Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Permission Based Email Marketing -The Strategy That Works!

By Ray Lam


A productive opt-in email list is the most important aspect when you happen to use email marketing for your business. Email marketing is a kind of direct marketing technique. It is a means of communicating to your audience through emails. There are a number of reasons why you need to send emails to your customers. Every time an email is sent to a customer it is considered to be an email marketing technique. Emails can be sent to customers for various reasons. Either to promote a new product or service or to update customer profiles. Sending advertisements or website updates to customers is also considered to be a part of email marketing.

In order to make an email marketing campaign successful it is important that the marketer makes use of an effective and profitable permission based email list. A correctly conducted Online business through email marketing will give profit, flexibility and security to your business which will save a lot of your time as well. In order to make your email marketing campaign really effective and useful for your business it is best to use a permission based email list for for your campaign.

Most people agree to receive email only after considering what they have to gain (or lose) from giving their email address away. As a business owner, merchant, or affiliate marketer, you should focus on building a relationship with those who give you permission to contact them through email. Those who "opt-in" want to like you. They want to trust you. Trust is only gained by treating them like real personalities rather than merely a list of email addresses.

The reason why opt-in email campaigns or permission based email lists are more profitable is because they send emails to only those email ids, that are somehow interested in learning about the business or have used the product before and are readily waiting to have more news on the topic. Information about the user in these campaigns is collected through the forms that they fill when they are subscribing to the email campaigns. Not only newsletters but the subscribers also subscribe to email advertisements and other marketing and promotional mails that the marketer might send to them.

When writing your emails, always focus on building the relationship that you have with the people on your subscriber list. Speak to them individually (even though you are writing to everyone at once) and you will gain their trust, respect and attention.

When a prospect submits their form indicating their interest in subscribing to your service, before they are added to your list and before you can begin sending them any email messages, they are sent an additional message requiring them to confirm their opt-in request. Once you receive this confirmation, you can begin sending emails to their address.

Personally, I prefer the Confirmed Opt-In process and use it for my Permission Based Email Marketing. The advantage is, your new subscriber is confirmed as a high level prospect for your offers and opportunities. They have been given the chance to "think twice" about joining your list, plus you have reduced the probability of someone else signing them up without their knowledge.

The disadvantage to the Confirmed Opt-In process is that some prospective subscribers submit the opt-in form with good intentions, then forget they have done it when the second confirmation request arrives and do not follow through. However, in my opinion and experience, losing a few potential subscribers this way is better than gaining a list of so-so subscribers who are not truly interested, or did not want to be on your list in the first place.

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