Running the Campaign - E-Mail Transmission Tips

As soon as you've selected your target audience, built your mailing list and put together the message, you are ready to broadcast it. There are several ways to deliver the message to a list of recipients: the most common are as follows.

1. If your mailing list is short and you don't require advanced tracking features, you may use a traditional email client program like Microsoft Outlook;
2. For larger lists, use bulk mail software to send it directly from your computer or through an external SMTP server;
3. Lastly, you can subscribe to an online email marketing service and have your message delivered from their servers.

In this lesson, we examine the strong and weak points of each option.

Standard e-mail programs

Strictly speaking, e-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Eudora are for personal correspondence and are not the best choice for professional customer connections through e-mail. Surprisingly, many small to medium businesses still reach their audience this way. Personal e-mail programs are appropriate for later stages when the sales department follows up leads who have positively responded to initial communications. Standard programs are also helpful in keeping all both-way correspondence in one place and tracking down the correspondence history for each contact.

Mass mailing messages using say Microsoft Outlook can be problematic. Outlook is not a bad program, but it simply wasn't intended for this purpose.

It's rather tricky, though possible, to get Outlook to do "mail merging", i.e. sending personalized messages using a single message template but so that each sent message contains a different name in the greeting line, and other information taken directly from the mailing list. There's an article from Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287561/) that describes this process. With other e-mail clients, it will take you a lot of time, effort and in some cases even programming skills to get the software do it the right way.

Most e-mail clients allow request of a "read receipt" that can be used to track the "open" action and get an idea of how many recipients have successfully received the message and opened it. However, it's up to the recipient whether to send a "read receipt", and although it only requires them one click to do so, you cannot rely on read receipts as an exact measure.

Since e-mail clients are easily configured to check your mailbox for responses, you can also track bounced messages (those that return undelivered) and after some calculations see how reliable your delivery mechanism is. A message can get bounced because an e-mail address doesn't exist any more or because the message has been blocked by a spam filter. In the latter case, it may require some further action from your side to confirm that you are really interested in delivering the message to this particular address.

Finally, the frontier of standard e-mail client tracking ability is in receiving "unsubscribe" requests. Note that your e-mail program can't automatically remove the unsubscribed addresses from the next mailing list. It can only receive and show these requests, and provide you with an idea of how high the "unsubscribe rate" of your campaign is. It's impossible to automatically manage subscriptions with standard e-mail programs and track actions such as clickthru, sales and conversion rate.

All in all, standard e-mail programs quickly exhaust their capabilities as a professional e-mail broadcast instrument, especially when it comes to large mailing lists, scheduled correspondence cycles, advanced tracking and analytics, and subscription management.

E-mail marketing software

Nowadays there's a great selection of e-mail marketing software. Take a look at some software rating and review sites where you can choose one most suited to you:
http://email-marketing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/. In this course, we illustrate the bulk sending process using Email Marketing Director (http://www.arialsoftware.com/emailmarketingdirector.htm) as it has been rated the No.1 bulk email package at Top Ten Reviews at the time of writing. Many of its features are described here, and are standard for many other e-mail marketing packages as well. Here's a list of features that will be useful for comparisons when making your choice.


Explanation

Mailing list import
Possible to import a mailing list from a text file, datasheet, or database


Mailing list segmentation and contact grouping
Possible to filter the mailing list based on custom criteria, and send different templates to different segments

WYSIWYG HTML editor
Ability to edit your message both in HTML source and visual modes, add a plain text variant, use pre-installed templates, and preview the message in a browser

Spell checker
Ability to spell check your message before sending

Auto-detect mail settings
The program can automatically extract the information about the SMTP server from a standard mail application like MS Outlook

Direct send mode
Instead of handing off your message to an external SMTP server, the program will use the DNS system to find the recipient's server, connect to it directly, and try to transmit the message. Note that this mode is less reliable because your own computer is now acting like an SMTP server but some fastidious receivers may not recognize it as such.

Adding unsubscribe link
You may include an "unsubscribe" link in the bottom of your message for better compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. Usually clicking this link only opens a blank message with the subject "unsubscribe" which the recipient can then send back to your address.

