Website Marketing Resource

Have you ever heard email described as, “the killer Internet Application?” Do you understand why email is the killer app for your business on the Internet, or how to make it that way if it isn’t now?

In my spare time, I teach WingTsun(TM) Kung Fu. I learned Internet marketing by marketing my martial arts schools and classes online. Much of what I’ve learned about Internet marketing - and Life - has been strongly influenced by Kung Fu.

Good Kung Fu is concept-driven. Good Internet marketing should be, too. Have you ever heard the concept, “The best defense is a good offense?”

My students and I are nice people. But if you’ve ever had to defend yourself or your family, you know you can’t be too nice. Your survival, or the survival of your loved ones, depends on you winning. You cannot stop, you must win.

So let me ask you: If you were in a situation where you had to defend yourself and your family - life or death! - would you only hit once? Of course not. You’d keep hitting until you and your family were safe, wouldn’t you?

Delivering email newsletters and sales messages to opt-in subscribers and customers is getting more exasperating-and more expensive-by the day. Delivery rates for email have gone through the virtual floor. According to MarketingSherpa, one out of every six people who asked to be on your mailing list won’t receive your email newsletter or marketing message because a spam filter blocks it by mistake.

Why you’re just not getting through to them
As you probably know, the challenge you are facing is primarily spam filters, electronic and human. And no wonder. Consider these sobering numbers:

• 10 out of 12 messages reviewed are considered spam (Postini.com)
• average users receive 42 unwanted sales pitches a day (Jupiter Research)
• 70% of all email messages will be spam by 2007 (Radicati Group)

Your emails fail to reach your subscribers for three basic reasons. Either the email is blocked by the subscriber’s ISP or enterprise firewall (in which case it never gets delivered), the email is blocked by the subscriber’s spam filter (in which case it gets delivered but is never seen) or the email is deleted by an irritable subscriber with an overzealous delete-key-finger who does not recognize your "From:" address or mistakes your email subject line for something unwelcome.

Before I do this, let me describe how autoresponders work. Think of autoresponders as the equivalent of fax-on-demand, but for email instead of fax. You simply set up a message and then whenever someone sends an email to your autoresponder email address they will immediately receive this as a response.

Autoresponders can also be triggered from a form on your web site, where the visitor will enter his email address (and his name too if requested) and receive the autoresponse straight away.

Many autoresponders on the market today are “sequential autoresponders”, and save contact information in a database so it can send further messages to your prospects at intervals you specify (such as two days, five days and seven days later).

Here is an example of a message sent by a modern autoresponder:

Dear John Doe,

Thank you for requesting more information
on our products earlier.

I have attached to this email a document containing our
price listings for August’s catalogue of products. Please
read through it in your own time John.

I will get back to you the same time on Wednesday with our
special offers. Feel free to send me an email or call me
on 000-000-0000 if you would to discuss your needs.

Most email marketers know that it is important spam-check email messages before sending them out, as this may identify potential issues that cause emails to be marked as spam.

It should be noted however that the results generated by the spam-check feature should act as guidelines only. Spam-check is almost always based on the open source software SpamAssassin, whereas large email services employ their own content filters, created internally.

There is no magic formula to composing messages that don’t trigger anti-spam filters, but if you want to maximize the chance that your message goes through to your subscribers, then…

Don’t do what spammers do!

This may sound like an obvious truth, but, looking at contents of email messages sent out by legitimate email marketers, apparently it is not.

One example of how you can easily hurt your email deliverability is by using “hashbusters” - using misspellings and/or random punctuation in the attempt to fool content filters.

Examples:

s^pam instead of spam
F’REE instead of FREE
Op-portunities instead of Opportunities
Get R1ch Quik instead of Get Rich Quick
and so on…

Please don’t do it.

E-Mail is still the most widely used Internet tool available today. Virtually everyone who has Internet access has an email account, and for the Internet Marketer this opens up a huge possibility for more business.

Unfortunately, over the past few years lots of people have abused this amazing marketing tool with their unacceptable spam. Fortunately, more and more people worldwide are taking action against spam, and so the amount of spammers has drastically reduced.

In this article I’ll explain how you can use this fantastic technology to your advantage, by simply following a few easy steps. The result is a powerful marketing system that will save lots of time and enable you to spend more time promoting and advertising your online business.

The first step - Get to know your email program!

