Friday, August 22, 2008

Permission Based Email Marketing -The Strategy That Works!

By Ray Lam


This is fast becoming the most acceptable form of email based marketing. It is an excellent way to expand upon your current base of customers and provides a cost-effective method of communicating with existing clients, partners, and associates. It also allows companies to communicate with people who have explicitly opted in to receive information on specific topics.

Businesses are increasingly using permission based email marketing as their preferred method for building customer relationships while keeping their reputation intact. While everyone with a website should use email newsletters and promotions to bring their subscribers back to their site, businesses that are not online, can also benefit from email marketing. Businesses without websites can easily send newsletters, promotions, announcements and invitations by email and generate an email reply, a telephone call, an appointment or a personal visit.

A professional email tool can save your business time and money, and simultaneously provide a wealth of intelligence about your customer base. Permission based email marketing will get you in the door and help you to establish long-term customers and clientele (which is what growing a successful business depends on). Confirmed opt-in validates that an email list is truly permission-based, and it has become the standard for qualifying a list as a legitimate, non-spam means of business communication.

Many email marketers make this critical mistake. They send email after email to their subscribers without stopping to think of the people behind the email addresses. As a result, their email marketing campaigns often seem lifeless and dull.

Research and practice has proved that the output coming from the permission based email list is comparatively much higher than any other direct marketing tool. It has a magnetic effect on the traffic flow. No sooner does the email fire, that the click report, automatically generates a higher hit ratio.

When a prospect submits their form indicating their interest in subscribing to your service, before they are added to your list and before you can begin sending them any email messages, they are sent an additional message requiring them to confirm their opt-in request. Once you receive this confirmation, you can begin sending emails to their address.

If you want to be an Internet marketer with an effective opt-in listing, you must treat your leads like human being-complete with emotion, calling them by their first name (you can actually automate that!), and making them know that beyond marketing, you genuinely care about them. This is not something you do to flatter. It will not pan out properly if you are not as sincere in creating a personal touch to your business.

The theory of reciprocity is often attributed to Dr. Robert. B. Cialdini. Through numerous experiments and by observing human behavior, Cialdini noticed that when something generous was done for a person, that person often felt motivated to reciprocate the goodwill. This tendency of human behavior is directly applicable to your permission based email marketing campaigns.

About the Author:

No comments:

Blog Archive