Scheduling e-mail campaigns
Possible to schedule each mailing to run automatically at a certain time

Subscription management
Possible to connect to mailboxes through POP and IMAP, collect messages with "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" subjects, and reflect these subscriptions in your next mailing list

Tracking and analysis module
The main measurements that can be made for an e-mail campaign are: bounce rate; unsubscribe rate; open rate; clickthru rate; conversion rate. Very often e-mail marketing applications offer advanced tracking as a separate subscription-based service – mainly they provide clickthru and conversion rates because you need a Web based datacenter for these.

Database writeback
This is what really few programs out there are able to do. If you store your contacts in your own (corporate) database, or have a CRM solution in place, and you want the results of the e-mail campaign to be recorded in your database for later analysis, a few software programs can do this for you (like Campaign Enterprise from Arial software, the vendor of Email Marketing Director).

Message grouping (throttling)
This feature is used to save bandwidth and lessen the load on your SMTP server, as it limits the number of messages that are send over a period of time, and makes pauses between mailing to separate list portions.

Let's see what the broadcast process looks like in Email Marketing Director.

When you open the program the main window appears with a mailing list column to the right and a campaign list to the left.



Main Window
Main window of Email Marketing Director

Step 1. Import your mailing list or create a new one

Click "New List" in the right pane of the main window. Enter a name for your list. Now you can fill in record by record using either the form view or the table view.

You can also import a mailing list from a ready CSV file if you prefer.



Mailing List Editor
Mailing list in Email Marketing Director

Step 2. Create a new campaign

Under the campaign list in the main menu, click "New". You will be taken to the three-step campaign wizard. In the first step, select a mailing list you've previously created, or create a new one. Then put together your message using the visual editor. You can add an attachment and specify if you want to provide a plain text variant along with the HTML version (or you only want to use the plain text version). It is possible to insert merge fields into the message – during the mailing process these fields will be substituted with the actual data from the mailing list. For instance, if you insert {FirstName} into the message or subject, it will be replaced with "John" when the message is sent to John and "Jane" when the message is sent to Jane.




Campaign Editor
Campaign Editor. Step 2: Message editing

In step 3, you provide extra information, such as to where send the campaign report and whether to limit the number of messages sent per hour.

When finished, save the campaign and it appears in your campaign list. To run this campaign press "Run selected campaign" under the campaign list in the main window.

The strengths of desktop bulk mail applications is that they let you keep your mailing lists in your own database while offering a decent ability to integrate with local and remote databases. Usually, they also offer a powerful HTML editor which is rarely available in web-based applications. Finally, since your PC is the control center of the process, you always know the status of each campaign that is in progress, each sent message, and it’s possible to stop or delay things at any time.

There are some major drawbacks, for example sending bulk mail messages consumes a lot of traffic between your PC and your SMTP server. Even if you use a direct send mode, it's still a lot of outgoing traffic. In addition, some external SMTP servers limit the number of outgoing messages, and in a direct mode your computer is not whitelisted with the main e-mail service providers (SMTP receivers) and thus the delivery rate decreases, while increasing the risk that your IP address will be banned for spamming.

Web services that specialize in e-mail marketing are free from these weak points.

Email marketing services

You can choose to send your campaigns using special Web based services like Vertical Response (www.verticalresponse.com) and Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com). You create an account with them, import your mailing list into their database, create or import a message, schedule it for sending and at the appointed time it is sent using their servers.

Advanced services offer almost as many conveniences as desktop applications, including mailing list segmentation, campaign scheduling and a WYSIWYG editor to create messages. Additionally, you don't have to worry about deliverability, spam filter compliance and traffic – this is taken care of by these services whose sending servers are usually white-listed with most email service providers like Yahoo! or Hotmail.

Web-based email marketing services usually charge on a monthly basis or per thousand addresses in your mailing list. This recurring expense might become annoying when compared to a one-time purchase of a desktop application, especially if you use this type of service to deliver a newsletter or some other kind of email that doesn't convert directly to sales.

Since email marketing services are responsible for delivery of your message to recipient mailboxes, they may impose certain limitations on the outgoing e-mail. Thus, you may be required to include a physical postal address of your business in the message, or tailor it in another way for better compliance with spam protection regulations. The size of the message also can be limited because these companies need to predict and control the traffic flow from their servers.

If you plan to market internationally and send messages in different languages, make sure that the service of your choice supports the Unicode format.

