As you go about developing a marketing plan for your Net based business enterprise (or, for that matter, for a venture that exists in the brick and mortar world) you will want to make certain that you consider all of your promotional alternatives. In this regard, you will want to consider frankly the value of direct email marketing. There are a number of benefits that you can realize through direct email marketing. In fact, when all is said and done — when you consider the pros and cons associated with direct email marketing — you will be able to determine whether this type of promotional approach is worth it, whether it will be valuable to your own business venture.

First of all, direct email marketing is cost effective. Indeed, you can reach a significant number of people through direct email marketing for a mere fraction of what other types of solicitations can cost.

Second, direct email marketing is easy to develop. There are some types of marketing schemes that take a long time to pull together. Such is not the case when it comes to direct email marketing.

Finally, the fact is that although some people complain about direct email marketing, the reality is that direct email marketing is effective. The rate of return between “pieces” sent out and “responses” received is considered to be at the high end when it comes to direct email marketing. (Naturally, you will want to make very certain that you comply fully with all statutes, regulations and rules pertaining to direct email marketing on the Net.)

Now it is up to you to decide if you should try direct email marketing.

Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, 7 Steps to Internet Marketing Success.

In this day and age there are a number of different options available to you when it comes to making money on the Internet. One way that you can better your own bottom line is to make money with email marketing. Through this informational article, you are provided information to demonstrate how you can make money with email marketing in 4 easy steps.

Find a Niche Market in Which Your Will Thrive

The first step that you will want to take when it comes to moving to make money with email marketing is to identify the niche in which you will thrive. By that it is meant that you need to properly identified that very specific part of the marketplace that will be most interested in your particular product or service.

Develop a Targeted Opt-In Email List

When it comes to working to make money with email marketing, after you properly identify your market niche, you will want to develop a targeted opt-in email list based on your targeting considerations. In the end, it does not go whatsoever to have people on an email list that will not in the end have any real interest in your product or service.

Create a Succinct and Interesting Email

The next step that you will take when it comes to working to make money with email marketing is creating and developing succinct, informative and interesting email content. You will want to get the attention of a recipient, keep his or her attention and get that person to act.

Repeat … Repeat … Repeat

Finally, you will want to repeat (and repeat and repeat) these steps in order to better drive home your message. By doing so, you will be on your way towards your goal to make money with email marketing.

Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, 7 Steps to Internet Marketing Success.

Email marketing can be a very effective tool for promoting your exhibition or event. The problem these days though is that the benefits of e-marketing are being reduced due to more and more spam. Of thirty billion emails thought to have been sent last year, some statistics suggest that 60% of those emails were spam. The spam situation is so bad now that marketers, who have a genuine message to send out, are finding it harder and harder to get their information across to recipients about upcoming events and exhibitions. So what can we do to try and improve results? Some ideas are detailed below.

Subject Line:

One of the biggest mistakes when marketers send out their information regarding events and exhibitions, is that they include spam like words in the subject line. There are certain words which, if included, will almost definitely result in your email being automatically classified as spam. Words involving education should always be avoided as should words such as ‘free’. Also ensure you differentiate your email subject line from the standard messages you receive. Including your company name at or near to the start of the subject line is thought to be very effective because it ensures that the recipient (having signed up to your database) will recognise the sender and be much more likely to open it.

Choose time of day and day of week:

You might be anxious to get news out about your next exhibition or event, but be patient. Plan your emails in advance and you will then have the time to choose the best send time.

From my own experience, try and send the emails in the mornings or lunchtime and avoid times late in the day. Try also to avoid sending just before the weekends because recipients may then end up checking the emails on Monday morning, a time when many weekend spam emails have built up in their email box.

Ensure you track the results using a web stats package:

To really have the best idea of the best time to send and to gather other useful statistics, put some tracking code into the emails and use software to track 1) opens and 2) click throughs. If you are not using your own mailing list then this tracking will be of particular use because it will give you a clear idea of which list broker or publication lists are the most effective. Some list brokers do block the racking but you can certainly ask them to provide statistics.

Provide a html and non html version or the email send:

You may miss potential visitors to your exhibition or event if you do not send a text version of the email. To ensure you capture as many people as possible, provide a text and html version when you send the emails.

Marketing with Exhibition
banner stands and Dublin exhitions

As I write this, the Boston Celtics basketball team is celebrating last night’s victory. Not because it put them into first place… in fact, quite the opposite. Last night’s win mercifully broke a team record, 18 game losing streak.

Things were very different around here twenty years ago. Back then, the Celtics were a great team, and – unlike today, where not only can you get seats, you could probably suit up and play for a few minutes if you asked nicely – tickets were impossible to find. So when my boss handed me two “luxury box” tickets to a Celtics-Lakers game, I was thrilled.

