Email marketing do's and donts?

I was looking into email marketing as a possible marketing campaign. Is it ok to buy email lists or is that not legal? IF so how do you choose who to buy from? Also what is the process? I find a lot of articles on how to set up your emails and stuff but nothing on the actual process of buying, sending and how it exactly works. Any help would be appreciated. Also will my site get blacklisted by sending out emails that I purchase?

Thanks

The latest trend in this type of viral marketing is to have a database with a permission based email IDs that means a corporate cust IDs or registered users of any product.

If you have a related and permmission based DB then there is no prob at all.

Cheers

The best way for you to set this up is through a proper Viral Campaign. Ensure that you have a solid P3P policy in place, and good optin and optout this will protect you from companies like AOL who often nails spammers even if things was done correctly. I have VERY bad experiences in the purchase of an email database and suggest that you rather built your own list. There are a few genuine list that are worthwhile but they ussually belong to reputable companies such as portals.

Yeah, you ahve to be careful about the big boys like AOL who will ban your address as a spamming account at the drop of a hat even though the email is legit. We ran into this a while back. We got banned not just from AOL, but from our country's backbone (SAIX) even though the newsletters were optins (and contained the necessary optout info)...

So basically if you buy your email addresses you risk the potential of getting your website banned? I really dont want to risk it.

I currently am trying to bring in a related industry to my website so I am not just trying to get my customers to come back and buy something. Im trying to bring in new customers on a specific niche industry. What would you suggest?

Thanks

I remember back in 2000 I was consulting for a company. I suggested an email marketing campaign after the MD told me they had about 13,000 emails in their database. Well long story short. A day after the email campaign was launched their websites were switched off. It came out that the used the tool that comes with Outlook Express to search for email addresses as well as collecting email addresses by hand. They accidentally included a response email address from Internet Solutions as well. IS is the primary Internet service provider in South Africa and where their servers where located, lol It took 2 days and allot of explaining before their server was switched on again.



There are various acquisition techniques that you can use.I will list a couple, but because it is your business and you know your limitations only you can decide what to use.

Banner Advertising

Probably one of the most expensive ways to get traffic, but it can provide you with good branding and recognition. What will be good is if you combine this with a good promotion or special offer.

Viral Marketing

Probably one of the most powerful marketing techniques. Yahoo's success back in '96 is a good example of how powerful it can be. You will probably look at setting up a tool related to the niche market and use your existing database to spread the news. You can use this in a similar way as with MLM's and simply let people spread your web address through a refer a friend campaign or you can built a email database from there. Once again ensure that you have a P3P policy in place.

Editorials

I love editorials as a marketing method as it also provides benefits for SEO which is my primary source of traffic. Editorials however can also provide you with email addresses and referrals, for example with a newsletter.

Community Marketing

Community Marketing in my view is when you make posts on forums and primarily target communities within your niche market. Please DO NOT SPAM on forums. I personally hate these idiots and it is a perfect waste of time as the forums with propper traffic are well modurated, you also damage your reputation in the niche market you are targetting. I mean become part of the community with posts in forums, articles and so forth. This will earn you respect in that community and provide you with very targetted traffic.

Please note that with all these marketing methods you need to plan your website properly in order to obtain the email addresses on an opt-in basis. Get them to read some good content they will receive in the newsletters.

One final remark. I didn't say do not purchase a database. You can go into a deal with several companies where they request an opt-in from their extensive database of visitors. There are other options available depending on your budget. However, you need to make sure that the database you obtain is legit. The crappy ones outnumber the good ones 10/1 if not more.

Thanks for the posts. I appreciate the insight. Good stuff

Thanks

Sorry so late getting to this post but you may want to either enroll here or be sure your list comes from someone that is a member of DNEList.com