Improving Your Email Deliverability (Page 1 of 4 )
What is the difference between marketing email and spam? A lot of harried Netizens can't tell you the answer to that, and the way some email campaigns are conducted, it's no wonder. This article, the first of two parts, will show you some of the best practices to help you make sure your ezines are not only delivered, but read.
Spam is a bad word, unless you are an online marketer. Then spam is just customer paranoia (that was a joke). However, spam is real, and online users find it inconvenient to have their inbox filled with unwanted emails from companies which want to sell to them. This reduces their browsing experience and makes robotic tasks (reading and deleting emails, archiving, storing, replying and other unimaginative, unproductive tasks) take longer. It also means users have a harder time viewing and replying to really important messages.
Improving the users' browsing experience has become an integral part of the relationship between users and web sites. Even in a field where it seems all the rules have already been made (ezine marketing or email campaigns) there is still a lot of room for continuously improving the browsing experience of the web surfer. If it is a joy to navigate through your ezine, and the content in it is actually useful, it goes without saying that your email will be anticipated before it actually gets to the users' inbox. And then, you are truly on your way to not just selling, but to building relationships with the members of your opt-in database. But first, online marketers may have to change their current view of reality.
The changing times
It is spamming to send unsolicited mail, but with a few technical sounding words on the “we hate spam” statement below the register button, websites can get away with selling or renting their mailing lists to “partner sites.” This brings extra income to the web site, but the user did not subscribe to these services. Even if it is not sold to a partner site, the database obtained by one division of a company is ritually plundered by other divisions in their monthly marketing sprees. So a user that subscribes to the a home appliance newsletter (said home appliance company being a division of a larger engineering conglomerate) gets three emails in a month from three other sites, who put it in small print that you are getting this email because you subscribed to it from our site or an affiliate site. The marketer gets his numbers, but the user ends up suspecting that someone somewhere hoodwinked him.
Simply put, his/her browsing experience has been compromised. And if the content sent is irrelevant, at best it will not get opened, while at worst the user will report it as spam (the unsubscribe button is hit only if you are lucky). The very first thing to do if you are serious about getting awesome returns on your email, is to make sure you are invited to the users box. If you cannot avoid buying an email list, then you are constantly at risk of mediocre or just average returns. You will need to buy a huge volume to increase your odds of marginal success, and a large percentage of your emails will simply not get the required response.
If you buy a list that was built by a website that offers services identical to yours, it drastically increases your chances of getting your emails opened. Still, the best option is to build relationships, hence your own mailing list.
Next: Build Your Own Opt-in Database >>
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