Effective Email Marketing

Using email to promote your website or product can be powerful. Even more powerful than blogging. You can reach a large base of people in a second. However to be successful you have to do it effectively.

Be Careful of Spamming

I’ve asked the question “Isn’t Email Marketing Spamming?“. I still think it is, but nonetheless email marketing is used everyday and can be a good thing.

Grab Your Targets Attention

Recently I received two emails that can be regarded as “email marketing”. They each had the goal of me to check out their blog. One I didn’t respond to. The other I responded to and built a relationship with them.

The First:

Hello, my name is (removed) and thought you might like to read a very insightful pots i made for my blog about how to increase your subscribers.

I’d like it if you could express your honest opinion about it, you can see it here (url removed)

The email wasn’t personal at all and “post” isn’t even spelled right. It made me want to NOT visit the blog.

The second:

It’s Matt here from ContestBeat.com, where one of your previous site competitions was featured.

I just wanted to get in touch regarding any future competitions you might be holding. Besides from being able to submit them free to the site, I have just finished a a couple of posts that could really improve the success of your contest. They are as follows:

10 Tips to Run a Better Blog Contest

Why Run a Blog Contest?

The posts draw my own experience in blogging about contests each day and I am sure they will make a difference to you, so please feel free to check them out. Also if you feel the tips might be something your readers could benefit from, (either when they run their own contests or enter in to your next one), please don’t hesitate to spread the word!

Matt has already done something for me by featuring our contest. Why would that give me any reason not to check out his posts and possible offer a positive contribution to them via a comment or a post of my own?

After this email I responded and he ended up featuring Blog about your Blog for his new project which I wrote about here.

Being Effective

The two emails are pretty different but each had the same goal. They wanted to promote their posts and gain more readers. Matt was obviously effective when doing this. He’s already offered or given me something free, that is enough incentive alone for me to want to visit his blog again.

To be successful at email marketing the goal isn’t to email everyone in the world and hope for the best. It’s about being effective.

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