In this blog I am showing you some email marketing techniques and strategies useful for professionals, small and medium-sized companies, which do not have significant capital to invest in surveys and market research and in expensive advertising, but which at the same time are effective because ' they can give you immediate and measurable results, with a small investment and without major risks.
But if you really want to have these results you must absolutely forget:
To spam, even if only with companies and not with private individuals!
If you believe that it is legitimate to send unauthorized emails to the whole world targeted with your product, and this only because you receive an unsolicited message from you every 30 seconds... then it means that you have understood nothing!
I'll give you an example: imagine you receive a visit from a representative who wants to sell you a supply that you may also need.
The salesman is 'nice, for goodness', he also seems prepared, but every time he comes to visit you, he knocks on your office door, instead of waiting for someone to tell him that you have freed yourself and that you are waiting for him!
Certainly a representative like this will never do a lot of business and will only cause annoyance: know that by sending unauthorized messages you make the same impression... you only have to lose... and in addition to not concluding good deals, you risk being reported to the Privacy Guarantor, with the resulting bad publicity, and end up on blacklists, or even be blocked by ISPs, including your own internet service provider, and you will gain a very bad reputation, so you will be forced to close up shop, because on the internet negative opinions travel at the speed of light!
Furthermore, unauthorized emails, in addition to being prohibited by law, are annoying and create economic problems due to investments in antivirus and the time that must be wasted distinguishing them from legitimate messages.
But there's more: in fact, consider that not all legitimate messages can be interesting... many will end up in the trash... if not in the spam box of the end user and/or that of the ISP (Internet Service Provider). (and you will have to apply very specific strategies, which you will find in the Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up, to prevent all this from happening)... let alone unsolicited or unauthorized messages or messages without consent!
But don't be discouraged, because there are more remedies so that you can send emails to companies, without having had prior written consent, to ensure that you do not have to suffer negative legal consequences.
We will talk about it soon at this point.
To use external email marketing services that send your messages to their contact database!
In addition to having no control over their lists, you will only be able to conclude a few meager deals... you will also be able to sell... but it's a long way from here to saying you can achieve success with services of this kind.
You may also receive complaint messages about spam, because often in the contract clauses there is a note according to which these external services do not give any guarantee and do not assume any responsibility for any actions for spam by the guarantor, considering that the messages sent contain your company logo and not theirs.
Also consider that once the message has been created, you will not be able to modify it, making any split testing strategy difficult and/or more expensive to verify the message that gives the best results.
It will therefore be impossible to create a good number of loyal customers, which is the main purpose of any production and sales activity.
To use external email marketing services that provide you with a database of names and addresses that you will contact via email!
You may encounter two types, without the price giving you any signal regarding professionalism.
For a first type, very professional and serious, you will be guaranteed the existence of the recipient's consent to be part of that database and at the same time to receive your messages, but by contract you will not be able to use the purchased contacts to send them promotional emails, with hyperbolic phrases or with references to discounts and prices.
You will only be able to send descriptive contents of your business, your site, and what you sell, forcing you to carry out promotional campaigns only on your website, perhaps being able to obtain a small turnover, but only in the long term and without being able to enjoy the results immediate results that only promotional email campaigns can give you, after testing their effectiveness in terms of message openings and conversions.
It's money wasted because even in this case it's difficult to create a large group of loyal customers, certainly not impossible, but it takes a long time... and if you have to make revenue in the short term... forget it.
There is another type of external service that does not require the same conditions, perhaps they are a little more flexible, but believe me you even run the risk of being reported for spam, because they do not give you any guarantee on the actual correspondence between consent and membership in the purchased database and consent to receiving your emails with promotional content!
In each of these types of contacts, the best solution is to obtain their consent to send promotional emails with a specific telemarketing strategy, in order to verify the contact person to send the message to and their email address, received with the purchased database.
It is certainly not a quick system like the one you could create based on a series of contacts to immediately send promotional messages, but it is certainly better than sending generic messages to get to know your company.
To use external non-professional email marketing services to send your messages to your database, created with effort, because:
You have no control over the mailings.
As there are new members, these services impose ever-increasing monthly costs on you.
If you already have a list created with another software you cannot import it into the service software if it was not created with double opt-in.
You can only manage subscriptions with double opt-in.
You could run into sending queues, which without any warning would postpone your sendings to an unknown date!
