Email advertising is often considered by many people spam, however it could be an effective tool to use and not make it consided as advertisment. Has anyone here tried email as an effective way to get visitors to your site without being categorized under spam?
The best way to use email for advertising while steering clear of any infringements towards spam is through newsletters and opt-in mailing lists. This way you know the people you're emailing aren't going to get pissed off about it, because somewhere along the line they showed some interest and opted to be emailed. On the flip side of that, if you are looking to get advertising out but don't have a list of your own, you can purchase ads in other newsletters, or possibly work out an exchange of service or commissions with a newsletter owner.
Do you mean email marketing not to your own list? Or Email marketing to your own subscribers? If you are talking about your own subscribers, Aweber is the industry standard and gives you alot of protection from spam complaints. And the highest delivery rate on the web. Brad
Build your own list and use double opt-in to make sure people who sign up really want to hear from you. Developing a relationship with the people on your list can be one of the best investments you can make.
If you build up your own list to email, it is not spam. But to protect yourself, always make sure it is double optin! Having a double optin system means that if Jack joins your list using Janes email address, Jack aint on cause he won't get a confirmation email, Jane will get the confirmation email and then Jane can either click yay or nay. This protects you from people who just love to enter either bad email addresses or other peoples email address. Most services on the net that allow you to join and email their lists use double optin. And always have an unsubscribe link on each of your emails. Because people join newsletters, lists of various kinds, and at some point in the future, they forget they joined. Then here comes an email and they scream spam!
Very well said Iowa Dawg. It's funny you mention that, just the other day I received an email that looked unfamiliar... I'm not one to scream spam without looking into it... so I looked into it... Sure enough they had records that I joined their list way back in 2001! I hadn't seen an email from them in who knows how long, probably had been filtered out by my junkmail filter... I can't remember if I unsubscribed or if I kept it... But it wasn't spam at least, and I knew that because of the systems we are discussing here, and it was not a hassle to figure that out at all. I didn't even have to do any more than click on one or two links starting with one at the bottom of the email.
And where can you rent lists (and services)? I've heard of foreign countries that have "opt-in" lists (debatable) in places like India, Russia and China. Or what other options are there for someone that wants to email their message beyond their own lists?
I would never purchase any subscriber list. No matter how it's done, whether the person signed up to something somewhere where they technically agreed to have their email address shared and sold around, they still didn't want it. They did it without paying attention, because they wanted whatever it was that was offered behind the subscription, or because they used an email address that is just for junk and likely never checked. If you want to access email marketing without using your own subscriber list, I would suggest purchasing ad space in an ezine that relates to your product, service or website etc.
Thanks for your input Mike. The thing is, the boss wants to do some testing and hook up with somebody (He suggested outside North America) that can provide us email lists and also send them. If anyone else has comments or suggestions where to start, let me know!
You could try this service: Lead Club I've been thinking about using them, been subscribed to their newsletter for a while now, and signed up for their free affiliate program. Haven't placed an order yet though. They seem to be what you're looking for. If you'd prefer a non affiliate link: http://www.leadclub.net/
I've had success with Abacus (a division of DoubleClick) and NextAction for aquiring new leads based on data from existing subscriber information. abacus-us.com nextaction.net Kevin
I been using webtrafficmarketing.com I paid them 1 time for a life-time membership. Its fully automated its a big safe list, good luck John
Dude I really dont know for sure I think most people on the opt in list are trying to sell you something also and probably delete most of the emails they get before they read them. I think for the money give it a shot but I cant say it really helped me. John
John, Didn't you see any tremendous rise in your traffic? If you mail 2.7 million a day and receive only 1% of that as your web traffic, still thats huge.What you say? did you see any change in your site traffic. or any other indication disclosing the service is going well or not?