Your Questions About Email Marketing

Jere answers:

Basically, both email and postal mail are used as a marketing method to keep your connection to customers (either b2b or b2c). However, since the objectives for b2b marketing and b2c marketing are different, there becomes different decisions on your email & direct mail marketing campaign.

When marketing a b2b business, your objective is to generate interest in your products and services, to try to pre-sell and lead receivers to your sales team. So usually it will be done by free offerings. In this case, emails become more cost-effective. You can put downloads links like white papers, reports about your products or services, etc. And people will actually take them as valuable. While in b2c marketing, the objective is more of a “Buy Now!”, “Coupon Available!”, “Sales Today!” kind of thing, where you plan to inform and have them commit purchase in a short time. In this case, emails also have a lot of advantages, such as highly customized, efficient, environment friendly, etc., but an official information that comes in some well-printed direct mail can also be appreciated by people.

I personally prefer email marketing since it seems more beneficial (check the benefits out in below source if you are interested) than direct mail these days.

Jere answers:

Aaron,

Marketers use this information all the time. If you have an opt-in list which is nothing more than consumers saying that they give you permission to send them email then it is fine.

If you already have a list of 20k I would strongly suggest that you do send out some marketing to them. Here is the thing. Usually on the terms and privacy policy, when soliciting an item to someone there is a statement mentioning somewhere that they are giving you the right to send them email. However, you cannot sell, trade, etc. And it should be for your own use.

Here is my suggestion, if you are going to use a resource such as iContact. What you should do is set up your iContact account while still maintaining the list that you have already achieved. Once you have created your iContact account then just send a simple email to your list explaining that you are moving over your list set up and that you would like to make sure that it is alright with them to send them email. They will do one of two things, sign up (preferrablly double opt-in) or they will ignore your email. If they ignore your email then that is someone who does not wish to receive future emails from you.

Think of it this way. If you were to buy a physical product from a company such as Bed, Bath and Beyond, wouldn’t you be more likely to use the coupons related? It is the same concept, just do not overstep your boundries.

I hope this helps you out some.

Jere answers:

Email Marketing is a cost effective way of doing a marketing.But it will only work if it has designed well and the content in it is worth reading.

Jere answers:

There are lots of programs for email marketing but most are geared toward opt-in due to the SPAM laws. Two of the more popular ones are Constand Comment and Mail Chimp.

Jere answers:

When you inform others about your product or services by sending emails, then it is called email marketing. It is important to note that it would be considered marketing when you send out emails to the people you know or who have subscribed to you; sending promotional emails to unknown people would be considered as spamming.