Three types of email marketing and More

There are basically three types of email marketing:

1) opt-in email marketing

2) house list email marketing

3) bulk spam.Opt-In email Marketing:

Opt-In email Marketing:Opt-in email marketing works like this. There are various web sites and companies that compile lists of email addresses of people who are interested in receiving information on a particular topic. The people on a given list have chosen to be on that list – they have “opted in.” Let’s say for instance that there is an opt-in list for people who are interested in golf products (and there are many such lists available). The people who have opted in on that list WANT to receive email about golf products. They have opted in with the understanding that they will receive such email, and they have the option to opt-out at any time.

So the owners of that golf opt-in email list will rent the list out to companies that have golf related products for sale, like golf clubs and other equipment, instructional videos, books and so on.

There are hundreds of opt-in lists available, with people who have opted-in to receive information on various topics, to receive newsletters, etc.

House List Email Marketing: Companies who sell products and services will collect the email addresses of customers and prospects. This is called a “house email list”, and is made up of people who have had some contact with the company and who usually have given their permission to receive information from that company.

Companies will send various email campaigns out to their house lists, notifying people about new products and services, special deals, special offerings to customers only, special events, etc.

Bulk Spam: Although there is some debate and variance of opinion on what constitutes “spam”, for our purposes we will define “bulk spam” as promotional email that is sent out to large lists made up of addresses of people who have not agreed to be on any opt-in or house list.

Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Earthlink and others, will try to prevent people from sending out bulk spam from their servers, and many will terminate the email account of anyone caught sending out large amounts of bulk spam.

A Major Change in Email Marketing

There has been a dramatic change in the email marketing field over the last two years.

The change has been brought about by an incredible over-saturation of promotional email being sent out to people who have not opted-in to receive it – in short – “bulk spam.” You’ve seen the emails for mortgage refinancing, for Viagra and other drugs, for drugs that purport to enhance parts of one’s anatomy or improve one’s sex life, offers of discount software, free iPods, pornography, the list goes on and on.

The problem with the vast majority of bulk spammers is that they do not follow practices that have evolved as accepted practices amongst legitimate email marketers, most of which are now Federal law under the CAN-SPAM act (see end of this chapter for an analysis of CAN-SPAM). The two most egregious violations that are made routinely by vast numbers of spammers are: 1) not allowing the recipient to opt-out of future mailings (or pretending to have an opt-out mechanism but not really taking people off their lists), and 2) having deceptive subject lines in their emails. Both are now violations of US Federal law.

Unfortunately, the result of the incredible avalanche of bulk spam, and the routine violations of laws mentioned above, is that opt-in email, once a great way to make money (and one of the authors has used this medium to make millions of dollars for clients) is now for all intents and purposes - dead. People are receiving too much bulk spam to pay attention to any type of unsolicited email – they just hit the delete button. This is a shame but it’s the reality.

The Good News

Now that we’ve given you all the bad news, here is the good news. There are still some specific uses where email marketing is quite effective:

a. House List Email Marketing: Email marketing to a house list is extremely effective, even given the saturation problems today. People are used to receiving email from the companies that they do business with, and they are generally interested in and accepting of special offers, discounts, new products, customer service and tech support type traffic.

So building a house email list is extremely effective, extremely profitable (costs to send to it are negligible, especially in the beginning), and the larger your house list becomes, the more valuable an asset it is to your company.

More Information / Source by creeper-seo.com