The main tools required to start e-marketing is:
- A valid email list A good mail list management software: try any FREE software if any, We know a powerful application "Maillist King", but you are not forced to use it, try any FREE software, just Google for "Free Email marketing software OR Free mail list management tool".
- A high performance PC to handle your campaigns.
- A reliable SMTP server, (Subscribe to any of our powerful SMTP server plans for a minimum 1 month.) Domain name to grant more legitimacy to your emails.
Here is how you can start quickly and start building your list really fast.
Tools required and how it works fine?
Step by step,
Step 1:
Decide what your campaign is for. The key to a successful email marketing campaign is getting your aims and objectives right from the start.
You need to decide:
- What the purpose of your campaign is?
- -To find new customers?
- -To get additional business?
- -To build on your relationships with clients or prospects?
- Who should receive the emails
- -Who are you targeting?
- -What are their interests?
- What would they be looking for, and why would they be interested in hearing from you?
- How often should you send them?
Generally speaking, there are not many situations where it is advisable to email people more than once a fortnight.
Once a month is quite a good frequency – any more often, and you may annoy people – any less often, and they may have forgotten who you are in between.
Step 2:
Get your mailing list together When compiling or purchasing a mailing list, it is essential to make sure you stay the right side of the law.
If you’re collecting email addresses yourself, you must get consent from the person to whom the email address belongs before mailing them.
If you’re collecting email addresses via your website, you need to make sure that people are asked to opt in to receive your emails rather than fail to opt out.
So, for example, you should say:
“Tick this box to join our email mailing list”
rather than
“Tick this box if you don’t wish to join our email mailing list”.
Make sure your user knows what they are signing up for, and what you are going to do with their data.
Step 3:
Decide what software to use It is perfectly possible to use an everyday email package such as Outlook or Outlook Express to conduct an email marketing campaign, and you may wish to start off this way if you only have a small mailing list and/or very little budget.
However, there are certain limitations to this approach:
- - It may be difficult to manage unsubscribes. You must provide an easy mechanism for your users to unsubscribe from the email. If you are using a standard email package you will then have to remember to remove them by hand from your mailing list
- - You will not be able to get statistics showing you how many people have opened your emails / clicked on links and so on.
- - You must make sure that subscribers’ email addresses are concealed from fellow subscribers. If you’re using a standard email package, this means putting them into the “bcc” field, rather than “to” or “cc”.
As an alternative, you could choose to use an email marketing software, which would enable you to send out emails laid out like web pages, containing graphics (‘HTML emails’), make it easier to deal with unsubscribes and obtain useful statistics to help you measure the success of your campaigns.
Step 4:
Decide the content of your first message First impressions count, and therefore getting your first message right is crucial.
You are going to need to think about:
- - Giving the email an arresting title that induces people to click on it
- - Creating some compelling content
- – either in terms of interesting articles, or good products or special offers, depending on what you are aiming to do
- - Making sure that you can live up to your first email in subsequent messages! You can choose either to put all of the content into the email itself, or look at including ‘teaser’ paragraphs which lead on to the full articles on your website.
If you haven’t got any other way of tracking the success of your email campaign, this is quite a good route to go down, as you should be able to see from your website statistics how many people accessed those particular pages on your site.
Step 5:
Giving your email a visual impact Even if you’re not using HTML emails (emails with graphics in them), you still need to think about the layout of your email. The key here is simplicity – make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for, and make sure the information is easy to read.
Space out paragraphs and separate articles – with a simple line of dashes, for example, if you’re not using HTML.
If you do have the ability to use graphics, don’t go too over the top.
Remember that every image you add increases the time it will take for your message to download in your user’s inbox.
Make sure that you have a good reason for including each image, and make sure you compress that image to as small a file size as possible.
If you’re trying to build a personal relationship with your subscribers, a photo of yourself can be a good (if slightly embarrassing) idea.
Step 6:
Measure your success If you don’t put in place a way of measuring your success, you won’t know whether or not your campaign has achieved its objectives.
If you are using an email marketing software, you may well have access to statistics about your emails as part of the service. This may give you information such as:
- - How many people have opened the message
- - How may have clicked on the links to your website
- - How many have unsubscribed
- - …and so on. If you’re using an e-marketing software, you may be well advised to use the technique described previously, of sending subscribers through to specific sections of your website
- – enabling you to track them through your website statistics.