(c) Email Marketing Techniques
(Though you can utilize these techniques to promote products without a website,
this chapter will assume that you have a website!)

This is a great method of marketing because, it costs you (almost) nothing to send emails and you can contact your prospects or customers instantly when you need to promote something. The return on investment when you market through email is always higher as compared to any other kind of marketing - if you promote to right people.

Important: You are not supposed to send unsolicited emails (spamming). By spamming you may not get any sale; on the contrary you will end-up receiving complaints and you might have to face legal disputes. Off-late people are taking up spam issues very seriously.

There are three aspects involved in email marketing. They are:

• Building the opt-in email list
• Keeping the subscribers (for longer period of time)
• Promoting right products to right subscribers at right time

Building the list

The first step in building email list is to create a strategy for your website, which you had seen in the lesson 5(b). As you had seen earlier, if your intention is to create a 'quality list', the squeeze page works well for most of the websites.

When you force your visitors to subscribe to receive the information (opt-in through squeeze page), only those who are interested will subscribe. Again when you ask them to confirm the subscription (double opt-in), only those who are serious would confirm. In this process you are filtering out those who might simply waste your time, money and resources. The final list of prospects may be less than 20% of your visitors. But they are the ones who will read your emails regularly and eventually will become your customers.

However, you need to test each strategy and choose the one that suits your business and prospects.

Retaining the subscribers

Maintaining the existing list (keeping the subscribers) is the most difficult task as compared to getting new subscribers. As a rule of thumb, if your website has good contents, people prefer visiting again and they would prefer subscribing to receive more information from you.

Secondly, you must give your subscribers exactly what you promised them when you got their email address in the list. And try to exceed their expectations.

If your website (or your advertisement) promotes a book on 'human resources', it is obvious that people subscribing to your list are interested in the subject and you must stick to that subject only. If you try promote them something else, you will find them unsubscribing instantly.

There are exemptions, for example, during festive season you send them a greetings email and simultaneously promote a product related to the festival, it is more likely that you will end-up earning money than losing subscribers.

It is good idea to publish your own newsletter (ezine), so that you have a reason to contact your subscribers at regular intervals. If you provide useful / valuable information through your newsletter, they would prefer to remain as your subscriber forever.

The blood of internet marketing

To take advantage of the full power of Email Marketing, you must use a good auto-responder service or you must have your own email management software (with advanced auto-responder).

In the lesson 6 (about automation), you learnt 2 types of autoresponders. Now you will learn how to use them for marketing.

Basic Auto-Responders

This is generally called out-of-office autoresponder. However, you can use this for marketing also.

First you need to setup multiple email addresses, each for a purpose (like faq@domain.com to answer frequently asked questions, ebook@domain.com to explain about the ebook that you are selling, etc.).

If you want to promote an e-book through advertisements, you will first have your auto-responder message (sales copy) setup for the email id. Then you will advertise the email id using various methods.

When someone sends a message to the advertised email address, he/she will automatically receive the preset message without your intervention. And you will have all the incoming email addresses stored for the future follow-ups. But the limitation here is, you can only setup one message per email id. So it can never replace an advanced autoresponder.

Advanced Autoresponders (Unlimited)

An unlimited autoresponder service will cost you some money every month. Logically, when your database is bigger than 5000 subscribers, you will earn much more than what you pay per month. So the money you spend initially is the investment for future returns.

All the paid autoresponder services, allow you to have unlimited autoresponders. When you pay for the autoresponder service, it will cater to all your websites and any number of lists (database).

You can predefine hundreds of email messages per autoresponder or per list. That means if you really plan very well, you can automate your website to handle your subscribers forever!

You have no restrictions for attaching files to your emails. That is you can attach a huge file (that can be practically transmitted on the internet) along with your messages.

You can link two or more lists and automate your list. For example, someone comes to your website and signs-up for your free newsletter. When he/she makes a purchase, they become your customer or client. You can program your autoresponders to automatically subscribe the buyers to clients' database and unsubscribe from the free subscribers list on receiving intimation from your payment processor (like PayPal).

