The dangers of email marketing

Email is a good way to stay in touch with customers because when people come online, one of the first thing they do is check their emails. Email list is still the most valuable asset online. No wonder email volumes continue to grow. EMarketer study found that e-mail volume in the US will rise to nearly 2.7 trillion by 2007.

Keep your audience email with you. Your blog or any other facilities online should have email notification built into it. But one of the major problems online is unwanted commercial bulk email otherwise called spam. When you send bulk mail, it drains and affects the server so the authorities are after those who send unsolicited commercial bulk mail. And they have built technologies and filters that prevent bulk mails going into inbox.

After researching or developing products, you send email to a list only to discover that the subscriber never saw it because a spam blocker or filter sends your emails into a spam box or bulk folder—spam will frustrate your traffic.

What about if it is solicited? In the early days of the Internet, people willingly subscribed to mailing list but now they’ve stopped. Nobody wants ads. So it is almost impossible to get a large solicited email list. DoubleClick study found that 64.7% of all legitimate emails sent are never opened. Filters and triggers will block your emails and newsletters even if it is permission-based.

People can now identify a commercial email by merely looking at it. So if you send 10, 000 bulk emails, only about 3000 gets in, and 100 are actually opened and 40 read while the rest are deleted. Some people report email as spam and delete it even though they subscribed themselves. If you send a confirmation email so that you can know those who really want you, you will only shrink your list. You will be surprised that nobody will subscribe unless those that want to research your product or market.

And if you spam, you will get listed in spamming database. Spamming database is where email providers verify what is and is not spam. Every time you send out an email, it’s has an IP address attached to it. If your IP gets into the database: your ranking may go down, your host could de-host you, your payment processor could banned you, and you could be sending emails that are being blocked If you link to blacklisted sites, you often get blacklisted too.

To avoid getting caught in spam filters or being blocked by ISPs: don’t spam; let your subscribes add your site to their address book; some words and phrases trigger spam filters like weight, subscribe, sell, download etc. The trick is to add symbol (like an apostrophe, asterisk or dash) in the middle of words. And hope that filter doesn’t arbitrarily block you.

If you are selling something in your subject line, spam filter will likely block you. Spam and email overload have actually cut down email marketing success by about 60%. Use it only to substitute other traffic techniques.

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