The Internet is believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct surveys than using more traditional telephone or mail methods. You eliminate the need for extensive paper works and man hours.
No matter how striking your website is, if your website developer doesn’t make the direction-finding system user-friendly, you’ll be undetectable to the search engines. Whether you like it or not your web site will remain virtually invisible to the bulk of the internet online businesses unless you take the appropriate steps to draw interest to it.
If you plan to do serious marketing via e-mail you’ll need to put in some first class tools. Not all people respond well to online surveys and to email web marketing. They see this as a nuisance and if you don’t package it well, they’ll probably just block all your efforts.
E-Mail Client Programs.
The first type of e-mail program you need is a fundamental e-mail client. Settling for the built-in program included with your web browser is not advisable. One of the essentials is the classification of filters that will arrange e-mails by keywords as it comes to your site.
By creating a group, you can send out multiple e-mail messages and files to individuals or just by pasting multiple addresses into the To: field, but it’s a mark for beginners, since each one of the recipients see the e-mail addresses of all the other recipients, which can be awkward to look at, and subjects your links to spamming from others.
When pasted into the Cc: field, it has the same purpose and works the same. But when you put the e-mail addresses into the Bcc: field (which means “blind carbon copy”) nobody can be able to see the addresses of the recipients. If you have little list of contacts to e-mail to, this will be acceptable.
Here are some of the most excellent programs available:
Eudora Pro
Eudora Pro (http://www.eudora.com/) is the father of brilliant e-mail handling programs. Its use of filters and stationery gives you permission to send automated responses to e-mails containing keywords, such as those you set up with forms-to-email systems. For example, one option a customer might choose and include the keyword “birdbath” which would automatically trigger Eudora to send an e-mail reply about your Electronic Birdbath product. Eudora’s filters are very powerful and reliable, but its contact information section is pretty rough, and difficult to put up in a database arrangement that allows you to send personalized e-mail to contacts.
Outlook 98 and 2000
Microsoft Outlook 98/2000 (http://www.microsoft.com/outlook/) is an outstanding e-mail program. Its filters are not as strong and reliable as Eudora’s, but the way it integrates e-mail with contact information, e-mail addresses, categorization, journals, calendaring, etc. make it supreme for people-intensive small businesses. One weakness of Outlook 98 is that not all fields of its contact information can be used in an e-mail combine operation.
Pegasus Mail
Pegasus Mail (http://www.pegasus.usa.com/) by David Harris is a high quality, multi-featured freeware e-mail program adored by users and it’s highly recommended.
Revnet Mail King
Revent’s mail king (http://www.mailking.com/?wmt) is a well program that reads data from MS Access or Excel files (as well as several other familiar formats), and allows you to merge that data into an e-mail message. It has some moderately sophisticated filters to help you select suitable recipients.
Arial Campaign
Arial Software Campaign (http://www.arialsoftware.com/?wmt) has been around for several years. The most recent versions of this software run on Windows 95+ and Windows NT platforms. Campaign provides all the features of Mail King, and works without difficulty with MS Access and other common databases, but also allows scheduling of e-mail messages to go out a certain number of days after a client has taken a certain action.
Mail loop
Mail loop (http://marketingtips.com/mailloop/t.x/15267/) is an extremely flexible program. It works alongside your current e-mail client program to pre-filter e-mail, extract forms-generated data from e-mail messages, strip e-mail addresses from any kind of file, merge your database into personalized e-mail messages, offer auto responder-like responses, host newsletters, and process “remove” requests from those who want you to be detached from any of your lists.
List server Programs
E-mail merge programs run on your desktop, and depend upon the rate of your connection to the Internet. List server programs, on the other hand, reside on web hosting service computers with a direct connection to the Internet, so they can pump out e-mails extremely fast. All include automatic subscribe and unsubscribe features, and allow a variety of lists, one-way mailings such as newsletters, and discussion lists, both moderated and unmoderated.
Spam e-mail is no longer the mild irritant it once was – it’s clogging corporate networks and ISP mail servers and has become a real productivity drain, forcing corporate and consumer e-mail users to spend 20-30 minutes a day dealing with this deluge of junk! According to recent figures, unsolicited bulk e-mail now makes up to 36% of all e-mail, up from under 8% just over a year ago. And, what’s worse, more and more legitimate e-mail is not getting through to recipients due to Spam filtering taking place via ISPs and/or corporate networks.
Opt-in E-Mail Marketing 30K foot Picture
Opt-in e-mail marketing is clearly losing some of its effectiveness as a viable marketing tool much to the consternation of those of us who have been advocating its effectiveness for years! This is not to say opt-in e-mail isn’t a viable way to market goods and services – but ROI (read response rates) is heading south quickly and needs to be considered when assessing the viability of this marketing process, as response rates have dropped on average from 10-20% to 3-10%.
