E-mail marketing in this economy has to be a major strategic role in a company’s marketing efforts. If you’re not using e-mail for marketing your business, you’re simply not taking adequate advantage of the online medium to position your company as an expert.

Most business marketing strategies deal primarily with customer acquisition. Getting new customers is not cheap, howeever, meansing a smart marketer needs to work hard to cultivate repeat business from an existing customers. While SEO and PPC advertising is a great tool to find new leads, permission-based bulk email software, when used responsibly and ethically, excels at:

1. Converting them to sales
2. Solidifying a relationship that will produce repeat sales

Some modern email marketing techniques are:

• Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)
• Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)
• RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)

Auto-responders

E-mail autoresponse systems are a powerful tool to keep in your email marketing arsenal. If you have never set up a “drip campaign,” you should do so immediately. It’s one of the few online marketing techniques where you can “set it and forget it.”

The downfall of any marketing technique is if it requires too much human involvement in order to work. Ideally, you want to design a marketing system that almost completely runs itself. With an auto-responder, you can do just that. Here’s how it can work:

1. A user signs up on your website (or you add them after a phone conversation)
2. They instantly get an email with a free report or instant download of some sort. For the real estate field, it could be something as simple as “Why I’ll buy your home if I don’t sell it in 15 days.” The idea is to create a useful resource that people will want to sign up for, and that they will be willing to give you to receive by email.
3. They automatically get a follow-up email an hour, a day, or a week later. You can even refer to “the email I sent last week” because your drip system automatically schedules the delivery of each message in the sequence.
4. You can automatically send more followup emails at key time intervals of your choosing. You can say “Three weeks ago, I sent you a free report entitled….”

Broadcast Email Marketing

Broadcast emails are distinguished from drip campaigns because they are sent as a broadcast message to the entire list at the same time. Email newsletters are a perfect way to establish your expertise as a niche expert in your business, or you can use it to simply broadcast product announcements and company promotional materials. You choose the material you want in the newsletter. The key is to gear it toward the interests of your users as closely as possible.

An email newsletter marketing system should allow for email scheduling as well. With this feature, you can write announcements in advance and have them repeat annually, such as “It’s December 1st, have you done your Christmas shopping yet?”

RSS Email Updates

Subscriptions to RSS Feeds are a great way to market a blog. Browsers like Firefox make subscribing to a website feed easy, but the savvy email marketer knows that most people don’t read their bookmarked feeds – but people do read their email. So if a reader is interested enough in your website content to sign up for your RSS feed by email, you’re much more likely to keep him reading your blog than if he had only bookmarked it in his browser.

Tags: bulk, bulk email marketing, Email Marketing, email newsletter marketing, optin email marketing, permission-based email marketing