Posts Tagged email blast
Avoid renting or buying email lists
One of the more common questions asked by customers when signing up to use SimplyCast’s email marketing software is “do we sell or rent previously created email lists”?
The answer is no as it is illegal according to Can-SPAM to send unsolicited email without the permission of users.
So why would anyone even consider renting or buying someone else’s email list?
While the idea seems attractive to obtain a ready-made list of email addresses, there is a big trap waiting for anyone pursuing this course of action without care, such as lawsuits, blacklisting of domains and termination of account by your email service provider.
The best way to go is to do the hard work of building your own list but if you are still curious about buying or renting a list, here are the drawbacks.
List rental
List rental is an accepted practice in email marketing. Owners of address lists will send an email to their list on your behalf and they charge you a fee for the service.
What you must understand is that you never get to see the email addresses on that list because the list owner does the sending, not you.
That right there should make you feel a little nervous because you don’t know 100% if the addresses are even targeted to your needs.
You also need to understand that the actual address list never falls into your hands. So you will pay a rental fee every time an email gets sent to the list.
Buying a list
The alternative is to buy a physical copy of a list of email addresses. After you pay the purchase price, there are no further fees to pay and you can send your promotional message as often as you like to that list.
Sounds better, right?
Wrong.
With very, very few exceptions, purchasing a bulk list like this is a shortcut to an email marketing disaster.
The value of any created list of emails is only maintained if you don’t abuse it. If you send too many campaigns, people will stop responding or worse, they may even report you as a spammer.
So what happens if the owner of that valuable list does sell copies to anyone willing to pay the right price? In short, the list gets ruined and the value is lost. There is no longer control over frequency of emails sent or what the campaigns are even about.
No list owner who values their business or customers is ever going to sell copies of their address list. If they do, it loses all value to them and will give them a shady reputation.
If somebody tries to sell and send you a bulk list of email addresses, chances are very high you are getting a spam list. This would be a list of addresses of people who have not agreed to receive messages like yours, or who are on a list that has been blasted by other mailers.
Remember email marketing is about relationships and the only way to build a relationship is if you build your own list.
8 comments April 17, 2009
Kill your email marketing with spam-traps!
A spam-trap is an email address collected using automatic harvesting methods for the purpose of sending unsolicited communications. The spam-trap address is usually hidden from view by using tiny font or coding the email using the same color as the background. However, spam-trap emails are different than regular emails, if an email is sent to this address the owner of the spam-trap will process the unsolicited email and beginning a complaint process to your ESP/ISP or block your domain/IP completely.
The only way to protect yourself from falling into a spam-trap is first, ensure you follow best practices of email collection using only closed-loop double-optin confirmation process, where users must confirm their intention of receiving your email. Second, remove all hard bounces regularly to ensure you are sending to a clean and current list.
SimplyCast Email Marketing has a built-in system to automatically remove bounces from your list and the web sign-up form will automatically generate a closed-loop double-optin confirmation for each recipient.
3 comments October 20, 2008
The Biggest Problem with your Marketing?
What is the biggest problem most marketers have? Who knows. We don’t, and they certainly don’t either. That is exactly the problem. Most marketers don’t know whether or not their campaigns are working because they don’t know how to track the results.
I can’t count the number of people I know who create a marketing campaign and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars implementing it, then don’t even bother to track the results. How will you ever know if, when, and why your marketing is successful, or unsuccessful, if you don’t see hard data on your results?
With online marketing, it’s easy to find out where and when your marketing dollars are being wasted. Using online tracking you can:
Track how many people respond to your online ads. If people don’t respond, then you can simply alter your ad and try again.
Track when people respond to your ads. Do they respond immediately or do they wait a week? This helps you to determine a time frame for sales activity.
Track whether people are opening your email marketing or bulk email messages. If they aren’t, maybe you need to change your subject line or find a new list of people to email.
Determine which ad copy or text brings the best results. The right words make all the difference in advertising. Online tracking helps you determine which words will pull sales.
Monitor the click activity on your site. What you really need to know are the number of unique visitors you receive. A unique visitor is each individual visitor who clicks on your site, regardless of the number of times they click on your site. The number of clicks you receive is less important than the number of unique visitors you receive.
Online tracking can tell you all this and more. Whatever online marketing you use, from banners to pop-unders, ebooks to articles, make sure you know what works and what doesn’t. Use online tracking such as Eztrackz.com or tracking links using SimplyCast and save yourself money, time and energy.
1 comment September 12, 2008
How to create an effective email subject line?
Having a strong subject line is key to the success of your email marketing campaign. The “subject line” is the first test recipients use to determine if they should invest time in reading your message. Furthermore, subject text is commonly used by leading spam filters as way to reroute messages to the junk box.
Investing time in creating and testing your email subject text can help increase your open rates significantly. Since subject text is important, we have outlined 5 best practices to help improve subject line creation:
1. Relevancy: using seven words or less and maximum of 50 characters to state the reason for sending the email.
2. Context: subject line must support the “from” line, if you sell t-shirts online, the from address could be Lisa, T-Shirts.com Inc.
3. Urgency: creating a sense of urgency in your subject line can help you increase your open rate. Example: “Limited time offer, blue t-shirt sale.”
