Bulk Email Marketing Serenade

Bulk Email, Spam, and Email Marketing

Excerpted from PlanetLink's Enews - an email newsletter delivered for FREE to your computer. To subscribe, go to www.planetlink.com

This issue focuses on the effective use of email lists and bulk email for website and business promotion. Bulk email essentially consists of sending the same message to some number of recipients at the same time. Spam is characterized as sending bulk mail to recipients whom you have had no prior contact or permission.

The issue of whether or not to send Spam can be summed up in three words - "don't do it." While it's not currently illegal under Federal law, (although sending bulk non-approved faxes is), it is generally not permitted by Internet Service Providers under their "terms of service" agreement (PlanetLink's terms of service can be found at http://www.planetlink.com/policy.html). Most ISPs will issue a warning on the first occurrence and cancel a client's service on the second. The reason for zero tolerance is that while the responsible party can literally send millions of messages almost for free, the costs associated with sending, delivering and receiving spam are incurred by the recipient whose time is spent processing unwanted mail as well as the ISPs that transport and store email. A recent European Commission report found that the world wide cost is $9.36 billion per year.

The other reasons for not sending Spam are the impact it has on the reputation of the company and the risk of interruption or cancellation of service. The other issue of importance for ISPs whose client's repeatedly send spam is that mail sent from their network can be blocked by other ISPs trying to stop spam from reaching their clients; potentially affecting thousands of customers. Under California Bus. & Prof. Code Section 17538.45, sending spam through a mail server based in California is illegal and allows for damages of $50 per message.

So, if we can't send Spam, what can we us bulk email for?

Bulk email is great tool for keeping in touch with your clients and customers, sending newsletters, service messages, announcing special offers and more. It can also be used to keep in contact with prospects on an ongoing basis and is an effective sales tool for generating new business. Systems can be implemented that make it easy to send automated messages on a regular basis. Systems can also be implemented which make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your list. Subscriber management features also make it easy for you to add, delete, schedule and send messages as required.

PlanetLink can assist you in setting up an effective email list system for your business and can implement anything from a fully automated system to a manual system. For more information, call us at 415-884-2022 or email info@planetlink.com.

Important Tips:

• Create an opt-in email list on your website.
  
• Don't buy a database of email addresses and send them bulk email - this is Spam.
  
• Spam can be reported to http://www.spamcop.net.
  
• Collect email addresses on a "sign up sheet" at public events, trade shows and presentations. Let them know on the form that they will be added to your email list and give them a check box to confirm their participation.
  
• If you send bulk email to your list, make it easy for them to unsubscribe.
  
• In the bulk message that you send, remind them of how and/or why they are on your list.
  
• Be sensitive to your list - people are busy and they get lots of email.
  

Steve Lillo author of Websites That Work! is the President of PlanetLink, a website design and consulting firm which specializes in creating websites which get results. They also provide their Web Rx Service for increasing the effectiveness of existing websites. PlanetLink can be reached at http://www.planetlink.com or by telephone at 415-884-2022.

Email Marketing Opus

Taking Email Marketing To The Next Level

How to use the latest e-messaging strategies to increase profits.

Many types of Internet advertising don't work as well as they once did. People have gotten used to banners and don't click on them. Some ezines have failed to keep their readers' interest and ads sometimes get less response. Search engines are overflowing with submissions. Getting your site listed high is almost impossible.

More and more businesses and organizations are now turning to email marketing to keep profits rolling in. While an increasing number of people say they rarely surf the Net, the vast majority of North Americans check their email every day.

Email marketing is the most effective and efficient way to influence purchases and keep customers informed and happy. It is also extremely inexpensive. Where you might have mailed out one printed customer update every month, you can now email one every week for a fraction of the cost.

Increasingly, companies need to embrace email marketing in a big way in order to stay competitive. Those who formerly used a service to send out their newsletters, sales info, and consumer updates are now doing all the emailing themselves.

New technology that is powerful yet easy to use allows anyone to handle email jobs that previously required expensive professional help. Many companies are bringing their email campaigns in house in order to have more control, grow their email efforts, and decrease costs.