If you are looking for a decent email marketing service, Top Ten Reviews is a good place to start.

Other email transmission tips

Keep these simple tips in mind when scheduling your campaign for transmission,

* Information products, especially business improvements, how-to and self-help, enjoy the best responses during January, February, October and November.
* January is considered the best overall month for mail-order marketing, while July and August yield the lowest response rate.
* Holiday offers work best from September through December. Ecommerce websites that sell gift merchandise get peak traffic around Christmas.
* Since it is possible to time an email marketing campaign up to the hour, marketers set numerous experiments with the best day and even time of day to send out their campaigns. Most agree on the following: on Monday people look through their email quickly, because their inbox is full after the weekend. On Friday people are getting ready for the weekend and also get rid of their email without excessive attention. Tuesday and Wednesday are considered the best days to mail, with a follow-up on Thursday.

However, if you mainly target home office / small business owners, you might want to consider late Friday / early Saturday. Many of them enjoy working with their email on Saturday mornings.

Gaming and entertainment offers best work if sent on Thursday.


* Some marketers report that the click-thru increases up to 12 percent if the campaign is sent out at noon.
* It is a good idea to monitor website traffic and schedule campaigns so that they slightly proceed the peak periods. This way items are marketed just as interest peaks.
* To prevent over-saturation with promo emails, we recommend an optimum frequency of an email twice a month (or once every two weeks), one of them being an informational kind of newsletter and the other one which includes promotional material.

Conclusion

Email transmission is the most important step in the entire email marketing process, and you may have to set up some experiments before performing really serious mass mailings. Try to use small portions of your list to answer the following questions:

* What provides you with the best deliverability rate, bulk mailing software or a web-based service?
* What kind of mailing list is more responsive to your offers, your own in-house list or one you've purchased?
* What days and times of day work best for your type of business?
* What kind of emails discourage your audience from clicking the unsubscribe link: promotional, or informational? What is the optimum frequency for the both kinds of email?

Once you've got answers about your own unique audience and which is specific to your business you will feel much more confident sending out the large-scale campaign.
Here's what should be retained from this lesson:

1. Once you have your mailing list, and have set up your message or messages, you may use bulk mail software or a web-based marketing service to deliver it to your target audience.
2. Web based services offer a better deliverability rate and – sometimes – tracking possibilities, however, their fees are recurring, and they may impose more limitations on the content and size of the message.
3. For the most broad and general sample of the Internet audience, the best frequency for your email messages is twice a month, with the best days being the middle of the week, in the afternoon.

Creating the Message and Choosing the Subject

Creating a message which can attract and hold reader's interest is key. Here we’ll provide some deeper insights into how to compose the message and what mistakes to avoid. It's no wonder nowadays that the most common Inbox activity is delete, delete, delete. Thus to prevent delete, unsubscribe or complaints you should be known for sending high-quality messages.

Starting from the very beginning you should be aware that any shorter Internet direct mail generally works better than a lengthy e-mail. The evidence shows that if you force people to scroll through pages of an e-mail message you risk to lose them.

Surely there is a workaround even for this particular situation. If the whole selling message can't fit in the e-mail, a two-step approach can work: you arouse the readers' interest and get them to click on a response form designed specifically for the e-mail campaign and on the Web. Once you get the prospect there, additional copy on the Web page can complete the sales job and get the order.

Another question you’ll face up during the creating message process is whether to use plain text for the mailing or an HTML enhanced version. Straight text is the simplest, most popular, easiest, and least costly e-mail marketing format. In fact, the programming and design costs are zero. Just type your message, and you're done.

But text e-mail doesn't take advantage of the graphic and inter­active capabilities of the Internet. HTML emails are much more inviting to read. HTML helps direct the reader's eye on where to go next and where to put one's attention. What’s more, a good graphical layout communicates a better brand impression. HTML also lets you track open rates, click-throughs and pass-along (recipients who pass your email communication along to friends/colleagues). An all-text email does not allow for tracking.

So when choosing between HTML vs. text, there’s no contest as HTML has higher response rates. Moreover with each passing year, more people prefer the friendlier "look" of HTML.

