Email Marketing - A free, guerrilla approach.

One of the easiest way to promote your service or product is by email marketing. We are spoil for choice as there are many email marketing services available out there. But why pay if you can do it yourself? Here are some useful tips. First off, how to collect a healthy number of emails for your database.

Embrace spam - By this I did not mean the type that told you just won USD 1 million rather emails forwarded by friends. Forwarded emails usually contain plenty of emails of past recipients of that email. Collect it

Use search engine - Pick any search engine. Yahoo and Google? Fine then. It a handy tool but can be time consuming. Type " *@putsomethinghere.com " and you can see bunch of emails with that extension pop up. Be sure of the URL of the company / organization that you are searching for.

Use P2P tools - Ever heard of Limewire? Apart from downloading movie or music, these tools also allow you to browse other people hard drive. Search "emails, email or *.wab, *.vcf, or *.csv ". This is like fishing. Depends on luck but hey, that's where the thrill is right?

Exchange address book with friends - Why don't I think of that! Just find friends with similar interest and wave length as you and exchange or ask if you can use their contacts. Imagine, if one people have 1000 contacts. If 5 people? You do the math.

Send emails to groups rather to individual - To save time, don't just send emails to individual but also to Groups, such as Yahoo Groups or Google Groups. You save time and the group member is always expending.

After we have accumulate a healthy database, you can start sending email now, but here some advice.

Be consistent but don't over do it - People will easily get annoyed and ignore you the next time you send your email. Maybe one a month or when you have an important product or important announcement, then you start sending emails.

Catchy title - Short, sweet and catchy tittle to entice the receiver to open the email

Include hyperlink- Don't write too long and detail about the product. Make it compact and include hyperlink to your website so reader can go and read the rest by themselves.

Include unsubscribe option - If you are using mailing list or email marketing tool, give the recipient an option to unsubscribe from receiving more email. This is a good feature to keep then from being force to receive something that they did not like.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank god if you send unsolicited mail like that to europeans you can go to jail.

That is spam and a crime. Stop giving stupid advice like that.

In Europe you have to have an e-mail sent by the person you send the mail to in order for it to be legal. And as in all internet legal regimes it is the reciever's country law that apply so if any american person from anyhwhere where this is not a crime sends an e-mail he'll be subject to criminal a juditial action.

men you people are so ignorant it annoys me. you just love to have your mailbox filled to the hilt with spam. enjoy, hope you get some sort of virus

Anonymous said...

Dude, (anonymous commenter) you're a jackass. There is a difference between spam and email marketing, the methods spammers use to gain email addresses are even more bogus, and their emails are meaningless, and aren't really trying to do anything other piss us off, and drive the anti-spam software market. At worst you could call this sort of advertising junk mail, not spam. On your Europe is better shtick, anyone that thinks making more laws solves problems, is full of shit anyway. Finding new solutions is always better than throwing "examples" in jail. Europe sucks, and more and more pissy US hating Europeans move to the US every year because they would rather Love Europe from where the better opportunities are.

Anonymous said...

"At worst you could call this sort of advertising junk mail, not spam"

Errmm... you can call it all kinds of things to get us all away from that dastardly, eeevil, evil "spam" moniker, but "unsolicited email" is something we can ALL agree on. I didn't ASK for this email, so why are you sending me this?

On your "driving the anti-spam software market" pseudo-conspiracy: I'll grant you so much that all the anti-spam products by the big companies (Symantec, McAfee et al) aren't necessary, if only cos there's SO much free software available, both client and server-side, that would take care of sp... i mean, "unsolicited email".

As for your woe-is-us, beaten-USA-puppy rant against Europe, I just love your argumentation: "Europe sucks". Good that you could nail it down. I especially enjoyed reading the sources you cited on the number of Europeans moving to your glorious motherland.

Where's the eye-roll emoticon?

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