However, opt-in e-mail is not disappearing off the marketing horizons – Forrester forecasts spending on e-mail marketing will grow from $1.3B (USD) in 2001 to $6.8B in 2006 and Jupiter Media Metrix is even more optimistic, forecasting growth rates from $1B in 2001 to $9.4B in 2006. But, there is a dark undercurrent to these numbers that is fueling the market growth and driving down response rates – some opt-in agencies, brokers and media representatives are “flogging” lists by overselling them – so caveat emptor.
Five Offsetting Marketing Strategies
1. Deploy opt-in e-mail campaigns very selectively (!) – buy opt-in e-mail lists from legitimate top-tier broker/list managers who are well established, are not “over-sending” messages to list subscribers and who are constantly refreshing their list quality by adding new subscribers. Critical questions to ask brokers include: how many messages (“frequency” in ad speak) are sent to each list recipient per month, how are new subscribers added and what is the percentage of new members added per month, are they using “third party” (someone else’s list) lists to augment their own, are their lists “double opt in” (meaning, you sign up and then must reply to a signup confirmation to be added to a list) and last but not least, what is their privacy policy and how strictly do they adhere to published industry standards.
2. Utilize plain vanilla text link advertising – find web sites or portals that have traffic that is comprised of customers who are in your market segment. Then, add a text link (banner ad or graphic button if you will) to a page or pages and negotiate a media buy that is based upon a “cost per click” basis; i.e. paying only for traffic that clicks through to your web site.
3. Creating and deploying a “link strategy” campaign (i.e. getting a site listed via other web sites) is one of the best self-sustaining interactive marketing processes available to any company seeking to drive qualified traffic to a web site. This process is not based upon the more traditional “reciprocal links” procedure but incorporates some web-based competitive analysis. You start by analyzing the links that are pointing back to your top 3-5 competitors’ web sites and then establish relationships with these sites and also submit your site to top and second tier directories to augment the number of links.
4. Newsletter insert advertising used to be considered rather mundane and not very effective. But, if you contrast the effectiveness of this process versus the new opt-in e-mail response rates the heretofore-lowly newsletter advertising has new and vastly improved luster! Also, in the past it was difficult to track when and if people clicked on a text link ad in a newsletter – but new technology enables virtually any publisher to provide you with this information, enabling you to track your ROI for the media buy. Finally, the real beauty of newsletter text advertising is that it is very targeted and people want to receive the information so you can be confident your ad will at least be viewed by some finite number of prospects.
5. Search Engine Ranking has come of age in the last 12-24 months – you can now easily create and deploy a traditional (title, description, keywords inserts in content, submissions and optimization) search engine ranking process that is augmented with a pay per click (“PPC”) process. Deploying both ensures you derive long term (traditional rankings) and short term (pay per click) results, with the latter being driven by the amount of funds you have in your marketing budget.
Out of all the most crafty marketers you know, the one that just about everyone hates is the spammer, the good news is that Spam is almost dead. It has been greatly taken over by the use of e-mail marketing. It is said that Spam is on the decline, contrary to popular belief. The rate that it is falling is approximately 13% per year. Why? Because the marketer now sees that e-mail is the marketing choice for the pros. By the year 2010 they say that Spam will in fact be a thing of the past. It is also interesting to note that the market spending in this fashion will grow from $885 million, to $1.1 billion dollars in as little time as well.
It is said that the bulk of the e-mailing for businesses in the year 2010 will be of the transactional, acquisitioned, and retention methods. With the remainder of e-mail leveling out between customers gain and personal e-mails heading up the rest. It is clear to see why the Spam is diminishing at such a rapid rate; the e-mail filtering system is getting stronger almost monthly. The amount of Spam that the average everyday user will receive will be cut in half from 2005 to 2010. This will set the pace for the e-mail marketing to take over. With new technology in place, it is easy for someone to recognize the difference between Spam and an actual e-mail from a company that is doing a follow up for business purposes.
It is clear by consumer reports that individuals will stay clear from e-mail servers that do not offer top of the line Spam filters. This is not to say that there are not still a plethora of servers available to the open market. The reason for the big concern right now is the cost of incorrectly blocked e-mails. This rate is at approximately $107 million dollars right now; it is expected to fall to approximately $88 million by 2010. In turn this will make for a much easier time to reach out to the consumer, by way of e-mail marketing once the Spam is truly eradicated. It is the idea that there will be a very organized arena for e-mail marketing that has business owners in fits of joy. They truly know the potential for this wonderful and inexpensive medium.
The improvement of the practices in list management will be stronger, and the ISP will have a stranglehold on the Spam. With all this technology, and the will to make the marketplace a safer business realm, it is clear that e-mail marketing can easily be allowed into the fold as one of the most productive marketing and business tools for the future. For now we still have to deal with all this junk called Spam.
