US - Canada Direct Email Marketing Consultant Teaches How to Use Spam Free Email
Direct email marketing without spamming people is the key to success if you have a great product to sell, and you have a spanking new Web site from which to sell it. You cannot just sit back and wait for the orders to pour in. That isn't how it works.
Direct Email Marketing Do's and Don'ts
 by John Tobin, Creative Director
Strategic-alliance.com
You
may be wondering what direct email marketing has to do with
your product or your fancy Web site.
Honestly, for most website builders, the only people to ever see their site is themselves, their family members and a couple of their friends. Direct email marketing, if done properly, can help build traffic to any site. So if you have a site, you must market it and let the world know all about it.
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What
makes your site unique?
Take out your pen (or keyboard) and write down why people should visit
your site. Use the AIDA (Attention,
Information, Desire, Action) technique to cover all of your
bases.
-
Where
and how to publicize your site: Choose a segment of
readers and target it, using an attractive pitch. Find Web
sites and newsletters that target your audience and trade
links or ads; join feedback forums (discreetly); and
subscribe to mailing lists and newsgroups that cover your
area of interest.
-
Sign
your work:
Develop a short, sweet, polite signature to use on the Web
that lets readers know who you are and what you do.
-
-
It's
not Spamtastic:
email can be great, but avoid (like the plague) sending
unsolicited, unwanted email in an effort to attract business.
The first step is to start thinking of what
you feel is unique about your site and put it in writing. Why
would people want to visit your site and not any of the dozens
of other sites your competitors have put up? A marketer would
call this your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).
Work the entire thing into a short, clear note, preferably less than
a page in length. If you feel something has to be covered in
greater detail, include a link to an appropriate page on your
Web site.
When writing, use what's called the AIDA
strategy.
- Attention:
The first part of your write-up grabs a reader's attention.
- Information:
The second part gives them information.
- Desire: The
third part makes them desire your product.
- Action: The
fourth part spurs them to action making them reach for their
credit card and buy your product.
Now, you've reached the halfway stage: You have a product to sell, a Web site to promote it, and a fantastic write-up. The next half of the marketing process is to find out where and how to publicize your site.
 3-step direct email marketing - segment, target and fire!
Direct Email Marketing requires you to use the STP process: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning. This is, in essence, a simple concept.
- Divide
and conquer: In direct email marketing, you must divide the people you can reach into segments
based on various criteria (say, employed women between 25
and 35 who live in your city's suburbs).
- Segment
and Target: Decide which segments of your direct email marketing target audience are likely to be interested
in buying your product. Target your promotions to these
segments, concentrating your efforts on them.
- Make your
pitch attractive: Position your direct email marketing product so it is attractive
to these segments. This means you have to customize your
presentation to make sure it will appeal to the target audience.
For more information on how to do this, see our section
on Target
Marketing. If you really want to dominate your competitors,
you should consider attending our workshop called:
Bull's Eye Marketing: How To Hit The Target Every Time.
If you also want to learn the secrets of using postal mail
to reach your target audience, you should also consider
another one of our workshops, entitled The
Envelope Please: The Power of Direct Mail.
To learn how to use postal mail to supplement your direct email marketing efforts, go to Direct
Mail - Secret Weapon for Small Business
- Trade
links and ads: Find other Web sites and opt-in email
newsletters and see if you can trade links or email newsletter
ads. This can be the single most effective thing you
can do if you find sites and lists that are focused
on people who will be interested in your products or services.
- Talk back:
Maintain a feedback form and a "tell a friend" form
on your site, encouraging visitors to send in comments and
tell friends about your site. Include some freebies to attract
your user (say a mouse pad or a 10% discount for the best
comment you receive).
Make sure that it's clear to people that they're signing
up for your list. Include a clear privacy policy,
even something as short as, "We never share your name
or email address with anyone." If you do share or
sell your lists, include a checkbox that allows visitors
to say they don't want any promotional mail from anyone
else.
Don't
send email to people who haven't asked for it. That's
called Spam, and it can do you more harm than good. Ignore
the Spam you get offering to sell you a million email
names for $20 — just take a $20 bill and light it with a match.
That will probably do you less harm.
- Get on
the Liszt: Now, start identifying the various mailing
lists and newsgroups that are relevant to your site and
are usually read by your target audience. Liszt (http://www.wolfbayne.com/lists/lol.html)
is a great search engine for mailing lists and DejaNews (http://www.deja.com) for newsgroups. Subscribe to the most popular ones, sit
tight, and read them for a while, till you understand what's
going on. Don't post anything yet.
Once you get the drift of what's going on, post a short note to these lists (one at a time, don't cc your mail to half a dozen lists and newsgroups).
Be very tactful about this, or you'll be flamed so bad
that Hell will seem like an air-conditioned hotel room with
a tray of chilled martinis by comparison. You might want
to check with the list administrator about whether your
post is legit or not.
For example, it's not a good idea to say: "Great new site!!! 10%
Discount!!! Buy Now!!! http://www.mysite.com ... blah blah."
At the same time, it's perfectly legitimate for you to reply to a query posted on the list, answering the question in brief and adding, "See my Web page at http://www.mysite.com/stuff.html for more details."
In fact, this is more likely to attract people to your site because people then realize that you know what you're talking about and that you are not just some idiot of a marketroid—the sort who rings you up when you're having dinner.