If one day you want to change your system, you risk losing some of your contacts!
Of course, if you have the necessary capital, these services can be very professional and allow you to save time and money instead of purchasing a server where you can install self-hosted autoresponder software.
The non-professional services can be used by those who are new to the internet, have a small list and do not want to make any significant investments on the web, being able to spend no more than 100 euros per year, including these services, domain name and web space.
There are also some external professional e-mail marketing services, which within certain limits, in terms of number of recipients, allow them to be free, as long as they accept that their target may receive advertising messages within the contents of the e-mails. email.
Naturally you understand that this solution, although economically convenient, is not in terms of professionalism in the eyes of your recipients, who may misunderstand or not understand the reasons why you may have inserted messages that are not very useful as they are not coherent with your editorial line or with the object of your business.
It is obvious that when the business grows it will be better to change the system, but with the necessary precautions so as not to lose the data already acquired.
External professional email marketing services are very attractive for companies of a certain size because they allow significant savings, they must be structured and designed to be used for Italy, therefore by third-party Italian companies.
Professional external services are also recommended for professionals, small and medium-sized companies, since on the one hand the standard services, which are mainly foreign, do not offer, despite having increasing costs based on the increase in members, an excellent service in every respect of view, while professional external services, despite having rather high management costs, guarantee notable results in terms of contacts and customers and therefore can be supported by all types of companies and freelancers.
To use autoresponder software from the self hosted category because:
You can now realize that the costs of external e-mail marketing services are almost similar to those you could sustain in the context of self-hosted autoresponder software.
The most obvious difference is that on the one hand you will no longer have to waste time installing software on your potential server and consulting and/or requesting assistance from the hosting service provider.
You will no longer have problems because you will have services available that will allow you to avoid the risk of having to deal with incompetent technical assistance, as often happened to me with HostGator.
In fact, I calculated exactly that in a year, what I spent was double the actual yield, due to the incompetence and the spasmodic and prolonged waits for days in search of an effective solution for the problems that the servers granted by HostGator they provoked me.
Not to mention the abusive and undue payment requests sent to my bank, and the money stolen for services no longer used.
HostGator is no longer the one that 8 years ago guaranteed a solution to your problem within an hour.
Now his assistants, with the excuse of turning to someone more competent than them to get the desired solution, do nothing but put you on hold, and at the same time dedicate their attention to problems that perhaps they know better and can highlight their competence in the eyes of their supervisors.
But not only that, because they still have to get in touch with 3 or 4 requests for assistance at the same time.
What's their little game?
Very simple, instead of ensnaring the customer with spasmodic waits before someone responds to the requests, they currently prefer, as a marketing strategy, to respond immediately, giving you the sugar, and then making you wait dozens and dozens of minutes, with the excuse that they have to consult with someone more competent.
The real problem is that HostGator is no longer the independent company created almost 15 years ago, but is part of a group owned by an investment company, Endurance International Group, which also owns others well-known hosting provider brands, such as BlueHost.
How to notice this?
It is sufficient to enter the support chat interface to verify that it is always the same interface, with the exact same typing problems, common to all the companies that are part of that group.
Certainly if I were American I would have sent a summons to court demanding damages.
But being almost 10,000 kilometers away they account for the lion's share.
For my part, I am also pushing to damage them as much as possible with my negative word of mouth.
But it's not just the costs and time losses of managing the server and installing the autoresponder software.
Even owners of autoresponder software have now doubled the costs of the license and annual updates.
There are even those who, like arpReach, produced in Great Britain, make you pay the famous tax on replacing the domain name, no longer used, with a new domain name, a tax which amounts to as much as 35 dollars.
Just think about the fact that, having had the possibility from the old owner to grant nine domain names, unlike the current owner of arpReach, who only grants two, one day I decided to change just one of these two domain names, they asked me for 315 dollars, because for them I no longer had space to install new domains in their database, considering that with my old 9 domain names I would have exhausted that space.
Naturally, in order not to succumb to such blackmail, I closed with them forever and changed platform, moving from WordPress to Blogger, therefore with zero costs on everything!
It's a shame that arpReach will suffer the costs of ferocious negative word of mouth, a natural consequence that those who reveal themselves to be greedy for money on the internet suffer, and who at the same time act by blackmailing others, in order to have undeserved economic advantages.
