Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as
a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an
audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current
customer could be considered email marketing

Why Email Marketing
Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social
networks. The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly
(centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile
devices). Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of
communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions.
At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and
ask questions.


Essential Characteristics of Email Marketing.
• Legitimate mailing list.
Do not send spam. Spam is illegal in some parts of the world. In the US it
is illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Never buy or rent mailing
lists even if they are touted as "opt-in." A purchased email list is never
opt-in; it is always a spam list. If you send spam, you will be reported,
blocked by ISPs, harassed by SpamCop, blacklisted. Not only your email
address but your whole domain may find itself on blacklists and blocklists,
which can' be good for your SEO either. If you are on a shared IP address,
other users will suffer too.

• SignUp for Customers.
Create a signup center on your site, visible from all pages. You can also
use other techniques to get people to sign up. For example, take them to the
signup page when they click on "Lean more" information links. Or create
pop-ups inviting them to sign-up once they have posted a blog comment.
Always let them know that you won't share their information (and be true
to your promise).

• Email Policies
Always include your company’s physical address in each email message.
(This is required by the CAN-SPAM Act.)
Always include an easy unsubscribe option, preferably via a live link.
(This also honors the CAN-SPAM Act).
Include a prominent FTAF ("forward to a friend") link.
Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a
canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization.

• Email Automation
Sequence and automate your email marketing campaigns with autoresponders.
Most email marketing software today supports schedulers and event-triggered
autoresponders. This is a big subject that can be researched independently.

• Email Delivery Tracking
Track delivery and open rates. The best email marketing applications today
have this ability. You will know how many of your messages bounced,
how many ended up in a junk folder, how many made it into the inbox,
how many were opened, and how many had the links in them followed
to your website.

• SMTP Options
Invest in a good SMTP (email delivery) service, don't just send via your
regular email provider. Such a service can provide you with a dedicated
email server and IP, scale and monitor your email campaigns, authenticate
your emails and perform reputation management for you, including dealing
with spam reports, ISP blocks and blacklistings (they call this black list
resolution).


Email Marketing Timing and Tips
• Provide advance notice
If you're sending out your Midnight Madness Sale email at lunchtime on
the date of the event you can expect that the majority of subscribers
may not even get to read it, let alone act on it, before it's all over.
You might not want to tip your hand to your competitors about special
sales, but the deepest discounts won't move merchandise
if your customers don't have a chance to shop before it's history.

• Specify dates & times – "Special offer today only…" and exactly when
 is "today"? Thursday March 23rd Only may not sound as marketing
-zingy as Today, but it's going to be more understandable to your readers,
especially the ones that don't read their emails every 8.3 seconds.
Remember that some of your customers may see your email appear on
their smartphones but may not open it until days later at their desktop or laptop
computers.

• Include the time zone
An inordinate number of email marketers feel that their city is the center of
the universe and that subscribers should not only be able to be prominently
aware of where the company's office is, but should also be able to
instinctively calculate the difference to their own time zone when responding
to time-specific offers.Keep in mind that 10 am in Greenville, Massachusetts
is 9 am in Greenville, Iowa; 8 am in Greenville, Colorado; 7 am in Greenville,
California; and 6 am in Greenville, Alaska.

• Track the delivery time
Not all ISPs deliver emails in nanoseconds, so you may find that while your
Gmail customers are swiftly receiving their newsletters, the Hotmail addresses
lag hours behind or vice versa. The variable delay situation is aggravated
should you be rash enough to dare to place an attachment with your emails
in which case some may disappear outright.
A good practice is to set up a number of seed email addresses with major
ISPs which you can use to determine the best- and worst-case delivery
scenarios for each and accordingly adjust your send times.

• Send at the time that they usually respond
You can track your response rate by time and thus understand the dayparts
where your customers may be more likely to respond.
By analyzing the timing data to group individuals who habitually open
and/or click at specific dates and times such "weekdays between 1 pm
and 4 pm" or "Saturdays between 9 am and noon" will allow you to optimize
your sending timing to that specific category of email subscriber.

• Don't send trigger based reminders
That friendly little reminder to ask
why they didn't open your email is a fast track one way ticket to
unsubscription or even worse, a spam folder relegation.
When your subscriber entered their desired frequency in your
preference center, they expected to have your emails land in their
inbox at the specified periodical level. Violating their expressed desires
will disembowel your subscription list.


References:

1. http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-answers/2444-email-marketing-search-engine-optimization.html
2. http://www.designdamage.com/how-to-integrate-email-marketing-seo-and-social-media/
3. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/867-The-Top-7-Ways-To-Master-Email-Marketing-Timing
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing