Affordable Email Marketing
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When a small business needs help, an affordable email marketing plan is a welcome answer to what could otherwise be a costly expense. Internet mailings are a powerful way to reach thousands and maybe even millions of potential customers for a relatively small amount of money. This is especially true when compared to traditional direct mail campaigns using snail mail. And while direct mail response may not be evident for days or weeks, Internet mail broadcasting can offer almost real time analysis of its impact, results and return on investment. This is especially true when the model is a business to customer (b2c) campaign. But the word affordable is a relative term and it may mean a good deal for the company ordering the mailing, or it might mean getting the cheapest delivery despite the questionable quality of the results. So an affordable email marketing campaign may not be an appropriate Internet mailing strategy.
Affordable email marketing probably always begins with a discussion of how much the campaign will cost. All of this depends on what kind of delivery model is chosen, in house with software and staff doing the work or farmed out to a marketing firm specializing in Internet mail broadcasting. There is a third alternative, and that is using software downloads from an outside firm, but doing the work in house with support from the marketing firm. Just like buying a car, there are cheap models and ones that cost a lot more and the same can be said for Internet mailing options. Software costs can run between a few hundred and a thousand dollars, depending on the maker and the features. Email broadcasting firm services can be as inexpensive as seventy five or a hundred dollars for one hundred thousand or more emails sent out and go upwards to more than five hundred dollars for each ten thousand broadcast, but the comparisons may not be apples and apples.
Full investigation ought to be given to any software or Internet mailing service and not just to the basic cost. Many of the affordable email marketing software packages that are available are actually priced by the amount of emails sent per campaign. Prices can vary from one cent per email per thousand and move down in price as more emails are bundled and sent. Stand alone software can begin with costs under five hundred dollars. The typical software that a company can use will offer a number of templates and designs and will allow the importing of data based mailing lists. Additionally, the software will provide the means to track the action taken on the Internet mailing campaign such as opened and deleted messages. Additionally, real time reports are available from most programs to track opened links.
A look at an affordable email marketing campaign will probably include the option of farming out the entire job to an Internet mail marketing firm. This will especially be true if the mailing is a company's first bulk mailing and if the company does not have a substantial in-house mailing list. If the campaign is handled completely by a marketing service, which is quite normal if a circumstance quickly arises and a same day broadcast is called for, the service will be able to completely design the message from top to bottom. Typically for a full service campaign, there will be set-up fees that may amount to as much as a thousand dollars. Additionally there will most likely be a per email charge which will vary from firm to firm. Putting God first in one's life has great benefit. "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths." (Proverbs 3:5, 6)
For the small business owner, putting together an affordable email marketing campaign has some issues that cannot be ignored. The first is the most formidable and that is ownership of a trustworthy mail list. For a young company the list of email contacts will be quite limited. Business addresses are usually secured through reply letters, sales team activity and trade shows, but it takes a number of years for this list to begin to become what might be called extensive. But a blind mailing list, that can certainly be bought or rented and just used randomly, will have quite high deletion and unopened rates because the company has no name recognition with the recipient. In a situation like that, an affordable email marketing campaign may have just become a waste of money.
An affordable email marketing campaign may be best based on a mail list that is comprised of opt-in recipients. This is a list of addresses that have already given permission for messages from unknown sources to be sent to them. It is extremely important for the company spending a lot of money for a wide message broadcast to be confident that the majority of the messages will be opened. It is clearly a waste of money for a campaign to be viewed as spam by a majority of the recipients and can hurt future mail campaigns as well as the sending company's reputation. In the event a company is accused of spamming, an ISP can take severe action against its website including the removal from the Internet. So the term affordable suddenly becomes subjective. It certainly is not affordable if the inexpensive campaign suddenly becomes the focus of complaints and legal action.
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