What is Email Marketing?

One of the most popular and easiest to get started form of online marketing is called Email Marketing. If you have an email, you have received email marketing/ads. If you ever signed up for a free offer, a contest to win something, or responded to any offer to make money online, you opted in to an email marketing/advertising program.

Equate email marketing to that type of marketing and ads that routinely go to your offline mailbox or postal box. Stores and businesses spend lots of $$$$ sending flyers, circulars, postcards, coupons, and etc to you at your physical mail address. As trees and processing which result in paper and then ink, presses, people, computers, buildings, electricity, gas, water, security, urban development (or otherwise) all go into the COST of delivering this TANGIBLE advertising product to you - they usually cost a lot.

Online, you have costs - servers, scripts, some people/labor and permissions. Usually the costs are less than their offline counterpart. This makes online advertising/marketing viable and affordable for everyone and anyone - especially for us with limited budgets.

Back to the title and question: What is email marketing anyway?

Email marketing or advertising involves you sending ads to people in the form of email.

You try to convince them to sign up for or purchase a product. Let us review some terms that are important when you enter the realm of email marketing:

* ISP: Internet Service Provider. Examples are your cable or dial up or dsl provider, your email service provider, your site provider - like Cashflowpc/Vortex. All are subject to ensuring that their members and people using their services/programs and venues do not misuse their email.

* Opt-in: In order to send your email ads to members of a program or venue, you must AGREE to receive email ads. this is called opt-in. Many times in order to receive the free gift or a chance to win something, you must agree to receive that program's email ads. This is also called opt-in. If you belong to an opt-in program which allows you to send your own emails, you can only send your email ads to people who have agreed to receive such email. You cannot simply send ads out accross the Net to anyone and everyone. Not legally anyway. To do so is called:

* Spam: Unsolicited email. You did not opt-in to a program or a list and did not agree to receive email from the program members or the individual. Most email providers have departments dedicated to spam complaints. Usually the default address to report spam is abuse@ then the email provider. Example: abuse@yahoo.com

It is important to remember what programs you 'opted' into. Many times people opt into things then forget then file spam abuse complaints when they receive email ads.

Whenever you receive what you perceive to be spam, always search for the opt-out link in the email and use that before filing a complaint.

If there is no opt-out link - simply return email the sender with "REMOVE" in the subject line. If you continue to receive email, after following those steps, you can then report the sender to your email and THEIR email provider for spam. You always need to include:

* Full Headers: This contains all the routing information associated with the email. Most email providers have a feature you envoke to see the full headers. This will show everyone the path - sender and receiver - the email took to reach your inbox.

* Spam Cops: An enforcement agency that is very powerful and can shut an ISP down for allowing spammers to broadcast using their servers, programs or venues.

* Harvesting: This is collecting a person's email address and then sending them YOUR email ads outside of the opt-in program. This abuse is wide spread especially among FFA marketing venues. You find it happening sometimes in safelists, but most admins are quite aggressive when it comes to harvesting and spamming.

* Auto Responders: Auto responders are attached to your email service and send the sender a reply email from you automatically whenever they send you an email. While there is a time and place for an auto responder, NEVER use them in your email marketing. Period. That practice will get you banned from every safelist, ffa network, and other opt-in programs on the planet. (Including traffic exchanges.)

* Contact Email: This is your email you use to receive information from the Admin or program owners. It is also used by Admin at times to send paid ads (sometimes referred to as solo ads) and etc.

NEVER use your 'real', personal contact email as the contact for email marketing.

Always set up a seperate box (or several) for your contact marketing box. This is also practical in managing spam complaints. If you never use your personal contact email to sign up for offers or on lists, ffa sites and etc - then you know for sure when you receive that unsolicited email ad that you are dealing with a spammer. So, open seperate "contact" email accounts and always use those in your marketing endeavors. Then, remember, no autoresponder.

* List Email: This is your email you use to receive emails from the other members, commercial email from Admin and the program owners. If you use safelist submitters and do a lot of ffa marketing, it is usually a good idea to use a box cleaner on your list email to help you manage the volume of email you will receive. Full boxes cause what is called Bounce.

* Bounce: This is email that cannot be delivered to your email inbox. Many things can cause bounce: servers being down or not communicating, blocked email addresses, and full inboxes.

* Ad tracking: This involves creating a special link which then records how many times someone 'clicks' on it. Useful in determining where your traffic is coming from.

* Traffic: Visitors to your site

* Groups aka Ezines: Groups or Ezines like Yahoo and MSN were early forms of what is now known as safelists. These are sites/venues which members opt in and then can post their site links, files and - send email to one another.

* Safelists: Opt-in mailing lists. These are probably one, if not the, most popular and widely used form of email marketing venues. Scripts vary greatly.

Some lists like the Cashflowpc Safelist has save and auto send features, banner ads, ad tracking, and box cleaning services.

Email ads are sent to your list email while Admin will send their personal email ads, solo ads and Admin updates to your contact email.

Note, there are a couple types of safelists which do not send your ads to member's email boxes. Listbank is a prime example. Member ads actually are posted to a board - rather like an ffa. In this respect many people refer to Listbank lists as FFA safelists. In order to read the email offers you must sign onto the list and read from the board. Some people do not find this very effective marketing as most of the Listbank sites do not offer any reason or incentive to read the messages posted.

* Safelist Submitters: Venues which store safelists in a database. Scripts then allow you to auto join the lists, manage your subscriptions, save and auto send your email ads to the lists. The Cashflowpc Submitter has ad tracking, validation services for both your email boxes and box cleaners. The safelists listed in any submitter are those which allow auto submitters to access their list. Note that not all safelists allow auto submitters.

Also note that most of the safelists in auto submitters tend to ban the same email providers. AOL, MSN, Hotmail, Netscape, ZWallet, and other (free) web-based email services are not allowed at most of these kind of lists. Yahoo runs a close second.

* FFA email marketing: When ever you make a free post to an ffa site or network you must opt-in and agree to accept email ads from the program owner/admins and the upgraded membership. (Usually Pro account holders.) These members pay for the privilege of sending you their ads. FFA email marketing runs a close second in popularity to Safelist marketing.

* Safeadlist: While your email ads are actually read via an onboard viewer, these venues also offer solo advertising which go to the member's email box. These are all credit based advertising sites meaning you read other members' ads in order to gain the credits to post your own. The Master Safeadlists also feature links, banners and a paid to view. The Cashflowpc Safeadlist is a Master Safeadlist.

These are some of the basic and most popular forms of email-style advertising. There are other venues of course, each equally valuable, useful, and interesting. In general however, buyer beware. There are many programs which make promises and then fail to deliver. Your best strategy is to try out any venue free. If it delivers, you can then investigate the paid advertising options. Then, monitor your account and test results. Past performance is never an indicator of the present or even future!

When you are ready to get started with your email marketing, Cashflowpc has resources and then networks with many programs - thus providing you with a wide-variety of options and venues for your email advertising endeavors. Explore the Center and forum for the resources to get you started with your marketing.

Then, when you are ready to put your marketing efforts into high gear, consider the Vortex Micro Upgrade option.

This option provides you with a wealth of resources including monthly and daily leads, access to the Cashflowpc Center and Safelist Submitter which houses over 1000 active lists, a second Submitter account at XtreamNet Center and Safelist Submitter, and other benefits. It is the most affordable marketing package you will find anywhere on the Net

If you are not a member of Cashflowpc, you are welcome to join our team:
http://cashflowpcmarketing.com/freesignup.html