When creating HTML text keep these tips in mind:

* Make certain your HTML email is easily understood when it is opened and read without the graphics appearing. Some corporate email servers do not pass emailed graphics to PC clients on their networks. Furthermore, people often read their emails offline, and most graphics only appear when there is a live connection to the Internet.
* Keep experimenting with HTML formatting. Try different background colors. Try one column vs. two and two columns vs. three. Try putting key copy points and links in bold type.
* For long emails, consider inserting a hyperlinked Table of Contents or Index at the top of your email so recipients can quickly click and jump to where they want to go.
* You can conceal unsightly and unusually long Web addresses in HTML through masked links. An extremely long Web address can be embedded and hidden while the reader only sees the simpler address displayed in your email communication.

Furthermore, use graphics, animation, video, music, sound effects, mul­timedia, and audio incorporated into a self-contained file that is sent as an attachment to an e-mail or a link to a Web page. In the industry, this is known as rich media. With rich media, you can create dynamic presentations that have much a greater impact than traditional static e-mail.

Here we should mention also that many graphics are also damaging. As most of you are painfully aware, dial-up connections take too long to download large email messages: try to keep your communications to 20K-60K in file size.

If your audience is known to use greater bandwidth such as cable, DSL or high speed Internet connection, then you should be able to increase the total file size of your email message with no negative feedback.

A last point is to not eliminate text-only email communications. There are subscribers which prefer receiving their newsletter(s) in a text-only format.

To sum up give the recipient a choice between HTML or text versions of your email communications; that choice gives the subscriber a better sense of control. And some words about email relevancy. In the recipient's mind, you have to be known for sending high-quality messages: otherwise, you will be ignored or recipients will unsubscribe or complain.

Be careful in order not to damage your e-mail transmission and entire approach. It’s the case that 50% of email is now spam and people are busier than ever, so your e-mail should use the following structure:

At the beginning of the e-mail, put a "From" line and a "Subject" line. The e-mail "From" line identifies you as the sender if you are e-mailing to your in-house mailing list. If you're e-mailing to a rented list, the "From" line might identify the list owner as the sender. This shows the recipient that the e-mail is not spam, but rather a communication from someone with whom they already have an established relationship. The "Subject" line should be constructed like a short attention-grabbing, curiosity-rousing outer envelope teaser, compelling recipients to read further. If you can tease the readers and force them to read the e-mail to satisfy curiosity, your subject line will increase readership and response.

Remember your name in the ''From" field represents your brand and reputation for sending messages that directly appeal to the recipient. The "Subject" field represents a timely and relevant proposition.



Message example

It’s also highly advisable to get the first and last name of your subscribers. People like to receive personalized communications because it indicates it’s not a mass email distribution and are glad to see their names in the subject header and/or the body of the email. But don't overuse the first name of the recipient in the body copy of the email. After awhile, it comes across as too contrived.

In order to make certain that your emails are relevant and valuable to recipients use your website's registration page to ask recipients what content they want to see. Don’t be too intrusive, however, or it can turn people off and may cause them to abandon the sign-up process all together.

One more advisable technique is to encourage your existing subscribers to register all of your products in their possession. In turn, you can send them relevant product updates, tips and offers in the future.
What you should remember from this lesson:

1. Remember you have to be known for sending high-quality, relevant and valuable messages: otherwise, you will be ignored or recipients may unsubscribe or complain.

Working with Your Mailing List

In this lesson we continue speaking about e-mail marketing channel and going to study building your mailing list’s secrets.

Currently, direct marketers effectively use the World Wide Web as a marketing tool. More and more e-mail lists or “e-lists” are emerging on the mar­ket today. And surely the number of marketers using e-mail lists is growing just as rapidly.

There are a number of ways to build an e-mail list on your own. One way is to provide useful content, such as an e-mail newsletter. Another way to gather e-mail addresses is through your own company database. If you want to build an email list of existing customers give them a value proposition that makes them want to be on your email list. The result of your actions should be an opt-in list generated which will offer the best effect for future mailing in comparison to any other ready-made e-list offered for renting.

The true definition of opt-in is that people on an e-list have (a) registered at the website or through some other electronic or paper form and (b) checked the option requesting additional e-mail information.

The last statement is very important because obtaining permission before sending e-mail is critical. Without it, the e-mail is Unsolicited Bulk Email, better known as spam. Be sure to obtain subscriber permission before adding new names to your mailing list.

Another important point to keep in mind is to be selective about who is added to your list or you'll just create more work for yourself.

