Saturday, July 29, 2006

Email Marketing Strategy

Nowadays, almost anyone can build an E-commerce website because the software and the other elements that are needed to build one are readily available. Given this, more and more businesses, especially those that are home-based, make it a point to have a website from which they can sell a wide variety of products, information, and services. Additionally, business owners employ a number of marketing strategies that can help them advertise their websites to a wider audience.

However, most home-based business owners do not have the resources to launch major marketing campaigns to help them compete. This can mean that their websites may not get as much traffic. Fortunately, there are still a number of marketing strategies that they can employ that can be very effective in getting more traffic to their websites. One of these is e-mail marketing.

E-mail Promotion

E-mail marketing involves sending e-mails to a number of people about your business and the products or services that you are selling. However, you cannot just send e-mails to anyone since you need to send it to people who will find the information you send them useful. This is why the first thing you need to do is to determine your target market and to get as many e-mail addresses of people who belong to your target market. There are a number of online companies that sell e-mail lists of specific groups of people.

However, to prevent being accused of sending spam, you may opt to send an opt-in or opt-out message, which will ask confirmation from the individual to whom you sent the e-mail as to on whether he would like to receive the information you are providing. If you get a confirmation, you should make it a point to provide the best services, as this can build customer loyalty. In writing your e-mails, you should also be as clear and as concise as possible, so as to make a good first impression to your customers so that potential customers are enticed to go to your website.

One of the most effective and most affordable ways to market a website is to use e-mail marketing; most Internet users use e-mail, which provides a wide market for businesses. However, employing such a strategy should be done responsibly as it also has the potential of creating the opposite effect of alienating customers who might find the e-mails annoying.