I’d been to the old Boston Garden a couple of times before, but when my friend Fred and I arrived for the game, we weren’t quite sure where to go for the luxury boxes. After wandering around a bit, we found the entrance: A dilapidated-looking elevator, hidden in a corner and manned by an equally dilapidated-looking security guard.

Being the street smart, world travelers that we were, Fred and I took one look at the uninviting entrance and quickly deduced that there probably wouldn’t be any food stands or roaming snack vendors on the other side of that elevator ride. So we stopped to wolf down a couple of hot dogs each, and five minutes later, when we boarded the elevator, we were happy at having “planned ahead.”

You’ve probably already guessed the punch line.

As we discovered, one of the things that makes the luxury boxes so luxurious is the fact that they are stocked to the gills with (free) soda, beer, snacks and a rich assortment of hot food. They even have a man in a white coat and chef hat who arrives pushing a dessert cart at halftime (a happy surprise that prompted Fred to ask, “What’s next, massages?”).

We consumed all we could that night, all the while wishing we hadn’t “wasted space” on hot dogs. Clearly, thinking too far ahead does not always work to your advantage.

Similarly, in working with a new client on an E-Newsletter, one topic which invariably comes up is the “editorial calendar.” Successful businesspeople tend to like planning and structure, and my clients are no exception.

I do my best, however, to convince them that this element of organization is a bad idea.

You see, to me, the best E-Newsletter content is spontaneous – less like successive chapters in a book, and more like a series of great lunchtime conversations. A little of this, a little of that. A little business, a little personal. A little humor, a little serious. You mix it all together, you have a nice time, and when you leave – although you may not remember exactly what was discussed – you make a mental note to get together again soon.

An E-Newsletter, after all, is just a glorified e-mail. On the communications continuum between writing a PhD thesis on the one hand and chatting with your boss in the men’s room on the other (assuming you’re both men), it’s much more down at the men’s room end of the equation.

Consequently, the best E-Newsletters are not so much about publishing, as they are about connecting. In my experience, planning topics in advance dampens this connection, and leads to dry, overly thought out, difficult to give birth to, missives.

Bottom Line: Let yourself and your colleagues off the hook, and just write about what’s on your mind today. I guarantee it will be more interesting for your readers, less effort for you, and a better reflection of your authentic point of view. Not a bad way to make the phone ring.

P.S. Not creating an editorial calendar ahead of time does not preclude having a file of “possible future ideas,” something which in fact, I recommend. The idea, however, is to select the topic of the month based on your current state of mind, rather than a preplanned schedule.

Michael J. Katz is Founder and Chief Penguin of Blue Penguin Development, Inc., (http://www.BluePenguinDevelopment.com) a Boston consulting firm that helps clients increase sales by showing them how to nurture their existing relationships, and that specializes in the development of electronic newsletters. He is author of the book, E-Newsletters That Work.

Before I even really begin this, I have to tell you that as effective as email marketing is for me, it is only as effective as my entire system is together – that is the bottom line. You have to have a system. And there are a lot of them for sale out there – and if you look at the systems – they are all really about same thing.

They are about traffic and conversions. That’s it. Traffic and conversions. Traffic is the fuel – you have to get eyes to your web pages in order to sell anything.

And conversion is where you make your money. That is where they buy from you. And that is it. Check it out – look at every system you have bought, ever, about how to make money online, and they are about traffic, conversions or both. Sure, they might call it something else – but it is all the same thing.

And all email marketing is is octane booster for your fuel. Now, you have to have a fuel to get people to your squeeze page so you can build your list. You have to have one. Why one? Because it is hard to get good at several. Trust me. I have tried it. I have gotten good at one – article marketing.

But you do not have to get good at the same one I am good at. But you have to choose one. If you have two, then you can only be half good at each one – but half good plus half good does not equal one – it is like the square root of ½ times ½. The only way you really get ahead online is by becoming an expert at something.

So you have to get good at one form of traffic.

Then you use email marketing to boost your traffic – I boost mine by about a factor of five, by getting people to opt in to my list, and then I send them to my web pages repeatedly.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 900 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

Email is today’s most popular way to advertise.
Every day our inboxes are filled with messages whether we asked
for the contact or not. Email is today’s biggest communication
factor.

But there is one problem that you might face with email–that is being
blacklisted. All it takes is one complaint, and your ISP or domain name
can be put on someone’s blacklist. If you’re on the blacklist, your emails
are not getting through–and neither is your message.

