Direct mail tips

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

How to Start Your Own Email Newsletter

Starting an ezine (Email Magazine) or electronic mail newsletter is quite easy.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Choose a topic

You can take any subject that you like, although obviously it assists if you take a subject that people will be interested in reading!

You do not necessitate to take selling or making money for your subject - but if you do, you might make better by choosing a more than specific subject (for example, instead of just "making money" how about "making money on eBay" etc.)

One other consideration is choosing your topic: is how you mean to make money from it. For example, if you trust to do money from affiliate programs, you ought to take a subject which binds in with plentifulness of nice affiliate programmes (otherwise you'll have got nil to promote).

2. Kind out the mechanics

While, in theory, you could run an ezine yourself just using your electronic mail program, and manually keeping path of subscribe and unsubscribe requests, you would quickly happen that doing so is likely to be at best incredibly time-consuming, and at worst, totally impractical.

You will therefore necessitate some kind of book or programme to pull off your mailing list. There are many programmes and books available which are specifically designed for running a mailing list. Alternatively, many (but not all) autoresponders are able to not only work as autoresponders, but can also run mailing lists.

3. Promote Your Ezine

Now you've put up your ezine and subscription process, the adjacent measure is to begin getting subscribers.

At minimum, what you should make is at the subscription word form to your web pages.

There is also whole subdivision of our www.ezineblast.com land site dedicated to getting ezine subscribers, so you can read that for ideas.

4. Send Out The First Issue

Once you've put up your ezine and got some subscribers, it's clock to direct out the first edition of your ezine.

Obviously, you'll necessitate to set up the text, but you should also read our formatting tips to guarantee that your ezine shows properly on all your subscribers' computers.

The exact procedure for sending out the newsletter will depend on what program/script you use, so check up on the instruction manual that with that.

For additional thoughts about creating and promoting your ain electronic mail newsletter, I propose you take a expression at The Step-By-Step Usher to Creating and Promoting Your Ezine Type A step-by-step usher to creating & promoting your ain successful ezine!

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Thursday, May 03, 2007

How To Make Sure That Your Legitimate Marketing Emails Are Not Identified As Spam

If your business relies on email marketing to get your message through to your customers, you might want to pay attention to this. Spam filters lately have increasingly been hurting legitimate businesses by blocking marketing emails. The fact that your customers have confirmed that they want to subscribe to your marketing emails and newsletter does not guarantee that your emails would get through to them. And it is even worse when you don't know that you or your company have been blacklisted.

There are quite a few reasons why you might be blacklisted. The most common one is you are accused of sending unsolicited emails. This could be your subscriber just forgot that some time in the past they subscribed to your newsletters, or this could be people who did this deliberately to hurt your business.

In order to make sure that your emails reach your customers, you have to monitor the emails delivery and check if your emails bounce back. Normally the bounce message will contain the reason why your email is not delivered. Pay attention to these messages as they might indicate that your emails are marked as spam: Access Denied, Message Refused, Client Host Rejected, Sender Address Rejected, Sender Domain Not Found, and similar messages.

When you are accused of spamming, you should remain calm. The first thing you need to do is to prove that you are innocent. And this is where you would thank the confirmed opt-in mechanism. For those of you who don't know what confirmed opt-in is, when a user subscribes to a newsletter, the user will then get an email that basically asks the user to confirm their subscription by clicking at the activation link. Their subscription will become active only when they click on the activation link. How would this benefit you? When the users click at the activation link, you will have a record of the date, time, and IP address of the computer used to confirm. You can then use this as a proof that the users did confirm they wanted to receive emails from you.

Some other basic tips to protect you from being blacklisted:


  • Make sure your emails conform to CAN-SPAM act (search Google if you don't know what CAN-SPAM is).

  • Never send emails to prospects that haven't confirm their subscriptions.

  • Make sure that your unsubscribe link works.

  • Get whitelisted with major email providers (Google, AOL, Yahoo).

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