Viral Marketing - Your Key to Gaining New Clients
Email newsletters are an excellent means of promoting the products and services offered on your Website. Adding two simple tools to your newsletter can dramatically increase your readership. As well as Website promotion, email newsletters are an efficient means of retaining current clients by reaching out and touching them on a regular basis. They can also be very effective in gaining new clients. By providing pertinent, high-quality information in your newsletter, readers are more likely to forward your email to interested friends and relatives. This phenomenon, called "viral marketing," is a side benefit of email newsletters. To enjoy viral marketing, always include a link in your newsletter that allows visitors to "Send (it) to a Friend." The HTML code for this is usually free through your newsletter service provider or offered in your PC newsletter application. As your distribution list grows and your newsletter gets passed along, the odds of striking a chord with a potential customer dramatically increase. To capture new clients as your email gets circulated, also include a "Subscribe to Newsletter" link within the email. In other words, make it enticing and easy for new newsletter viewers to sign up for future issues. Viral marketing offers the possibility of geometric growth in the number of your newsletter subscribers as new clients also pass your emails along to their friends and relatives. To make it work for you, just remember to concentrate on providing attention-grabbing, useful information AND make your newsletter simple to forward to new prospects who can easily subscribe themselves. Al Kernek is a real estate broker and author of "Creating E-Mail Newsletters ? A Practical Guide for the Real Estate Community." To learn more about increasing sales using low-cost, effective Internet marketing techniques, visit http://www.renewsletter.com
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Treat Email as a True Risk and Cost Center
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Despite the prevailing opinion amoung newletter and ezine publishers that the recently enacted email legislation is directed only toward "Spammers", there is good reason to take these regulations rather seriously.
Even if we assume that you only send permission-based email (that all of your recipients subscribed to your ezine), so by definition you are not a "Spammer", there are many other aspects of the email process that have now become regulated. Examples include email transmission practices, list records, operational control over complaints and unsubscribe requests, claims of false or misleading Subject Lines, and several other issues. Mistakes in these areas, even with clearly permission-based mail, can have legal implications. And in fact, precisely what constitutes "permission" is still being worked out in some cases.
Online publishers should also be concerned about the motives and circumstances of some actions under the new laws. Targets may be chosen more for their ease of accessibility than for any serious infractions. It is much easier to find and go after a target you can see (such as an stable ezine) than it is to hunt down an elusive Spammer.
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Additional costs for administration and controls
Compliance elements and rising recipient expectations require more time and better records, and the need to track and respond to all complaints from numerous sources has added new manpower requirements. Of course, the costs of defensive records and permission audit trails are also growing. While these costs pale beside potential costs of non-compliance or customer erosion, in many cases they represent new and unfamiliar budget items.
Costs from distributed bandwidth and sending system architecture
The need to segment and distribute outbound email streams can increase both bandwidth and technical administration costs. The need to capture and retain more extensive records, or to access sending, delivery, response, unsubscribe, and complaint information in a timely fashion may require additional investment in computing hardware. Updated sending and tracking software purchases may also be needed.
Performance Benefits That Offset Costs
Simply put, you may have to absorb many of these costs to maintain effective, deliverable, and sustainable email programs. It is very likely that without this investment the efficiency of your email program will continue to slide, at the same time that the risks of uncontrolled programs are increasing.
Conclusions:
Over all, email sending programs have moved significantly away from the simple question of what "can" be done to a much heavier emphasis on what "should" be done, based upon increasing legal and recipient perception risks. The cost of sustaining effective programs is growing. Fortunately, so is the differential advantage of maintaining a working email communications channel.
Copyright © by Email Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
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