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email marketing




E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising email marketing book messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:



  • Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship b2b email marketing of a merchant with its current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
  • Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something immediately.
  • Adding advertisements in e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.

Researchers estimate that as of 2004 the Email Marketing industry's revenues has surpassed the $1 billion/yr association email marketing mark.








The Good


E-mail marketing is popular with companies because:



  • It is extremely cheap. Compared to direct mailing or printed newsletters the costs are negligible. The advertiser does not need to pay for production, paper, printing or email marketing strategies postage.
  • It is instant, as opposed to a mailed advertisement, an email arrives in a few seconds or minutes. email marketing consultant
  • It lets the advertiser "push" the message to its audience, as cheap email marketing opposed targeted email marketing to a website that waits for customers to come in.
  • It is easy to track. An advertiser email marketing video email marketing company can track bounce-backs, positive or negative responses, click-throughs, rise in sales.
  • It has been proven successful when well done.
  • When most people switch on their computer the first thing they do is check their email.
  • Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger other messages to be automatically delivered.



The Bad


Many companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with existing customers, but many free email marketing other companies send unsolicited commercial e-mail, also known as spam.


Illicit e-mail marketing antedates legitimate e-mail marketing, since on the early Internet (see Arpanet) it was not permitted to use the medium for commercial purposes. As a result, marketers attempting to establish themselves as legitimate businesses in e-mail marketing have had an uphill battle, hampered also by criminal spam permission email marketing operations billing themselves as legitimate.


It is frequently difficult for observers to distinguish between legitimate and spam e-mail marketing. First off, spammers attempt to represent themselves as legitimate operators, obfuscating email marketing services uk the issue. business to business email marketing Second, direct-marketing html email marketing political groups such as the U.S. Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have pressured legislatures to legalize activities which many Internet operators consider to be spamming, such as the sending of "opt-out" unsolicited commercial e-mail. Third, the sheer volume of spam e-mail has led some users to mistake legitimate commercial e-mail (for instance, a mailing list to which the user subscribed) for spam - especially when the two have a similar appearance, as when messages include HTML and flashy graphics.


Due to the volume of spam e-mail on the Internet, spam filters are essential to most users. Some marketers report that legitimate commercial e-mails frequently get caught by filters, and hidden; however, it is somewhat less common for e-mail email internet marketing users to complain that spam filters block legitimate mail.


Companies considering an e-mail marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' CAN-SPAM Act, the European Privacy & Electronic Communications email marketing program Regulations 2003 or their Internet provider's acceptable use policy. Even if a company follows the law, if Internet mail targeted email marketing interactive administrators find that it is sending spam it is likely to be listed in blacklists such as SPEWS.




