What if you could drop a marketing email
into 100,000 email boxes in one day and have 100,000 potential new customers
see your marketing message and possibly become long term customers of your
internet business?
That sounds pretty enticing doesn't
it? That is the basic marketing strategy
that many internet marketers have tried to use to build their online
business. This is a methodology commonly
called "Mass Mailings",. That
is the polite word for this technique.
The less complimentary term that email recipients use for mass marketing
emails is simply "spam".
Mass mailing marketing has been big
business on the internet. And it is
unfair to say that it has been used exclusively by scam artists or pyramid
scheme operators. Many legitimate
business have tried mass mailings to build their internet business on the
promise that the companies who offer these services have harvested tens of
thousands of valid email addresses that they will send your marketing message
to for a small fee.
Compared to the amount of emails that will
go out, the fee seems fair. The
marketing formula for success is also a reasonable one. Usually the fee for the mailing can be offset
by a small number of sales, perhaps less than ten. And with 100,000 emails going out, the
expectation that you might get a response of 100-1000 inquiries that could
result in 10 sales is not unreasonable at all.
The problem is that for every 1000
customers who may have an interest in your product or service, you will have antagonized
99,000 others who see your email as nothing more than electronic junk mail
otherwise known as spam. The spam
epidemic has reached a level of crisis precisely because mass mailing services
and software have made it possible for good business, scam artists and even
virus producers to spread their bad emails to a vast audience if the spam is
left untouched.
The result is that an entire cottage
industry has sprung up to fight the spam epidemic. These companies sell software to you to fight
spam emails by keeping up on the most up to date spamming methods and catching
bad emails and sending them to your deleted box or a spam folder for future
deletion. This sets in motion a vicious
cycle of one one-upmanship in which the spam operators find ways around the
spam filters and the spam filter providers continue to update their software to
stop the newest tricks of the spam operators.
It has become a huge mess and the worst
part about it is that you as a valid internet marketer of a valid product or
service only want a reliable method to communicate with new and existing
customers. Mass mailing seems like one
way to do that. But when you decide to
try your hand at sending a mass mailing
email, you get in the middle of the spam war and you are then faced with
dealing with sophisticated email delivery hindrance systems that are there to
fight the problem of spam.
So what can we do about trying to build our
online businesses with this huge battle causing serious disruptions to email
deliverability? For one thing, abandon
the use of mass mailings entirely. They
don't work and they put you in the distasteful company of spammers and internet
criminals.
There are far better ways to communicate
with customers such as web site memberships, newsletters and contests that the
customer can opt in on. Build your
relationships with the customer from the customer out and you will be able to
avoid the entire spam deliverability wars and side step the email
deliverability issues as well.
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