Don’t think that a simply large list is better and don’t make a mad dash to build the largest email list ever while jeopardizing the quality of the list. This is called GIGO (Garbage In/Garbage Out), and it can backfire.

Choose qualified names out of which a certain percentage will turn into prospects. Out of those prospects, a certain percentage should turn into conversions. When done right, catalogers and retailers enjoy higher sales results because their offers are sent to the right audience. High-tech or professional services firms avoid wasting time, resources and money following up on useless contacts.

Qualify new contacts using the “double opt-in” confirmation technique.

Generally there are several common forms of opt-in e-mail according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt_in_email :

Unconfirmed opt-in
New subscribers first give their addresses to the list software (for instance, on a Web page), but no steps are taken to make sure that this address actually belongs to the person. This can cause e-mail from the mailing list to be considered spam because simple typos of the email address can cause the email to be sent to someone else.

Confirmed opt-in
A new subscriber asks to be subscribed to the mailing list, but unlike an unconfirmed opt-in, a confirmation e-mail is sent asking if it was really them. The person will not be added to the mailing list unless an explicit step is taken, such as clicking a special Web link or sending back a reply e-mail. The Web link or reply e-mail must contain some sort of secret word or token that cannot be guessed by a malicious person. This ensures that no person can subscribe as someone else out of malice or error.

Double opt-in
The term double opt-in was coined by marketers in the late 90s to differentiate it from what they call single opt-in, where a new subscriber to an e-mail list gets a confirmation e-mail telling them they will begin to receive e-mails if they take no action. This is compared to double opt-in where the new subscriber must respond to the confirmation e-mail to be added to the list.

In practice many companies and e-mail publications require individuals to confirm their initial requests to get onto an email list. That's “double opt-in”, and it can slow your acquisition rate by 50% or more, but typically makes for a much more qualified and responsive e-mail list.

The "single opt-in" approach grows your list faster than double opt-in though the list may not be as responsive and as rich with qualified prospects.

In order to build a list of customers and prospects that includes e-mail addresses you can:

* Collect email addresses from registration cards, point-of-sale, customer service, and sweepstakes. For prospecting purposes, gather email addresses from your website, online white papers offered, from visitors to your trade show booths and from sales calls. Be careful: Just because you already have a person's email address for one reason or another doesn't necessarily mean you have permission to start sending all sorts of email campaigns to them. In all cases, give people an expectation of the value they will receive in return for handing over their email address to you.
* Post a privacy notice on your registration page at your website. People are understandably suspicious of any site they come across on the Internet so it's best to address their concerns up front. Every user is interested in how you will use their personal information.
* Show prospective subscribers a sample of what they are signing up for at your website.
* Keep your registration page simple by asking for minimal information. You can always get more information later by using surveys and incentives once an individual is added to your email list.

Mistakes to avoid

• Don't make it difficult for people to stop hearing from you by email. Make it easy for a person to leave ("opt-out") of any or all email communications. For example, people may still wish to receive your product updates but not your company news. If it's difficult to be removed from your email list, recipients can complain to their ISP or self-appointed spam police who in turn can have you blacklisted. Being blacklisted means the recipient's ISP will automatically filter out any inbound email containing your name or email address.

• Don't promote your company or services through the renting, sponsoring, or bartering of email lists without performing a background check of the list owners and asking how they obtained their email addresses. You could be guilty by association if you are perceived as doing business with a spammer. Furthermore, spam laws are currently getting tougher in this area. Monitor the latest developments in legislation by visiting http://www.spamlaws.com/.

Now you can see the full picture of the e-list creation. Therefore, pay proper attention to the mailing-list obtaining process in order to have success with your email marketing strategy.
What you should remember from this lesson:

1. When building and updating a list of customers and prospects that include e-mail addresses be selective about who is added to your list or you'll just create more work for yourself.

The Six-Step Process of E-Mail Marketing

The following six-step process, recommended by Internet marketing consultant Al Bredenberg, should be put together to execute success­ful direct e-mail campaigns.

1. Planning
Direct e-mail campaign, like any other promotional effort, should have an detailed plan and come from your business's over­all marketing plan. Here are some questions you should answer at the beginning.

