MarketingProfs' Members Register for B2B Forum 2010 for just $695! (good until 11/30) »

Ask your question ... sign up today! It's FREE!
E-Marketing     
 
This question has been closed, and points have been awarded.
Newbie Needs Help In Email Marketing
Posted By: Idris on 7/18/2006 6:52 AM (CST) 200 Points
Hi all,

I want to know about Email Marketing. How to brand your product through email marketing? What are the softwares required to run email marketing campaign? Is it ok to Harvest emails? I also want to know about IP’s. Just consider the situation like if I am getting solution (web based email marketing software) from the Email marketing company whose IP addresses they will be using? Is it my IP address (example: info@xyz.com’s IP address) or they will have pool of IP addresses? If they use their IP addresses how will I know that it is not blacklisted? How to plan for Email marketing campaign? If my objective is to a)Brand my product b) reach more customers c) 100% delivery success d) Sales, how should I start and what factors should I look at?

Posted by: Inbox_Interactive Accepted Answer
7/18/2006 7:12 AM (CST)
I don't think I would rely on email to brand a product. Generally speaking, you want to send email only to people who asked for it, so they should already be familiar with your product or service. You can certainly use email to reinforce your brand with your customers, but as far as "building" it, I don't think it can be done using generally accepted email marketing techniques.

As far as harvesting goes, that is a 100% no-no in the ethical email marketing world. Having said that, I have seen a small number of B2B companies do this with great success when they use email addresses from a trade directory or other published source. In this case, the recipients probably know the sending company, and they probably have some interest in the product or service. I have seen these harvested lists perform very well with very small unsubscribe or complaint rates. I don't condone this activity, but it can be effective in small doses.

As far as software vs. hosted solution, there's little doubt that you want to use a hosted solution. You can get Web-based email marketing for $20/month, so there's no real reason, in my opinion, to ever buy software. These ASPs make it all so very easy.

If you use the ASP, it will be the ASPs IP address. They usually have more than one. If you pay enough money, you can get your own IP address with an ASP, but it is not cheap. As for blacklisting, that is part of life with any ASP of any size. If you have a consumer list, you need to have seed email addresses with all of the major ISPs (AOL, Comcast, etc.) and Web email services (Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.). You might also include paying for a delivery monitoring service, but again you're paying more for that.

We all started somewhere, and it sounds like you're new to email marketing. I'd get a book on the subject and start there, although I'm no aware of one book that will cover all of the questions you asked. Just don't be in too much of a rush to get started because that will lead to mistakes, and in the email marketing world, you can't undo what you've done.

Good luck.
 
Posted by: W.M.M.A. Accepted Answer
7/18/2006 8:07 AM (CST)
Branding your product takes much more than an eMail marketing campaign. Branding, as well as marketing is a long-term commitment to your company, products and clients.

To be more clear, first, marketing must be defined. My short version of marketing is:
EVERYTHING YOU DO. From the moment you open your doors to the type of clothing you wear, to the way you greet people (not just customers), and finally your signage, letterhead and material...is marketing.

Included, is your suggestion of eMail marketing. This is a topic that can be discussed and argued for days. As paul stated, it's time for you to begin to read, and/or hire a Prof that is familiar with eMail marketing, who could help you to develop budgets and strategies that make sense for your product, that blend in your industry and that impact your clientele.

Hope we've helped a bit.

Randall
WMMA
Helping You Reach The Summit
 
Posted by: postfuture* Accepted Answer
7/18/2006 8:44 AM (CST)
There are numerous facets to email marketing and selecting a vendor or a software system can be a challenge all by it’s self. I can help you to some extent but you need to understand this medium is vast and fraught with land mines.

First, understand your company’s culture….by that, does your company prefer to “own” or “rent” specialty software? If they’re more likely to rent, I would suggest you buy the 2005 Forrester Report on the top email service providers. It’s titled The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q4 2005 by Shar VanBoskirk. The companies in this report include:
1. CheetahMail (Parent: Experian)
2. Digital Impact (Parent: Acxiom)
3. DoubleClick Email Solutions (Acquired by Epsilon)
4. Epsilon Interactive
5. Harte-Hanks Postfuture
6. Premier Global Services
7. Responsys
8. RightNow Technologies
9. YesMail

All these companies are considered to be the top email service providers (ESPs) in the US in terms of the breadth of their offering, functionality, their technology platform and services. There is another good report from Jupiter Research that’s titled “E-Mail Marketing Buyer’s Guide, 2005 by David Daniels.

