My understanding, is that email marketing is when you mail bomb a whole bunch of people advertising something.
This should only be done with email lists which people have signed up for, never from lists containing email addresses for people who did not agree to be contacted as this is illegal in many countries, not to mention immoral.
A legitimate/moral use of email marketing for example, would be if the Developer Tutorials sent out an email to all those who are registered for the forum informing them of new tutorials/services/news about the site.
In the online world of business people have to pay close attention towards the means they use to promote their web sites and web based businesses. In the present time email marketing is considered to be one of the best ways to market your products and services. Email marketing is good in the sense it costs you less. You can reach a bulk of people through one email. This method of marketing is very effective if you take care of certain small steps.
Last edited by ryanhellyer : 05-15-2008 at 05:40 AM.
Reason: removed inline link
Email Marketing is one of my favorite ways to make money online – in fact in a lot of ways, it is the only way I make money online. Sure, people buy things from my sales pages, but they get to my sales pages via my email marketing.
Last edited by ryanhellyer : 05-16-2008 at 09:05 AM.
Reason: Irrelevant link removed
I like the concept of email marketing, but it is very difficult to build up a reasonable list of email addresses to market to. You need to recruit those users initially and get them to agree to be contacted for it to be effective. I've slowly been building up email addresses via blog comments, but I'm loathe to mail bomb them all as I never directly told many of them that by providing their email address would result in me using it for marketing purposes. There was an implication of that in the way I collected them, but I didn't explicitly state it until recently and even now 50% of the addresses I collect have not given that explicit permission unfortunately..
There are of course the scum bags out there who spam the heck out of all of us via giant email lists they have purchased, but I sincerely hope those people do not make any money.
Do any of you have any good tips on how to collect email addresses for marketing purposes in an ethical way?