1. What is the product for? (What does it do and who is it for?)
2. Who is your targeted audience?
3. What is your competitive position?
4. What revenue do you expect to collect? (Be specific: number of sales, dollar amount of sales, profit margin.)
5. What do you want to achieve with this e-mail campaign?

Besides answering questions like these, keep in mind that an e-mail campaign affects things such as fulfillment, delivery, customer service, etc.

2. Determining your offer

Basically, any offer should have a peculiarity, something that makes it unique, interesting or promising. As a rule the offer is a straight sale: you give your clients the product with its associated benefits, and they give you money. It is useful for a business to structure more compelling offers, or offers that sound like an exceptional value. Perhaps you could offer a discount price for those who order during a certain predefined timeframe during this special campaign. Or maybe offer a free pre­mium, something like: buy one and get one free. Whatever the offer, you should emphasize that in your ad copy.

3. List selection

If you don’t have your own mailing list (collected with the help of registration forms on your site) then you will have to buy one or use a mailing service. The list or lists you mail to will be deter­mined mostly by your budget and marketing plans. Some list providers offer many e-mail lists with varying demo­graphics or interest areas. Some providers own only one list, but they should be able to tell you what the characteristics or interests of their recipients are.

4. Creative

Any advertising piece consists of a concept, copy, design, and format. In other words there is creativity. It is difficult to state what stage is more critical than another. Offer or list selection are critical choices you're going to make. Creativity is as critical as the steps stated above. If you botch your creativity, your campaign will be ruined and your money wasted.

5. Testing

After you've selected your lists, created the mes­sage, and arrange all back-end processes. It's time to test. Now you have several lists that match your purposes. Each list may have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of addresses. Test a future e-mail campaign on smaller samples, a few thousand per list would be alright. Then examine the response to see which lists have the best "pull." Code your tests to determine where responses are coming from. Also test various offers and creative approaches to find out what generates the highest response rate.

6. Rollout

It’s time to roll out your cam­paign to a larger audience after identifying responsive lists and work­able offers and creative approaches. Be sure to track the campaign and measure response. Always run the numbers.
What you should remember from this lesson:

1. A successful direct email campaign goes through a six-step process: planning, determining offer, list selection, creative content, test and rollout. The Internet has permanently changed the way business is done in America and worldwide.
2. It is obvious to work carefully at every step as well as thru the whole process. Any botch within any stage can lead to campaign failure.

Introduction to E-Mail Marketing

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 their current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business;
* Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something again;
* Adding advertisements in e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.

Studies have shown that the first thing people do when they turn on their computers for the day is open their e-mail. Because of this fact, email marketing has become an effective and extremely popular tool for advertising. By using advertising banners, click through message options, and other routes, a business can interest a new customer as well as entice a previous customer into more purchases.

Internet direct mail has many advantages over traditional paper direct mail:

* It's faster. E-mail can reach the target almost in seconds. You can get out a campaign, get results, and make money in days in a short period of time after sending your e-mail. This compares very favorably to traditional direct mail campaigns, which can take eight to twelve or more weeks to complete (from concept, copy, and design, through printing and mailing).
* Response is immediate. Your customers will give a response the day you send your message, and you will receive 90 percent of your responses in about four days. As you get results sooner, you can plan the next campaign or rollout with confidence.
* Traditional direct mailing is limited by geo­graphically boundaries (currencies, time zones, varying postal regu­lations, and postal systems of varying quality and reliability), e-mail is a global medium. Successful campaigns can easily be rolled out worldwide.
* It's less complicated to produce. The typical Internet direct mailing is a typed e-mail message created right on your com­puter. Unless you want to incorporate sophisticated graphics you do not need a professional graphic designer, Web developer or HTML programmer.
* Costs are much cheaper to send. The cost to send a paper direct mailer is typically sixty to eighty cents per piece. This price includes printing, postage, mailing list rental, and production. At that rate, mailing 100,000 pieces would cost $60,000 to $80,000. E-mailing to the same number of prospects will cost about $300 - $1,500 depending on the services used.
* E-mail services works as well as or better than regular direct mail in many instances. E-mail makes the purchase fast, easy and at a time and place of the buyer's choice. This increases response rates. Personal­ization, which increases response, is easy and inexpensive. You can create powerful presentations combining graphics, text, voice, video, audio, animation, color, and interactivity.