E-mail marketing terms



  • Auto-responders: Automatic replies sent by the e-mail software of the recipient after receipt of an e-mail.
  • Bounce backs: e-mail sent back to the server that originally sent the e-mail.
  • Bounce rate: Ratio of bounced e-mails to total e-mails sent.
  • Bulk, bulking: Terms used by spammers to refer to their line of work. Mostly synonymous with spam or UCE.
  • Call to action: Words in the e-mail that entice recipients to do something.
  • Click-through: viral email marketing The action of clicking on a link.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): Ratio of click-troughs to total e-mails sent.
  • Commercial e-mail: Any e-mail sent for commercial purpose; for instance, an advertisement to buy a product or service, an order confirmation from online email marketing program an online store, or a paid subscription periodical delivered by e-mail. Commercial e-mail is not synonymous with spam; see unsolicited commercial e-mail below.
  • Demographic: Characteristic of a group of e-mail recipients.
  • Double opt-in: A term coined by spammers to refer to the normal operation of secure electronic mailing list software. A new subscriber first gives his/her address to the list software (for instance, on a Web page) and then confirms subscription after receiving an e-mail asking if it was really him/her. This ensures that no person can subscribe someone else out of malice or error. The intention of the term "double opt-in" is to make it appear that the confirmation is a duplication of effort; and thus, to justify not confirming subscriptions. Mail system administrators and non-spam mailing list email marketing strategy operators refer to confirmed subscription email marketing helps business or closed-loop email marketing lists opt-in. [1]
  • Double opt-out: Same as Opt-In, but the recipient unsubscribes financial services email marketing instead of subscribes. Borderline spam operations frequently email marketing reviews make it difficult to unsubscribe b2c email marketing from lists, in order to keep their lists large. Hard-core spam operations make it impossible -- they treat opt-out requests as confirmations that the address works and is read.
  • Email internet marketing mass email Blast: An email sent to multiple recipients, intended to inform them of announcements, events or changes. A variety of methods can be used to send the same email to multiple recipients: for example: using options within an email program, using the mail merge option email internet marketing service within a word processing program, or using a commercial email list programs.
  • Express consent: A recipient agrees actively to subscribe by checking a box on an web form, paper form or by telephone. A recipient not unchecking a box is not express consent.
  • False positives: E-mail that is not spam but is labeled spam by a spam filter of the recipient. Note that e-mail marketers may have different opinions of what is "spam" than e-mail recipients.
  • Format: E-mails can be sent in plain text, HTML, or Microsoft's rich text format.
  • Hard bounce: Bounced e-mail that could never get through because the e-mail address doesn't exist or the domain doesn't exist.
  • List broker: Reseller of lists of e-mail addresses.
  • List building: Process of generating a list of e-mail addresses email marketing tools for use in e-mail campaigns.
  • List mass email marketing host: Web service that provides tools to manage large e-mail address databases and to distribute large quantities of e-mails.
  • List manager: Owner or operator of opt-in e-mail newsletters or databases. Also software used to maintain a mailing list.
  • Look and feel: Appearance, layout, design, functions & anything not directly related to the actual message on an e-mail.
  • Open rate: The ratio of email marketing broadcasting emails that are actually opened online email marketing by recipients over the total email marketing emails sent in a particular campaign.
  • Opt-in: The action of agreeing to receive emails from a particular company, group of companies or associated companies, by subscribing to an email list.
  • Opt-out: A mailing list which transmits emails to people who have not subscribed and lets them "opt-out" from the list. The subscribers' e-mail addresses may be harvested from the web, USENET, or other mailing lists. ISP policies and some regions' laws consider this equivalent to spamming.
  • Personalization: The use of technology and customer information to tailor emails between a business and each individual customer. Using information previously obtained about the customer, the email is altered to fit that customer's stated needs as well as needs perceived by the business based on the available customer information, for the purpose of better serving the customer by anticipating needs, making the interaction efficient and satisfying email marketing system for both parties and building a relationship personalized email marketing that encourages the customer to return for subsequent purchases.
  • Privacy: The Privacy Act of 1974, Public Law 93-579, safeguards privacy through creating four procedural rights in personal data. It requires government agencies to show an individual any records kept on him/her; also requires agencies to follow "fair email newletter marketing information practices" when gathering and handling personal data. It places restrictions email marketing uk on how agencies can share an individual's data with other people and agencies and also lets individuals sue the government for violating its provisions.
  • Rental list: A mailing list that can only be used once or for a limited time. The user of the list pays the owner of the list less money than if he/she would have bought the list outright. Note that this term is usually used for lists generated by address harvesting or other means; the investment made by the list creator does not correlate with the permission of email marketing campaign the e-mail recipients. Many firms who "rent" or "buy" a list face spam complaints afterward from persons who never subscribed.
  • Segmentation (or Targeting): The use of previously gathered information to send emails of a particular offer to a subset of the list.
  • Soft bounce: A soft bounce is an email that gets as far as the recipient's mail server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. it might occur because the recipient's inbox is full. A soft bounce message may be deliverable at another time or may be forwarded manually by the network administrator in charge of redirecting mail on the recipient's domain. On the other hand, a hard email marketing network bounce is an e-mail message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient's address is invalid.
  • Spam or UCE(Unsolicited email marketing campaigns Commercial e-mail-UCE): From the sender's point-of-view, spam is a form of bulk mail, often sent to a list obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists. To the receiver, it usually seems like junk e-mail. Spam is equivalent to unsolicited telemarketing calls except that the user pays for part of the message since everyone shares the cost of maintaining the Internet. Spammers typically send a piece of e-mail to a distribution list in the millions, expecting that only a tiny number of readers will respond to their offer. The term spam is said to derive from a famous Monty Python sketch ("Well, we have Spam, tomato & Spam, egg & Spam, Egg, bacon & Spam...") that was current when spam first began arriving on the Internet. SPAM is a trademarked Hormel meat product that was well-known in course course email free internet marketing the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.
  • Spam filter: Software that is usually installed in the users email client, with the purpose of avoiding spam email to get into the client's inbox or at least to be flagged as such.
  • Subject line: It is one of the most important issues in email marketing. The better the subject line of an email, the better probability of being opened by the recipient.
  • Targeting (or segmentation): Sending emails to a subset of a mailing list based on a specific filter, trying to improve CTR and/or open ratios.
  • Tracking: The act of reporting CTR, open ratios, bounces, etc.
  • Trigger based messaging: Triggering a message based off an event or interaction with a previous message. Popular for customers who request more information
  • Unique click: During a particula period, a visitor to a website marketing email could click several times on a particular link, but during that period it is counted only as one and considered a unique visitor.
  • Unsolicited email marketing agency commercial e-mail (UCE): Commercial e-mail, usually of an advertising nature, sent at the expense of the email marketing companies recipient without his or her permission. Sending email marketing service UCE is an offense against all major ISPs' terms of service, and is a crime in some jurisdictions.



External links



  • To email marketing services Spam or Not to Spam, CMO Magazine
  • Direct E-mail Marketing email marketing targeted Do's, Don'ts, Tips, Tricks, and Traps
  • Email marketing article on About.com
  • SpamCon Foundation
  • Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
  • DIRECT email marketing tool Magazine internet marketing email - Email Marketing
  • Best Practices in B2B email marketing list Email Marketing
  • a Third Party to Manage Your Database

Information provided by Wikipedia.

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