Email Marketing: Affordable Internet Marketing Technique

Email marketing is labeled as a killer method when it comes to effective low-cost Internet marketing endeavors. This is because it is the most widely-used and has the best reputation in bringing targeted traffic to websites. It is used to stay in touch with your customers or prospective customers, send out invitations, or make special offers.

It's as easy as writing an e-mail that may be in a form of a newsletter or a plain announcement, and sending that to as many targeted recipients as possible. However, there's an ideal way of going about it. Email marketing is not just about writing any email that you will be sending to anybody. To clarify that, here are some simple tips in doing email marketing the best way possible.

1. Join the "Can Spam" campaign.

Email marketing is not at any rate tantamount to spamming. You are not supposed to send information that your email list will not have any valuable use for.

2. Make your email list open it.

Your email might get lost together with the hundreds of emails that inbox owners are confronted with everyday. Improve your subject line by using extra white space creatively, adding text symbols, starting each word with a capital letter, asking compelling questions, not making any unbelievable claims, and not using the word FREE.

3. Keep it real.

Not including any too good to be true statements is not only applicable to your subject line. Your email content must never embody any promise your business can't keep. Make your offer genuinely of value to your recipients.

4. Don't go too low.

If you inform your customers regarding discounts, minimal discounts are not that effective compared with substantial discounts. But never offer discounts that are lower than your profit. It will defeat the purpose of this email marketing effort.

5. Make it eventful.

It's not about contradicting the advice that you should keep an email short and sweet. This tip is on including seminars, conferences and other events in your email. Businesses that require training benefit much from this method. With these RSVP-requiring emails, repetition is important. Just make sure that an ample interval is considered before sending out a reminder email.

6. Post news.

Sending newsletters and postcards provides useful information for your subscribers. These are the best forms of reaching out to your customers or prospects. You should keep the information short, simple and direct to the point for this feat to be effective.

With these simple ways of going about your email marketing endeavor, your business will prosper in no time.

About the author:
David Riewe
Little Known Minnesota Man Making Six Figures Per Year Online, From the Comfort of Home, Reveals His Top Internet Money-Makers. http://www.push-button-online-income.com/pbi
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What You Must Know About Spam

What Is Spam?

Spam is about consent, not about content. It doesn’t matter what the message is about: porn, ads or lottery. Only if the message is bulk and was not solicited than you can condemn it as Spam.

When referring to emails, according to the NCES (National Centre for Education Statistic), “Spam refers to electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define Spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. In addition to being a nuisance, Spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Because the Internet is a public network, little can be done to prevent Spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, the use of software filters in e-mail programs can be used to remove most Spam sent through e-mail.”

Some search engines use the term to describe websites that try to attain a high listing rank by submitting identical or mirror pages. In this article I am going to give you a few tips about email Spam.

If we give a too general definition to the word, we might end up taking for Spam perfectly legitimate emails. Not “any” unsolicited mail is Spam. Spam means unsolicited bulk email.

If a message is unsolicited that doesn’t make it Spam. The same goes for bulk. A message is Spam only if it is both unsolicited and bulk. When you receive an unsolicited job enquiry, you do receive an uncalled-for email. But is that Spam? No. What about a newsletter? That is bulk, but no Spam if you are a subscriber.

Why Do You Get Spam?

Have you posted your email address online in forums, chat rooms, on your website? Than why do you marvel? Spammers gather the addresses from the Internet; so no wonder your own found its way onto a spammer’s list. Besides, spammers use different other means to get what they want: viruses, Trojans, buying from other spammers.

Spam Scams

How many times have you received an “update your account” email from paypal, a bank or ebay? How many times have you received a “warning message”? Maybe it didn’t look suspicious to you as it came from an institution you work with, but was it really that way? This kind of emails is referred to as “phishing scam”. There is not much you can do when this happens. Just don’t click on any links in that email, don’t give away any confidential information such as social security number, bank account or credit card number. There are some free tools that can protect you against known phishing websites. For example download the free EarthLink toolbar and report the scam to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

What about the emails from different Nigerian (or other nationalities) citizens offering you a percentage of a vast sum of money? Yes, you’ve got that right: scam. You’ll only loose your money on this one. Better don’t be curious. They will ask you to pay a fee in advance – a so called transfer tax, and guess what: some complications will appear, you have to pay more and more and end up with nothing. And don’t believe the “you won money” lottery sweepstakes either. You’ll only spend. The same goes for the Nigerian purchase scam: they want to buy something from you, pay by check and they wish the goods to be sent in Lagos, Nigeria.