Most of these companies provide a hosted (rented) ASP solution and most offer multiple service offerings that can include self-service, collaborative, full-service or an agency model.

In many respects, your budget, your business needs and the company’s perception of the email channel, will point you toward the providers you should look at. For instance, if you have a small budget (<60,000 per year) and all you want to do is send the same message to everyone, there are over 40 ESPs that can provide that service. With that in mind, there are numerous “low-cost” providers like Constant Contact, Blue Hornet, and Cooler Email that are limited on their offering but allow you a way learn without investing in an ESP that may not be suited for your needs as you get started.


If on the other hand your needs involve targeted content and in-depth reporting, sequenced communications, transactional messaging and integration with your web analytics provider, you should probably look at the vendors provided in the two research reports.

To change gears and go the other direction, if your culture is more oriented toward buying and owning specialty software for email marketing, you should carefully consider the following:

• Delivery Assurance – There are no assurances that your emails will reach your audience (filters, firewalls, ISPs, etc). Companies face the potential risk of corrupting your company’s IP address for sending basic day-to-day emails. Additionally it requires a staff to manage black lists, maintain relationships and compliance with all major ISP’s.

• Quality Assurance – In order to know that your email is displaying and functioning properly across various email readers a QA suite of 50-90 email accounts. Most build or buy systems have serious deficiencies in this area.

• Tracking – Limited or no ability to track the delivery of promotional or operational emails. This is especially true with transactional emails and provides no capacity for enabling cross-sell/up-sell opportunities. Additionally, limited or no tracking ability customer service cannot verify the consumers receipt of the email.

• Functionality - Limited to what your IT department can provide > dynamic cross-sell or up-sell offers for instance may represent a costly challenge to develop and implement

• Change Requests – Installed email systems can have costly time and functional limitations associated with changes requests or product enhancements.

• Issue Resolution – Company’s will need to hire personnel to handle all the issues that develop from Spam complaints and delivery problems.

• List Management – Limited or no real-time synchronization of opt-ins, opt-outs, and bounces with promotional email list located at Postfuture. Manual replies must be handled and processed in accordance with Federal Law.

• Infrastructure Costs – What will it cost to have the necessary architecture like redundant web servers, redundant database servers, RAID via storage area network, redundant load balancers and firewall, high-speed switches and routers support plus the bandwidth to support at least 25 mbps per second.

• Continuous Product Improvement – How will you keep up when your core competency is not email marketing? How will you keep up if your competition is using a leading edge service provider?

• Core Competency – It’s usually something other than email marketing. Hosted ASP's can bring best practices and ideas along with critical details that you won't get from case studies that really made the "program" successful. When you own, it's all on your back to figure out.

In any event, the issue of owning versus renting is very real and you must have this issue resolved before you begin contacting vendors. Otherwise you’ll be wasting your time and their’s.

Good luck!

Chuck Smith
(214) 405-4617
 
Posted by: darcy.moen Accepted Answer
7/18/2006 1:23 PM (CST)
How to brand your product through email marketing?

Use your logo in the outgoing messages a lot. You may want to have a custom email template made just for your email marketing messages, and use it. Over time, repetition will create the brand effect.

What are the softwares required to run email marketing campaign? You can rent, you can buy, or you can use opensource software. Since you are in the learning stage, you are likely to invest a lot of money in renting...and most likely make a lot of mistakes. If you buy specialized software for your desktop, once again, you are likely going to be spending a lot of money on mistakes. I would recommend you download some opensource software, install it into your web site, and make all the mistakes you need to there...at least you won;t be spending a lot of money while learning. I would recommend www.phplist.com as one system to start leaning with.

Is it ok to Harvest emails? NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!! ALWAYS GET PERMISSION! no exceptions. ALWAYS!


I also want to know about IP’s. Just consider the situation like if I am getting solution (web based email marketing software) from the Email marketing company whose IP addresses they will be using? Is it my IP address (example: info@xyz.com’s IP address) or they will have pool of IP addresses?