Although all email programs basically do the same thing, there is still a lot of variety between them, and so it’s very useful to get to know your email program.

Spending 30 minutes playing around with your email program is definitely worthwhile, and will enable you to familiarize yourself with all the individual features that your email program offers.

People tend to forget their subscriptions. Sometimes they don’t even know why they subscribed to your newsletter. Especially if the person is seeking for information, he/she will subscribe to every ezine or ecourse that will come across their search. They don’t remember it after a while. If you send email to them after few months, they simply accuse you of sending spam.

So how to safegaurd yourself from this type of accusations?

Follow up and Mailing list management software: You can manage your ecourses, broadcasts, follow ups with this single software-

http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/follow-up-autoresponder-pro/index.shtml

1. Provide their personal details in every email:

On top of each email, put their email address, their ip number with which they subscribed, URL of the form where they subscribed, list name they subscribed. This way your subscribers are aware of that you have their details with their permission.

You only gets the subscriber ips when he/she subscribes using a form. If they subscribed using email addresses, the ip will not be grabbed by your autoresponder software.

2. Use Double opt-in:

Everyone who has been marketing online for sometime already know the value of an email list. An email list, filled with targeted subscribers who opt in, is the most valuable asset for anyone with an online business. If you are not building an email list, then you need to start building one right now.

But the problem with many people is that they do not know how to start a list building campaign. And not only do they not know how to start one, but most individuals do not even know how to accelerate the growth of their lists into the thousands within a few weeks. If everyone knew the right things to do in order to rapidly build a decent sized email list within a few weeks, we would have a lot less complainers who constantly nag about the negative results of internet marketing.

Now I decided to handle this problem by giving you 4 critical steps for explosively growing your email list in a matter of days. If you just take the time and apply the steps outlined in this article, you will most definitely build a profitable and responsive email list within a few days.

A big-time dilemma is brewing online. In an understandable attempt to bypass all that annoying spam, e-mails that onliners want to receive are getting lost in the shuffle. Newsletter subscription requests are not being completed and important e-mails are not getting to their intended parties.

Your "Whitelist" is the list that contains the e-mail addresses of those you do in fact want to receive e-mail from. Some services require the accepted addresses be in one’s address book to be added to the whitelist. While other software/services call this list the approved or allowed senders list and require you manually add those you want to accept e-mail from to your list. Regardless of what this feature is called, it is clearly not being utilized correctly and in many cases, at all.

What can be done about this? A little user education and E-mail Whitelist Etiquette is in order!

=> When signing up for an online newsletter, mailing list or Web site service, immediately add their e-mail address or dot com to your approved or white list. This will ensure smooth communications with you and that e-mails will get through with the information you requested or confirmations necessary for you to acknowledge your request.

We all know that spammers are looking for your email-address. You can mislead them easily in order to prevent receiving spamming emails. The most simple way to do this is by providing your email-address as a logo.

The most easy way to do this is by going to www.cooltext.com and click on “logo”.

Follow the instructions and you will have a logo or picture instead of text.

Spying software cannot detect your email-address.

You just have to upload the picture into your webpagedirectory and place it into the HTML-page where you want your email-address to be mentioned. And you are done !

The drawback is however that the logo itself is not a hyperlink enabling someone to automatically reply to your email-address. S/he has to do it manually by typing your email-address in the “to” field of the email-application-window.

If you would like to have a masked hyperlinked email-address then it becomes a little more complicated.

Email me (find my masked email-address at http://startwithoutadime.blogspot.com/2005/06/most-simple-way-to-mask-your-email.html) with subject “mask my email-address” and I will give you a downloadlink to a freeware software. The first 1000 will get it for free.

Offer a newsletter in a time frame that will be easy for you to manage.

Although doing a newsletter is a great idea, do not be too quick to jump on the bandwagon. Almost everyone is doing it but not all are doing it well. The newsletter with the greatest frequency can get quite annoying for the recipients unless it is packed full of useful information. Only those that have the relationship with your company will continue to subscribe.

Even though you may have great information to give away, you must also consider the time it takes to put a good newsletter together. If you are doing a daily, you will need to spend at least 3 hours putting it together and another few hours editing, polishing, and answering queries. If on the other hand you decide weekly is good, then you will still need to spend that 3 hours, but this time it will be once a week. You also need to determine what day of the week the newsletter will be distributed. You may want to do some research to find out when is the best time to deliver. Some times are better for getting read than others.