Email marketing does not work as well for a one-time quick hit marketing strategy. Email allows you to build a regular, ongoing dialogue with your best clients and prospects. That becomes self-selecting - those who most wish to do business with you will appreciate the regular communications. Those who do not can opt-out.

E-Mail Marketing

Our next stage presents a new Internet Marketing tool which you can use for business project development. You can create a powerful presentation of your offer and deliver it to the targeted audience immediately and at a low cost. An e-mail marketing campaign can be an answer to many of your marketing needs.

These days people are virtually-living in their inboxes. E-mail is a fast, inexpensive and effective way to target and address various audiences, especially when compared to other traditional marketing channels.

E-mail marketing provides great benefits as part of an Internet Marketing business campaign. It’s a highly effective tool for reaching prospects, customers and specific clients.

E-mail marketers can freely manipulate the message transmission mechanisms, copy content, advertising banners and other options to make a purchase easy, fast, and at a time and place of the buyer's choice. This increases response rates. You should definitely incorporate e-mail marketing best practices into your knowledge base.

What follows is a compilation of ways to start an e-mail marketing strategy, create a reliable mailing list, compose message copy, track results, and run and manage the campaign.

You’ll also get a clear picture of trends and patterns to aid you in mapping your email marketing strategy. By having these guidelines and benchmarking your competition you can develop a Web project and become a successful industry practitioner. The market is constantly changing so tracking known competitors in your field is smart and savvy marketing will be one of your primary activities.

A direct e-mail campaign, like any other promotional effort, should have an elaborate plan and arise from your business's over­all marketing plan. Be sure to track the campaign and measure responses.

Use the Internet more effectively to deliver ads and offers via mailing services to prospects, customers and clients. E-mail marketing is a quick and easy way to drive considerable amounts of traffic of targeted visitors and it can effectively create interest for a new customer as well as entice previous customers into more purchases.

Using Keyword Suggestion Tools

You already know the significance of keywords and key phrases for website optimization. Keyword research is the first thing website owners start thinking about when considering traffic from search engines. Figuring out the strategic keywords is not easy, and approaching it properly from the very beginning is vital in order not to damage all your SEO campaign.

To start with keyword suggestion, you may use one of the numerous free and paid tools and web-based services. We’ll depict some of them in this lesson.

One of the good keyword suggestion tools that helps with keyword choice is www.goodkeywords.com. Wordtracker is another worthy tool offered as a subscription-based service.
Miva Keyword Generator (https://account.uk.miva.com/advertiser/Account/Popups/keywordgenbox.asp?Login=true)

If you want something free - Miva keyword generator will be of help.

The screenshot below illustrates the keyword suggestions offered by Miva service for the initial word "weather". All suggestions are real keywords and key phrases, and the numbers next to them indicate how often these words were used in search.



Overture suggestions

When you type a keyword or key phrase it offers a list of related searches that include your term. For example, our search "weather" produced weather forecast, weather station, local weather, and others.

If you are interested in more detailed and sophisticated keyword research data we recommend you Web CEO Keyword Research Tool.
Web CEO Keyword Research Tool (http://www.web-ceo-keyword-research.com/index.htm )

Web CEO offers Free SEO Toolkit with in-built keyword research software.

This keyword tool uses proprietary keyword database of real searches to get valuable suggestions. At this point, you will see how competitive each search term is (i.e. how many websites are already found on Google for this query), and how often it is used by the searchers daily.

It will also calculate the so-called KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) from these two figures, so that you can quickly sort the keywords by this parameter and see which terms have the best demand-to-competition ratio!




Web CEO suggestions

Web CEO Keyword Research Tool will spy on the competitors' pages to find out what keywords or phrases they use to gain top positions.

Furthermore, it provides more sophisticated research of your top 10 competitors for each keyword to see where the competition is weakest. One convenient table presents a complex measure of the leaders' strength that consists of their link popularity, Google PageRank, traffic, overall number of pages that have included that key phrase in their TITLE tags, prices that the leaders pay to stay in the top of the paid search results etc. (available in the paid (SmallBiz and Professional) versions of Web CEO).

At the end of this Step you will see a video demonstrating the work of Web CEO Keyword Research Tool. The movie called "Picking out Keywords" will guide you step by step through the process of researching and selecting keywords with the help of Web CEO.