What is a blacklist, exactly? A blacklist is a database of
known Internet addresses (or IPs) used by individuals or
companies sending spam. Various ISP’s and bandwidth providers
subscribe to these blacklist databases in order to filter out
spam sent across their network or to their subscribers.
Some ISP’a have very strict policies on spam, so many well-intended,
legitimate emails never get through.

Can you be sure you haven’t been blacklisted?
Unfortunately, you can’t be 100% sure. You may be on
someone’s blacklist and not even know it, and be added to and
removed from blacklists at any time. The only way to
prevent being blacklisted unfairly is to use technology today
to keep track of it all. There is cutting-edge service
technology available that checks all the major blacklists like
Spamcop, Sorbs, SPAMHaus, etc to ensure your domain or ISP hasn’t
been added.

Email reputation is very important and you need to make sure you are ahead of the game. Understanding your potential blacklisting problem can mean a huge
difference to your company and bottom line.

Author Lesley Fegarty is with MailWorkZ the creator of BlackList
Monitor– advanced service that continuously checks all the
major blacklists for you, and then some. Keep up-to-date on who may have
you blacklisted. Find out more at http://www.blacklistmonitor.com

Using Newsletters is a good way to get information to various consumers about the products and services you offer. You can also incorporate great articles that will provide them with information they can use. The information includes shouldn’t all be about your business or promoting sales, but related information in general to the concept. If your newsletter is informative people will come back often to read the newest information. This will also keep your products and services at the top of their mind when they are ready to make a purchase. Make sure you site has a very easy method for them to sign up so that you can collect their e-mail address and send them promotions and other offers.

Since you will likely end up with a very high volume of e-mail subscribers to your newsletter you have to come up with an effective way to manage them. This can be done by paying a third party resource or by purchasing a quality software program to allow you to do it on your own. Either one needs to offer the option of maintaining a database that is secure, adding new subscribers, deleting those that opt out, and posting archived newsletters for them to access.

There are some disadvantages to paying for a third party resource to help you because it can be expensive. You also have to give up some control over the information you have collected. It is a good idea to find out if your web hosting service provider offers any automated responders to assist you with the handling the data instead. This is a great way to add subscribers, delete them, and even block some from getting in if they are causing problems.

The quality of your newsletter is very important. If it isn’t informative then people will stop reading it. Send them out monthly or every 3 months depending on how often you will have good data. Makes sure to that your newsletter isn’t being picked up as spam or it will never get to most of the people on your opting list. Common reasons this happens is the newsletter contains words that spam filters pick up on including FREE, it isn’t addresses specifically to a recipient, and that ISP is known for sending spam.

It is important that you format your news letter so that it can be read in both HTML and text forms because not all viewers have the same set up on their computer. With HTML you will be able to add colors, graphics, and use various fonts. This can cost more but it gets the reader’s attention.

Using a newsletter is a very inexpensive and easy way to increase both traffic and sales to your website. In fact, many websites make more money off of their newsletters than their actual websites. You too can take advantage of this option if you use the right software or provider to help you manage things.

Ben Mitchell is an independant business consultant and internet marketer. He’s also the publisher of the Online Money Methods Newsletter.

If you’re serious about making money online and want to learn about the methods that actually work,

visit http://www.onlinemoneymethods.com and get a FREE copy of “$100,000 Worth of the BIGGEST Money-Making Secrets Ever Revealed!”

E-mail marketing is becoming one of the best ways to make money online. It can result in huge profits in only a short period of time. You need to know how to make it work for you if you want to get the most out of your efforts. You need to build a huge database of customers with their e-mail address collected so that you are getting the marketing to the target market.

It is simple to build your database. Offer a free newsletter or e-zine by creating a squeeze page, which is a very small web page. Make sure it offers a headline that will capture the attention of those who see it. The publication needs to describe what you have to offer to the consumer and how it is a benefit to them. You have to give them a good reason to join your publication or they won’t.

Use an autoresponder to provide a sign up box for the consumer to fill out there name and e-mail address. Make sure they get an automated response welcoming them to the publication. This database becomes known as your optin list and it is what you will use in your e-mail marketing strategy.

Your publications need to speak to the customers in a friendly manner about different topics. They are looking for quality information that they can use. As you develop this relationship with those on the optin list start adding product promotions and well as product reviews.

You can also write up an article from 300-500 words to post as an e-zine. You want the article to offer great content with links back to your site. The goal is to get the reader interested in what you have written so that they want to read more. Set a goal of writing one new article each day so that the amount of traffic to your site continues to grow.

Ben Mitchell is an independent business consultant and internet marketer. He’s also the publisher of the Online Money Methods Newsletter. If you’re serious about making money online and want to learn about the methods that actually work, visit http://www.onlinemoneymethods.com and get a FREE copy of “$100,000 Worth of the BIGGEST Money-Making Secrets Ever Revealed!”