A Major Don’t

Don’t reply to spammers… ever! Don’t send any “remove me” message. By doing so you confirm your address is active, you show you read bulk messages, you prove your ISP doesn’t use Spam filters. You are the perfect candidate. You will never be removed. On the contrary…

Spam Fighters

If Spam really bothers you and you want to fight against it, than you have plenty of possibilities. If you are an American, join Cauce at: http://www.cauce.org/. If not… check out Cauce’s international partners (example: EuroCAUCE for Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland, France, Norway).

Associations such as to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or other volunteers’ organizations are there to help protecting you against scam or other illegal emails (children pornography for example). Detailed information about Spam, Spammers and ways to fight against them you can find here: http://www.spamhaus.org/

About the Author:
Mihaela Lica is a skilled journalist and PR consultant, founder of Pamil Visions – http://www.pamil-visions.com/ Previously she used to work as a military TV redactor for Pro Patria and the Military Media Trust within the Public Relations Directorate of the Romanian Ministry of Defence.
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

How to reduce spam

SPAM is the one thing that is certain with the Internet, and there are few people who have not experienced at least one spam email. Whether annoying or time-wasting, or actually offensive and rude, follow these steps to eliminate it.

Spam type number one- random attacks

Many spam is just sent to random addresses, in the hope of someone receiving them. Try these XX tips to stop random attack spam

1. Do not have a catch-all email address

A catch-all email address will receive all email sent to your domain that does not have a email address set up for it. For example, lskadjfh@yourdomain.com will go to catch-all-email-address@yourdomain.com, whereas a legitimate domain, such as sales@yourdomain, will go to the actual sales@yourdomain.com account.

By turning off a catchall email address, you will greatly reduce random attack spam, since you will only receive the mail of a legitimate address. This does however mean that if a customer sent an email to saels@yourdomain.com by accident, they would receive a mailer-daemon return email, and may be discouraged from buying from you.

2. Do not use common email address

Spammers know that email addresses like sales@your-domain.com are likely to be in use, so target these addresses specifically. Use different addresses to stop this, such as salesdepartment@your-domain.com. This will stop all random attack spam if used in conjunction to tip number one, however as soon as a spammer discovers your new email address, you will need to change it. However, this may pose a problem to a customer when they try to contact you. An auto-responder telling your customer who to email may help, if they email the wrong address.

Spam type number two- targeted spam

The other type of spam is when a spammer discovers your email address from somewhere, and sends email to it.

3. Do not post your email address anywhere on the Internet

Spammers use a spider to collect email addresses from the web, and can discover your email address easily, if you post it. Always either post it as email at your-domain dot com, or better still, use JavaScript to disguise it (scripts are available at javascript-source.com) or post it as an image. This is a very effective way of stopping spam.

4. Always select NOT to have your email address passed on when entering your email address on a form.

This will stop spammers or even legitimate companies from emailing you. Never give an email address to a site which doesn't look 100% legitimate, as they may spam you. Remember, once one spammer has your email, they will sell it to other spammers.

5. Use a spam filter to reduce spam that reaches your inbox.

They use a number of techniques to decide whether an email is spam, though are occasional wrong, and so could lose you legitimate emails. Good ones to use are MailScanner, and SpamAssassin.

These tips, if follow, should reduce the amount of spam reaching your inbox by a significant amount. Think about doing the following two steps to stop spam for everyone.

6. Sign up to Spamcop

If signed up to Spamcop, you can report all spam to it. It will then find out which data center it was sent from, and will stop the spammer from being able to send spam from that location. While it won't reduce spam to you that much, it will reduce spam in general, so consider signing up to it.

7. Place a random email address link on your website

If you have a website, consider linking to a random email address script- this will fill the mailing list of the spammer with useless addresses, wasting their time and possibly crashing their server. Ones to use are at www.iwebtool.com/webmasters/antispam/ or www.bfndevelopment.com/cgi-bin/home/Members/fMail/Contacts/13647/List.html

These tips will all stop spam from reaching you, and will help stop the spread of spam on the Internet. One day, spam might not be around... but until then, have fun spam busting!

About the Author:
Tim Shaw is CEO of Big Wow Web Hosting, a cheap and reliable web host. Visit them today for cheap web hosting, and email customer support with coupon code MS10 to get 10% off MailScanner, and stop spam from reaching you.
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com