4. Personalization: Including the person’s name or company name in the subject line has been found to be an effective way to increase readership.
5. Testing: testing your subject text with co-workers can provide you with hints to tweak your final text prior to sending. Also, incorporating the learning from past campaigns will improve your overall results.
If you have specific questions, please post it on this blog or contact your SimplyCast account manager for assistance.
6 comments August 22, 2008
8 Steps to Optimize Your Email Marketing
1. Anatomy of emails
Anatomy of an email marketing message When writing for email marketing, you must focus on three key areas: the “Fields”; the “Body Copy”; and, if applicable, the “Landing Pages”. All require virtually
equal attention.
2. Understand the “Fields”
These are what you see when an email drops into your inbox. Like an envelope, the Fields give you a hint of what’s inside. With business people and consumers receiving multiple emails each day, the Fields are increasingly used to judge whether an email should be opened — or trashed. Fields of most concern to email marketers are the FROM field, the TO field, and the
SUBJECT field.
3. Set a singular objective
Email is the wrong media for a diluted marketing message. Your purpose for writing — whether that be to make an offer, or announce a special — should be strong and crystal clear.
Rambling, saying too much, introducing extraneous information, or adding complementary offers will drive down response. The reason is, many Internet users will quickly scan your email message to determine if it’s worth reading. If it doesn’t come to the point, and stick to the point, your prospect will simply delete your message and move onto the next.
Used effectively, email is a powerful relationship building medium.
4. Target. Target. Target.
The flexibility and economies of email allow you to target with precision. So, make the most of this advantage. For example, if you are making an offer applicable to two different audiences — IT professionals and marketing managers, for example — write two versions of your email marketing message. The more you customize your email to specific target groups, the more successful your efforts will be.
5. Write to target
Develop a thorough understanding of the and sensibilities of your target market before you write. This will help you select a style and tone appropriate to the audience — be it business professionals, college students, or homemakers.
6. Focus on building the relationship
Email marketing is not a hit and run medium. It works best when you use it to build sustainable relationships with prospects and customers. So, each time you write an email marketing message, remember that you’re building a relationship in addition to trying to generate a lead, hit, or sale.
Building a solid relationship with your email marketing list will lead to higher response rates in future campaigns.
7. Plan for rapid fulfillment
Sluggish fulfillment leads to dissatisfied customers. So, make sure you have all the internal resources in place to handle fulfillment of premiums, leads and other responses to your email marketing campaign. You may be surprised at the amount of response you receive from your efforts — often within hours of your emails being transmitted.
8. Think in two parts, not one
An email marketing campaign has two parts, not one: the email your customer receives; plus the hyperlink embedded in the email that he or she clicks on to respond to your offer. This link takes the customer to a web page with a reply form (to email marketers, this is called the landing page). The landing page requires almost as much attention to writing and design as the
email itself.
1 comment May 9, 2008
SimplyCast Announces Free Email-Marketing-4-Life Offering®
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 29, 2008
SimplyCast, a leading on-demand e-marketing solutions company, is launching a new outreach campaign to showcase the usability, attractive templates, effectiveness, and other enhanced features of its email marketing service.
The Free Email-Marketing-4-Life offering enables internet users to easily store, track and manage their email lists, as well as send email campaigns on a monthly basis, at no cost for low email volumes.
Businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals can integrate SimplyCast’s automatic email capture service into their website and/or blog , and then quickly and easily create and send email marketing campaigns.
“Email marketing is a powerful tool that must be part of every communications strategy today. With the Free Email-Marketing-4-Life offering, users benefit from our enhanced tracking and reporting features, attractive templates, automatic bounce management, and online technical support,” said Lesley Fegarty, sales manager at Mailworkz. “We continue to develop new and innovative marketing solutions so our customers can better reach and serve their customers.”
SimplyCast attracts customers worldwide from a variety of industries, including educational institutions, non-profit organizations, real estate firms, marketing companies and government organizations.
For the past five years, SimplyCast (formerly called Mailworkz) has offered a free email list management solution through its Ezlistz product. Now this functionality is fully integrated within the SimplyCast email marketing service.
The SimplyCast web-based email campaign solution includes features necessary to establish, maintain and manage email relationships with customers. The self-service platform allows anyone, whether it is somebody new to internet marketing or a seasoned professional, to create and send email marketing campaigns in a matter of minutes. SimplyCast also eliminates problems often associated with managing email databases and relationships with Internet Service Providers
Click here to trial the Free Email-Marketing-4-Life offering.
About SimplyCast
As a leading e-marketing solutions company, SimplyCast provides its services to more than 10,000 customers worldwide in various industries, including legal, retail, tourism, real estate and advertising. SimplyCast allows companies to grow their business by easily reaching and communicating with their customers. SimplyCast, which used to be Mailworkz was established in 1999 and was one of the first e-marketing solutions companies on the web. The company’s Zebratracks, a web-based e-marketing service, allows businesses to send personalized emails, conduct surveys and manage events. The company also provides its customers with Eztrackz, an online marketing and click-fraud tracking service; Blacklist Monitor, a blacklist IP tracking service; and Ezlistz, a tool that assists businesses with creating email lists.
For more information contact:
Lesley Fegarty
SimplyCast
902.835.3582
lesley.fegarty@simplycast.com
Add comment May 2, 2008
