Email Marketing for Small Business

Posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007.

I have decided to create a series of articles on email marketing for small business after helping numerous of our small business clients with their email marketing strategies. The one common element I have found is that they are all scared to venture into this space for fear of being marked as spammer and losing customers.

That’s a valid and realistic concern and if you don’t know the basics of ethical email marketing you will more than likely end up doing exactly that.

Now before I get into writing up the articles I need to add a huge disclaimer for all you people out there that consider any business sending email to be a spammer.

Email marketing is not spamming IF the subscribers who received the email have asked for it and you as the email marketer stick to the frequency of mail outs you stated to the subscriber when they subscribed and lastly you honor their unsubscribe requests.

For example we have one client who every day sends an email to their subscribers containing property news. How can they be a spammer when:

1. The subscribers have to go through a confirmed opt-in process before they are even added to the mailing lists,
2. The client sends the emails at the frequency that is stated on the subscription web page.
3. The client does not add any email addresses to the list,
4. Our system automatically processes all bounces and unsubscribe requests,
5. The client immediately removes any requests for unsubscribes if the subscriber does not use the links provided within their emails,
6. They use a professional email service provider to delivery and managed their email campaigns (that’s us by the way) and keep them honest.

So with the disclaimer out of the way I would like to present my ideas for the articles. Please contact me if you would like other topics or to provide suggestions with my current ideas. Topics I will cover are:

1. Why should small business use email marketing?
2. Common concepts and terminology used within email marketing
3. How much should I spend on email marketing and how do I calculate ROI?
4. Why use an email service provider (ESP) to managed email marketing
5. What content should I offer my subscribers?
6. Understanding the subscriber and their dangerous habits
7. How to attract and keep subscribers
8. Mailing lists and mail list hygiene
9. How to correctly format emails
10. How to understand and utilise email campaign statistics
11. More complex email marketing strategies such as segmentation, Autoresponders

Whew! So that’s the topic list so far. I am keeping the topics high level enough not to be boring for business people but detailed enough that you don’t need to hire an email marketing expert.

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