Free Email Marketing

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Free Email Marketing - How To Make It Work For You

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Free email marketing occupies a unique place in the marketing toolkit. Whenever the economy is in a tailspin, budgets grow tight or businesses face a cash crunch yet need to grow, the tried and tested marketing method they fall back upon is free email marketing.

And that's for good reason. Marketing through email is easily one of the most cost effective yet wildly profitable methods to reach out to customers and prospects to generate more sales. In terms of return on investment, it beats out SEO, direct mail and many other promotional tactics.

At the same time, simply because it is easy and free, email marketing has the highest potential of all marketing channels to be abused or incorrectly deployed. Here are some ways to ensure your email marketing remains effective and profitable for a long time.

Don't Email Too Much

If you were at a free buffet, could you gorge yourself on all the goodies - 7 times or more? Of course not. Unless you don't mind being sick! Free email marketing is just the same. You don't pay for postage or an envelope, but that doesn't mean you can blast out messages willy nilly whenever you need more cash.

Also, you are not the only person seized by the popular idea of using free email marketing to communicate with prospects. Viewed from the perspective of your email subscriber, it can't be pleasant to be flooded with marketing emails until it all becomes a blur. Over-mailing is the surefire way to be ignored and filtered out.

Deliver Value - All The Time

One guaranteed way to set yourself apart from all your email marketing competition is to constantly deliver value. When you are perceived as a person who provides information or news that benefits a reader, and does this consistently and reliably, your subscribers will eagerly await your next message and devour it as soon as it arrives in their in-box.

Value can be defined in many ways. Be concise and to the point. Saving precious time for your audience is a form of value-addition. Target your message to the right segment of your readership so that each subscriber gets exactly what they want or need. Design and format your email to be easily read.

Adopt a Leadership Role

People desperately crave good leadership. They are looking for someone to take charge and guide them along the right path. You can be that person through your email marketing communication - provided you accept that role. A confident attitude, shared expertise and knowledge, and an empathic connection with your ideal prospects delivered through the medium of free email can position you as a guide and mentor to your audience.

Keep Your Sender Reputation In Mind

Free email marketing is effective only as long as your email gets delivered to your readers' in-box. And spam filters are constantly scanning your messages, looking for indications of abuse and annoyance. While you could strive to keep trigger words out of your message, those lists evolve all the time and you'll waste endless hours staying ahead of the game.

A better approach is to never cut corners. Reputable email marketers follow certain best practices which ISPs and spam filters (and more importantly, the recipients of your email) have come to respect. Studying them and implementing them into your email marketing can be the best safeguard against being branded a bad sender.

Free Email Marketing - Best Practices

Some 'best practices' are mandated by laws like the CAN-SPAM act, which insists that all commercial email must go out with an unsubscribe link, and the company's physical mailing address in the message of your email.

But many free email marketing best practices are largely unknown, overlooked, or even willingly ignored... to the marketer's loss. Barely 1 in 8 email marketers know and use these ten practices, which only makes it more logical for you to embrace them eagerly and stand out from the crowd.

1. Set up a subscription administration page on your website and link to it from your email. This helps you stay connected with your subscriber, allows them to unsubscribe or otherwise modify their communication schedule with your business, and even prevent them from flagging your emails as spam. Having a link to your privacy policy on this page is important, as is a way to contact you in case of problems.

2. Publish searchable archives of your past emails so that new subscribers can find previous messages and even long standing readers can refresh their memory in case they deleted your emails, but suddenly want to refer to one.

3. Include a link in your email that allows readers to forward it to a friend. This viral pass-along process can help grow your list exponentially as you gain more readers. A simple request to share it with a friend will do. Having a script based system set up on your server may help you track how often it happens.

4. Include a link for new subscribers to join your list in every email. This way, someone who receives a forwarded copy of your message will know instantly where to go and sign up.

5. Ensuring deliverability of your emails to even opt-in subscribers means you are in compliance with current norms and are included on 'safe senders' lists. If you use a commercial email distribution service like Aweber.com, then the service will deal with these issues. But if you use a server based script for free email marketing, then you'll have to deal with this yourself.

6. Offer a Web based version of your email content just in case the formatting is off and/or the links unclickable in email. This matters more when the content of your free email marketing depends upon images, which sometimes don't render correctly in email clients.

7. Give your subscribers options to contact you. While an email address and website are good, some prospective customers may want to talk with you, or ask questions before they buy. Including a phone or fax number, a link to your help desk or call center, a mention of your virtual assistants or other communication methods could expand your buyer base significantly.

8. Displaying your subscriber's email address (and even maybe IP address and date of subscribing) in the message can boost credibility by proving that they signed up to receive your free email marketing messages.

9. For HTML email, whenever your message is lengthy, make it convenient and quick for readers to navigate around it and reach portions of interest to them through internal links within the email - or even to specific sections on the Web archive of your message.

10. Share an email address for feedback. This gives your subscribers a fast and easy way to get in touch with you. They may complain or enquire, praise or condemn - but if you don't tell them how, they may take it public, and that harms your reputation and brand.

By adopting these simple best practices into your free email marketing, you can harness the real power of what continues to be the best marketing channel online. Tie it in with mobile phone and social marketing and you've got a winner on your hands.