Here are four features you will want to use in your email marketing efforts:

* Include HTML in your email messages. Most email programs are now equipped to read HTML. Your logo, banner, bullets, and color elements can make your message jump off the screen. You can even include forms that allow customers to order instantly from your message. You take advantage of impulse purchases that can lead to big increases in sales. *Important - Make sure you have pre-qualified your recipient - do they want to receive HTML messages!

* Use a campaign manager feature to schedule when your email messages will be sent out. You can prepare an entire months' worth of messages and tell the manager which weeks, days, or hours to release them to your list.

* Take advantage of a POP import feature. It automatically takes the email addresses from messages you receive and puts them on your mailing list. This insures no one who requests information from you is left out of your next update. This also helps you grow your list as fast as possible. You can even use a feature that automatically unsubscribes those who ask to be removed from your list. Many companies say this saves them hours of work each week.

* Make sure the software you use to send your messages includes a walk-through wizard. You get step-by-step instructions on how to do any task you wish to achieve. Instead of waiting for the tech guy to show up, you can speed through the job on your own.

Author, Karen Fegarty, is with MailWorkZ. MailWorkZ has been instrumental in developing new email technology. MailWorkZ's award winning email marketing tool, is key to reaching your customers in a highly efficient, personalized manner. Reach Karen at karen@mailworkz.com.

Email Marketing Opus

E-Mail Newsletter Marketing Essentials

If Gutenberg were alive today he would be in publishing heaven! Forget the printing press, the web has fast-forwarded self-publishing in ways that are evolving so rapidly it's becoming difficult to integrate technology and process to leverage the opportunities. Any company, regardless of their size and marketing resources should be publishing an opt-in e-mail newsletter - it's a very low cost way to build community with customers, keep suppliers/partners/other informed and generate new business.

How do you get started? You must decide up front if you have the marketing expertise to develop your "newsletter creative" in-house and how you want to manage the distribution of your newsletters. Many companies turn to agencies/marketing services firms to help them develop the actual newsletter creative and also outsource part of the process to ASP (Application Service Providers), who handle all facets of the list distribution, signup and ongoing management.

Content format can be critical to the effectiveness of your newsletter - we typically don't recommend HTML (text with images/graphics embedded) format unless our client's product or service is very consumer-focused Plain old text is not as glamorous as HTML but it's a lot more effective in most cases - people want information, not fancy eye candy that's appealing to marketing geeks - keep your message, simple, to the point and with customer success stories or references when/where you can to drive credibility.

It's relatively simple to use a Word processor with a mail merge program to integrate the addresses (depending on the volume) with your message and then send out via your ISP. But, doing it in house can be very time consuming - you have to deal with inbound requests for people who want to be added to your list, "unsubscribes" (people who want to be deleted) and integrate your web site into the process, so people can automatically sign up with a back end auto-responder (automatic message) that confirms their sign up.

Most companies utilize an Application Service Provider ("ASP") to outsource the list hosting, signup and unsubscribe management processes and web site integration - typical costs are under $50. per month based upon your number of subscribers (on average up to 10-30K), frequency of your newsletter mailing (rule of thumb would be 2-4 times per month) and other specialized features, such as bounce back deletions (deleting any e-mails that have a "bad address") and making the HTML code available with a graphic to sign up people directly from your web site. Be forewarned, most list hosting providers tell you up front they reserve the right to delete your account if they catch you spamming thousands of people whose e-mail addresses were not "opted in" (given to you with permission to market to them).

What do you want to look for in an ASP List Hosting Provider? You want great customer service, an online interface that enables you to easily manage the process, the ability to easily to cut and paste your text (newsletter copy), instant distribution of your newsletter and the ability to know at a glance how many subscribers you have on an ongoing basis and the number of new subscribers and unsubscribers.

There are lots of list hosting companies out there - I'd recommend including two on your short list. One of the oldest, most well established companies that has consistently won rave reviews for excellence in customer service is Sling Shot Media, LLC www.listhost.net - they've been hosting since 1998 (ancient in web time) and offer a wide range of consulting services related to all aspects of newsletter marketing. The other company to check out would be Microsoft's bCentral Services www.bcentral.com which offers list hosting as one of its services. I can't give them rave reviews for customer service, as they make you pay extra for anything more than e-mail support which can be a hassle at times. But, their list hosting interface is easy to use, works well most of the time and they are price competitive.

Finally, one of the biggest marketing challenges facing many small to medium sized companies is generating a newsletter subscriber list. I don't have sufficient space in this column to address this challenge - but, it's a classic go/no go situation; the longer you put it off the harder it becomes, so get started, the upside rewards are too significant to delay!

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies.


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Opt-in E-Mail Campaigns Effective Serenade

Creating Effective Opt-in E-Mail Campaigns

It's been said before, but important to re-emphasize, e-mail is the "killer application" of the information age. According to the latest Forrester Research numbers, the permission based e-mail industry is projected to grow from $164M (USD) in 1999 to $7.3B by 2005. E-mail is also rapidly moving from a textual communications process to one that is rich in multimedia content via server-based streaming audio or video. Virtually anyone, even those with extremely low bandwidth, can now view compelling content.

Here is a condensed primer for developing an effective opt-in e-mail campaign:

1. First and foremost, what is permission based or opt-in e-mail and how is it distinguished from Spam? Opt-in or permission based e-mail (the terms are interchangeable) means recipients have confirmed their interest in receiving e-mail and have signed up (hence the term opt-in) to receive e-mail about a subject of their interest. The recipient may also unsubscribe from the list at any time and all e-mail messages are clearly identified as coming from a specific and approved vendor or source.

2. We do not recommend Spam (unsolicited bulk e-mail messages) to our clients, nor have we ever developed a campaign that is not opt-in based. We think there is a growing backlash to Spam and many of us (author included) are inundated with it and delete it as soon as we recognize it.

3. The actual opt-in e-mail content is very important, like any interactive marketing process. The subject itself needs to be succinct and informative (as this is how most people filter e-mail), the text in the message should be concise, with paragraphs no more than 2-3 short sentences, customer references should be referred to in the lead paragraph to drive the rest of the message, have no more than two hyperlinks embedded in the content, and utilize a close and signature that thanks people for their time with a link (phone and e-mail) to a "real" person.

4. Many marketing types don't know whether to use HTML (rich media) or textual content. A standard rule of thumb is, if your target audience is consumers, then many prefer the HTML format, due to the snazzier graphical content; but, if you are targeting corporate or technical types, the majority of them want a message that is text only and one that leaves out any/all marketing hype - just the concise facts.

5. Costs can vary dramatically depending on your target demographics or market segment. A good rule of thumb is to expect rates of $.05 (USD) to $.25 per message, depending on the size of the media buy and frequency (the number of times you are using a list), type of list demographics, vendor selection (small publisher versus comprehensive services provider such as YesMail), and market conditions in the interactive advertising market.

6. What should a good campaign generate in terms of response rates; i.e., those that clicked through from your message to a web site or called a toll-free number? These numbers will fluctuate based again upon your market segment, product or service you are selling, type of response rate you are seeking (download, e-commerce sale, review of materials via a web site, etc.). But, industry averages are from 4% up to 20%. Unfortunately these numbers are going south as more and more companies integrate opt-in e-mail with interactive and offline marketing processes.

7. Message testing is also a very important component of this process. Meaning, you need to develop 1-3 messages ("creative" in marketing speak) that have different content and call to action components. Then test by utilizing 10-15% of your total media buy by sending out these test messages and assessing the response rates and go to market with the message that generated the highest return. Be forewarned, this process can slow the campaign down, but testing can help you increase your response rates or back end ROI exponentially.

8. Your interactive ad agency or list partner should help you setup "landing page(s)" - the actual page where people are taken via a hyperlink in your opt-in e-mail message. This page should have content that is integrated with your opt-in message and act as a response mechanism by capturing sufficient information to enable you to build your own in-house newsletter, which in turn helps to leverage downstream media costs.

9. Finally, the last and most important part of the process is setting up tracking reports that will enable you to carefully analyze the results from your opt-in e-mail campaign. This is typically done by inserting 1-2 lines of HTML code on 3-5 pages of your web site (product overview, registration, or home/index pages for instance). A report can then be generated that shows the number of respondents for each page as a subset of the overall response rates from the campaign. This critical analysis process will help you understand the effectiveness of your overall campaign and will also provide valuable insight about your web site content, UI (User Interface) and navigation.

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies.


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