7. Gettin' Siggy with it. Include your Web site address and a note about your site in a short signature on each post (most mail clients allow you to set your signature). If you can, keep your signature to under four lines.
For example, my email signature reads something like:
John Tobin
Creative Director
Strategic-Alliance.com
http://www.strategic-alliance.com
Try marketing via strategic alliance agreements.
8. Press
release me: Get the public contact email addresses of the newspapers and journals that your target audience is likely to read. As you should know
your target audience rather well by now, this won't be too hard
(you'll probably read them yourself). These addresses will be
listed on the newspaper's Web site and/or mentioned in the newspapers.
(Click here to learn more about public relations and creating an effective press release).
Remember that reporters already get dozens of business related notifications every day, and are likely to trash your mail if you don't grab their attention in the first few lines. Use AIDA and customize your write-up as much as possible, keeping in mind the paper's target audience.
9. Start your search engines: Submit your site to the various search engines and "Free Ads" sites, and make sure your Web pages have sufficient meta tags to ensure the search engines will pick thrm up and index them properly. Some of the best ones are Yahoo
(http://www.yahoo.com), Google (http://www.google.com), LYCOS (http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html), AllTheWeb.com (http://www.alltheweb.com), and the Netscape Open Directory. If there is a speciality portal (one that exclusively lists sites such as yours), then definitely submit your site to it.
This should start things moving. If it doesn't, don't take the easy route and buy a "marketing set" (a bulk mail program and a CD full of addresses). Spammers use these and quite often sell it to gullible marketers.
How stopping spam email helps direct email marketing
So now you are facing the big dilemma -- "To Spam or not to Spam? That is the question."
What constitutes Spam? Spam is unsolicited email, the online equivalent of the junk mail that keeps arriving in your postal mailbox. Sadly, it is much more damaging than postal mail and can be the end of your career as a marketer.
Spam is unsolicited and also unwanted email, frequently sent in bulk quantities and advertising some commercial proposition. A major part of the Spam you probably get, and what this article deals with, is BUCE (Bulk Unsolicited Commercial Email).
Your long-forgotten ex-girlfriend is welcome to mail you, asking you to marry her. What she cannot do is mail you (and hundreds of others who don't know her from Eve) advertising her Web
site/product/get rich scheme.
Spam is illegal in several American states, including Washington and Virginia. In fact, you can be sued in small claims court by residents of these states who have received unsolicited mail from you. See www.suespammers.org or www.suespammers.org about how to report spam email violators. In Canada, there are currently also (Spring, 2007) private members bills being promoted in the Canadian Parliament to make such unsolicited email illegal.
Others will complain to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Web host, who may delete your Web site, disconnect your internet access, and delete any mailbox you might have mentioned in the Spam. They could even fine you anywhere from $20 to $2,000 for spamming. To learn more, just visit your ISP's Web site and look for a page that says "Terms of Service" or "Acceptable Use Policy."
Of course, you may, by now, be putting on an injured expression and saying "I'm not a Spammer. I'm a legitimate marketer promoting a legitimate product." Put yourself in the shoes of whomever is receiving your mail and paying his ISP for the privilege of doing so.
By now, you must have gotten dozens of offers from "marketing companies" that offer to promote your site by sending bulk email or try to sell you do-it-yourself promotion kits (a CD full of addresses and a bulk mailing program).
Don't ever respond to them, and complain to their ISPs if you can (see http://www.spamcop.net for a cool automated tool for reporting Spammers).
In particular, watch out for offers for software that claims instant, fantastic results by sending emails to millions of people.
Using these programs will get you a torrent of complaints, accusing you of spamming and perhaps someone with more technical skills than ethics may hack into your Web site and redirect it to a smut site, or just crash it.
 Don't send your direct email marketing ads Postage Due
Sending
spam is not like sending your ads by post. Let's see why
spam is evil, not just annoying. It twists the whole concept
of freedomn of speech to the point where it gets in the
way of conducting real business and can cause most legitimate
business operators to overlook its true usefulness, for
fear of being labelled a spammer.
When the postal carrier delivers your mail, you are quite often greeted with several ads sent by various companies (from the sleazy operators who send "Fill in this puzzle and get a camera" to big companies such as Reader's Digest and Pizza Hut (PepsiCo).
Fair enough, this direct marketing is just a mild annoyance, and besides, they are paying the postal department, not you. All you have to do is throw it into the recycling bin, tearing it into little bits if you are sufficiently irritated.
Now, suppose you got all of this junk mail "postage due" and were
forced to pay the postal carrier out of your own pocket for
the privilege of receiving this junk? Or you got five-page
ads on your office fax or telemarketers called you on your
cell phone? You wouldn't be all that amused, would you?
Now that almost everyone has at least a Hotmail account, the same problem has moved to email but magnified several times. Junk email (or spam) is a huge problem throughout the Internet.
According to a recent informal survey of several major ISPs, most said that more than 50% of the email reaching their users was spam. Thus, they had to invest thousands of dollars in more powerful hardware and extra bandwidth and had to take on additional staff to deal with Spam complaints. All of these extra costs were ultimately passed on to the customers, none of whom had asked to receive the spam in the first place.
Read more about the incredible cost of spam in direct email marketing.
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