Email Marketing Best Practices
The first thing I, and every other webmaster I know, starts his or her day with, is to check emails. You will also need to keep checking your emails several other times during the day.
Sorting and Managing Emails Outlook Express The first step you can take towards effectively managing your emails is to get yourself and email software like ‘Outlook Express’. With Outlook Express, you will be check all your email accounts in one single place, set up folders for different emails, set rules for email messages etc. Outlook Express will be sure to make life much more easier for any webmaster.
Spam Filtering You will notice that you receive tons of emails, of which very few are actually of use. Most emails, called ‘SPAM’ will try to sell you something or the other. How do these people get your email address? The answer is simple. Your email address is posted on your website, in the message forums where you are a registered member, your newsletter subscriptions and a whole lot of other places. Fighting spam is a difficult task but you can reduce the extent of spam by using Spam Filters. A spam filter blocks emails with offending words. A good spam filter is the Norton Antivirus Email Protection. Other Spam Filters are also available. In most cases your hosting account will also provide some sort of Spam Filter which you can activate to protect yourself from spam emails. Spam Filters are not 100% effective. In addition to those, you can set up your own message rules in OE (Outlook Express). You can set up emails from a certain address or with certain words in their subject line to be deleted from the server.
OE Folders You can organize your emails much better using a certain option in Outlook Express which allows you to create folders and setup message rules for them. You can create different folders for Ezines and Newsletters, Newsgroup postings, orders, queries, contest entries, passwords, payment details etc. You can automatically rules so that the emails are directly deposited in these folders. For e.g. you can create a rule that emails with the subject line ‘Mom Tycoons Business Ezine’ be delivered into a special folder that you have created for it. You can, of course, manually move emails to specific folders as well.
Desktop email software vs. Hosted ASP Now when you know do you want free or fee-based software and what to look in your email marketing software you have to decide do you want to have desktop email marketing software or so called Hosted ASP. Both types have limitations and advantages. You have to choose the best option for you.
Personalization & Segmentation Personalization is connected with Subject fields, too. Some people like to include first names of their subscribers in subject lines in order to have better open ratio. Personalization is also very effective when it is used in editor’s welcome message or in articles. For example, Dear !*First_Name*!, welcome to the 10th issue of Email Marketing Articles. Segmentation is the most important part in marketing. “What am I selling and to whom?” It is not the same to sell your software to novice users (newbies) or to seasoned users (knowbies). Also, it is not the same to market your software to small business companies and corporation. It is good that you make a good segmentation of your email newsletter. Best way to do that is to include several additional fields at sign-up process. Of course this doesn’t mean that you have to ask 15 questions from your new subscriber because many people leave when they see that there are many fields to fill. After that, you will make several email newsletters for each membership type.
With Hosted ASP you will usually have a lower initial investment. You don’t have to buy hardware and software. However, price is usually determined by the number of emails you send so you will pay more how your membership base gets bigger so this option will be much more expensive than a desktop email marketing software option in the long run. You can see that choosing the right email marketing software is very important. You have to bear in mind that the biggest investment is one that it is paid – twice. So, choose your email marketing software wisely.
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