Email promotion via internet marketing is a mandatory strategy that is needed in order to further your market reach and improve your brand’s name. It is no longer about sending a simple email to a database of subscribers. You must put thought into every internet marketing email promotion you send out. Among the various measures adopted for internet marketing, email marketing promotions contain some of the best benefits of gaining a nice surge of traffic. That targeted traffic, is in some ways, sent in the form of an electronic mail to the targeted prospect. This is why many businesses and companies are advocating email promotion due to the ease of extracting very responsive traffic and branding capability just from a simple electronic mailing. Such measures facilitate or promote email usage.

Sending email promotions is a form of direct marketing. The email conveys convincing messages- commercial or fundraising to the prospective clients. The client body holding prospects include old (long time) customers, who may have developed a loyalty or new customers in the quest of something similar/complementary to what the concern offers. Email marketing also implies the advertisements added in emails sent by some other companies to their customers and sending emails to any particular class of Internet users.

The popularity of email marketing (which brings about email promotion) is ascribed to the following reasons:

• It’s a less expensive means of (Internet) marketing and if rightly carried out the return on investment in this case is proven to be high.

• It’s delivered instantly unlike other marketing means like ads etc.

• It is a means of pushing the message on the audience instead of waiting for the audience to find out and then approach.

• The sent emails and their responses, non-responses, bouncing backs etc. are easier to track.

However, if companies resort to sending unsolicited bulk emails then it creates a negative impact. Such measures are also classified as spamming. In this case though there may be initial email promotion yet in the long run the whole object of email marketing is negated and the efforts are perceived in a bad light.

Melvin Perry is an internet entreprenuer that specializes in building large email lists within a matter of weeks. He curently teaches marketers via free step by step video how to earn thousands monthly through the list building model. You can snatch this report at no cost by visiting FREE Internet Marketing Videos

Writing and sending a regular e-newsletter is one of the most effective and cost effective marketing tools small businesses such as day spas, salons and medical spas can use to build their clientele. Here are some critical things to include when sending out a mass e-mail to your existing or prospective customers.

1. A subject line that will increase the number of contacts that will actually open your email. Having your business name in the subject line does increase the chances it will be opened. Something as simple as “March Newsletter from [your business name]” communicates what is contained in your email. I know it doesn’t sound very creative and there is this desire to make it more exciting somehow with a promotion. But having a cute or very marketing-ish subject line may in fact turn some people away from reading yet another email trying to sell them something. Your email newsletter is not the place do major sales, it is the place to build your relationship with your clients.

For advanced users, personalizing the subject line with the first name of your contact has shown to have an open rate of 41% as compared to 29% without personalization. You’ll need to have included both your contacts first name only and email in your email databases in order to use this feature. Beware of including the first AND last name, as this lowers the open rate to 20%. Source: Aweber Guide

2. Give your readers something of value. And no, I’m not talking about a discount or coupon. Something of value from you can be any number of things that do not suck the profitability out of your businesses. And since your client newsletter is the place to build your relationships, it is the perfect place to give nuggets of information you freely give to clients that visit your business. Examples can be short tips on how to copy the latest celebrity hair style, or skincare tips for a certain skin condition (dry skin during winter months; sunburn during summer months), or announce an educational seminar or charity event your business is sponsoring. It can be anything that is genuinely a gift. And if you must include a coupon, have it be a free upgrade or add-on service that they’d receive when paying for a full-price service. This could be an extra masque, lip treatment, foot/hand massage….keep it less than 15 minutes or something you can include in a service without increasing the service time.

3. Sign your name. A picture of your or your business would help. too, to connect with your contacts. Although the email “From” can be from your generic business email address, having someone’s name at the bottom of the email helps build that relationship with your client. Consider when you may have received an email from a large company…did you feel that they really cared about you? If you had a question, did you know who to call? The benefit of being a small business is that you have that one-on-one connection with your clients…don’t be afraid to flaunt this!

Heather Gallegos spent 12 years in marketing, communications and
operation roles in the high-tech industry before becoming a
consultant to the wellness industry. President of Spa Clientéle
Solutions (http://www.spaclientele.com), her unique perspective as a salon and day spa client,
strong marketing and business background, and affiliation with
Preston Spa Business Solutions (http://www.prestoninc.net) complement
one another to provide a powerhouse of practical and straightforward
solutions. She has helped day spas, medical spas and salons create their brand and
marketing plans, monthly e-newsletters, private label skincare lines, customer
appreciation events and local PR buzz. Published in Dermascope magazine,
Heather is also an active blogger about practical and helpful marketing ideas for
salons, day spas and medical spas at http://blog.spaclientele.com.