Typically, a good autoresponder service (who complies with CANN SPAM law) will not allow you to add the emails without confirmation from the subscribers.

You may think this as a disadvantage. But it is good for you and for other users of the autoresponder. Being a user of a paid service, you cannot spam and everyone in the field knows that too. This is the biggest advantage in using paid autoresponders.

Some reputed autoresponder companies work closely with the email service providers (like Yahoo, Outblaze, AOL, etc.). They do all that is needed to deliver your emails to your recipients. This one service itself is a big relief for you. For your information, not all paid service providers do that.

There are many paid autoresponder companies operating on the internet. Please ensure that you take the services of a reputed company.

Advanced Autoresponders (Limited)

A free service will limit you to use one list (database) per subscription. If you need more list to be created, you need to subscribe again with another username.

Since you have two different subscriptions, you cannot link two lists, when you need to do so. You will be limited to a number of leads (subscribers).

In addition, there is no guarantee that your messages will reach your subscribers. To make it clear to you, let me explain:

Usually spammers cannot use a paid service (due to CANN SPAM law). They can easily use a free autoresponder service, because the free service does not use double opt-in method.

When the pre-programmed messages are sent from the free autoresponder's website, your subscribers will receive emails with your email id in the "from" address. But the originating IP address will be of the free autoresponder's server, which is the same as other spammers.

I hope you are aware of the consequences of spamming. If not, please learn: "If an email service provider (like AOL or Yahoo) finds someone spamming to their clients, they will blacklist those email ids (of spammers) and the webmaster of the website from where the emails are originating from, will be intimated of the same. If the spamming is not stopped, the IP address from where the email ids are originating (that is the website itself) will be blacklisted."

Hence it is most likely that the IP address of the free autoresponders is already blacklisted, because of the spammers. If you are subscribed to a free autoresponder service, though you are not a spammer, it is highly possible that your emails will also be blocked by the email service providers. Hence, most of your messages will not reach your subscribers.

The size of the file (if) you attach to your email will also be restricted to something around 20 Kb or 50 Kb. That is not sufficient if you plan to transmit your ebook using an autoresponder.

You may also be restricted on the number of messages you can predefine, usually to 10 or 20 email messages.

In addition, a free autoresponder service is available to you free of cost because, they get money for advertisements they display on your email messages. That means you are going to send their advertisements to your subscribers free of cost!

When you are just starting your online business, with a low budget you may be tempted to go for a free service. But the money you invest in paid autoresponder service will give you more returns than the money you would have saved with a free service.

I initially used one of the free services for more than 2 months. Later on I realized that I was not getting any response from my subscribers for the messages I was sending. By that time I had already started promoting my website and started getting visitors. But at that time, I felt it was too risky to increase my monthly commitments, as I had already spent lots of money in various experiments. So I decided to try paid autoresponder strictly for 1 month.

But believe me, by using paid autoresponder service, within 2 weeks my subscription base grew above 1000 (with double opt-in) and I was getting tremendous response from the subscribers. From my experience, today I know that what I have so far achieved would not have been possible with a free service.

If you are determined to earn money, subscribe to a paid unlimited autoresponder service. It will help you succeed faster

Conclusion: You can save money, time, efforts and earn money repeatedly using email marketing techniques. And you can succeed only if you use an advanced autoresponder.

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Previous Chapters

Lesson 1: Introduction to Internet Marketing

Lesson 2: Online Business v/s Conventional Business

Lesson 3: Major ways of Earning Money On-line

Lesson 4: Understanding Legal Aspects and Scam
Lesson 4: (a) Usage of Credit Cards, Passwords and Misuse
Lesson 4: (b) Copyright, SPAM and Scam

Lesson 5: Online Business to "Sell Products"
Lesson 5: (a) Get an Idea to Create a Product
Lesson 5: (b) The Sales Process and Planning the Website
Lesson 5: (c) Link emotions to your product

Lesson 6: Online Business Automation

Lesson 7: Affiliate Marketing Business

Lesson 8: Online Advertising Business (Adsense)

Lesson 9: Promoting your Website
Lesson 9: (a) Various Methods to Drive Traffic
Lesson 9: (b) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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