The IP address is always the IP address of the source computer. If it is not the source computer IP, its most likely spoofed or forged. If it spoofed or forged, your message will most likley hit the spam box.


If they use their IP addresses how will I know that it is not blacklisted?

You can always check the IP against the blacklist at www.spamcop.com or www.dnsstuff.com

How to plan for Email marketing campaign? If my objective is to a)Brand my product b) reach more customers c) 100% delivery success d) Sales, how should I start and what factors should I look at?

Never bank on 100 percent success. Your playing the odds, and you might be fortunate to generate 2 percent rates. If you get 100 pecent, post what you did here...we'd all be dying to learn the secret!! :-)

Hope I helped you.

Darcy Moen
Customer Loyalty Network
 
Posted by: Clive Fernandes Accepted Answer
7/19/2006 5:46 AM (CST)
Hi,

I think you have already got some excellent responses on how to select the proper software or ASP. I will therefore concentrate more on the aspect of how to go about actually building your email list for marketing/branding purposes.

As you must have already gathered, "harvesting" of emails is a big NO-NO. Then how do you go about builing that mailing list. Its easy enough to choose from among the various email service providers, but even if you have the best ESP in your court the big issue is still getting those email addresses to send to.

This I feel is best done gradually and virally. First of all you need to give your prospective customers a reason to signup to your mailing list. This could be something free like a ebook or some usefull information. Depending on your product it could also be a demo and promise of "email only" discount offers.

Next you have to make sure that each subscriber of yours becomes your marketer. Have a link in each of your mailings asking your readers to forward the email/give you addresses of friends they think might be interested in the same.

I would feel that a small text asking them to forward the message to thier friends would be more effective than asking them to give you the friends email address. If you do this remember to have another link in your mailing so that people who have recieved the mailing from a friend can also signup to your mailing list.

I would like to suggest a good open source software that you can use to start off with. It is useful both in building/maintaining your mailing lists as well as sending mailers. More information at http://mojo.skazat.com/

Hope this helps.

Clive Fernandes
Clive Fernandes Consulting
 
Posted by: carrie77 Moderator Response
7/19/2006 6:41 AM (CST)
MarketingProfs has a Buyer's Guide (Vendor Selector) of companies that do email broadcasting. You might check there.

Carrie
 


Get more answers ... ReTweet this!

Would you like to post a response?
Welcome to Know-How Exchange!
This is a collaborative community. We welcome everyone's participation.
All you need to do is login. Enter your account info in the box above (top right).
Not a member? Not a problem. Register here (it's FREE and EASY).




Know-How Exchange powered by MarketingProfs


Sponsored Links

Buy a Link Now

Just Released ... Download Today!
Just Released ... Download Today!
Look inside
Included with Premium Membership
User Name:
Password:
Remember Me
Forgot your password?

Top 25 KHE Experts
(E-Marketing)
Jay Hamilton-Roth (20328)
Pepper Blue (16557)
Inbox_Interactive (12143)
stevea (8997)
darcy.moen (8899)
mgoodman (8341)
W.M.M.A. (7084)
Clive Fernandes (6555)
michael (6354)
telemoxie (5974)
Neil (5132)
Mikee (4050)
MRowland (3735)
mbarber (3717)
ASVP/ChrisB (3693)
AndrewS (3491)
Harry Hallman (3405)
Peter (henna gaijin) (3254)
NuCoPro (3110)
thinkmor (3075)
amandavega (2947)
Frank Hurtte (2873)
Gary Bloomer (2846)
ROIHUNTER (2746)
SRyan ;] (2541)
Recently Posted Marketing Jobs
Director of Marketing and Communications
Demand Generation Manager
Marketing/Advertising Faculty
Director of Marketing
Market Analyst
Sr. Field Marketing Manager - Business Intell.
Associate Vice President of Marketing and Corporat
Marketing Manager
[more jobs]

Join over 355,000 members ... SIGN UP!

My email address is and I'd like my password to be .

Already a member? Sign In!

My email address is , and my password is .


HACKER SAFE certified sites prevent over 99.9% of hacker crime.