Bulk Email Marketing Services 101

Email marketing is an innovative method of marketing your brand, products and services, as well as announcing sales, product promotions and offers. When planned and implemented correctly, email marketing gets you a direct access to your target audience. As such, the best email marketing ideally gets you more results in terms of conversions than other above the line marketing methods.

Many though associate email marketing with spam mails—those mails about software upgrades, sex drugs or expensive watches that have nothing to do with you. Fact is, the two are different, and as a Mark Twain line goes: “never the twain shall meet.”

Spam mails are sent to users whose email addresses spammers simply happen to have in their databases. The email addresses are usually generated illegally from forums, online billboards and guest books. Necessarily the recipients of spam mails did not give their consent to receiving emails, which is why they are often not interested in the subject of the emails.

In contrast, email marketing can take the form of direct mail, which is simply an email containing an advertising or promotional messaging; retention email, which take the form of informative newsletters that people sign up to receive; advertising using other people’s emails, which requires an email owner’s consent to allow you to append an advertising message to the email that he sends.  Typical e-mail marketers use a third party service for this (see AWeber Review).

Then there’s also bulk email marketing services that agencies offer, which are technically an entirely different ball game. Bulk email marketing services are most useful for getting new clients to sign up. They are increasingly becoming a staple in forward-looking companies’ marketing agenda.

Bulk email marketing services typically involve a client messaging in the form of an email advertisement, which is sent out or broadcast to proprietary email lists owned by agencies. The email recipients in these lists have opted in to receive emails about certain topics. And it is usually your bulk email marketing services provider’s task to choose relevant lists of recipients who have opted in to get information relative to your business, product or services. This makes email campaigns well targeted and most likely to produce results.

As with any email marketing campaign, the bulk email marketing services provider runs the risk of getting banned or blacklisted by the ISP or host in case of irrelevant or spam emails and complaints from irate customers. As such, it is important to take some safety precautions as early as when you are choosing your bulk email marketing services partner.

The more reliable partners are those who use the “double opt-in” scheme to filter their lists. Under this scheme, bulk email marketing services agencies gather the email addresses of persons who sign up or opt in to receive emails about offers of information form companies of their choice. Then, they also call them up to confirm information that they gave when they signed up, especially those relevant to the type of information that they want to receive from email marketers. As such, their clients are safe from the danger of getting blacklisted or from being shut down by their website host.

Then there is also the argument between simply purchasing database from a seller and blasting the email yourself, against having a third party provider do it for you. The latter is recommended because most database sellers can only provide you with outdated and inaccurate lists. And the only results that you can get from these are undeliverable mail receipts. Those emails that get through are to addresses that have not opted in, and so cannot be expected to be interested in your email.

Professional bulk email marketing agencies also take some time to consider several factors to work with you on a successful email marketing campaign. These factors include sorting out your target market, or those that are most likely to respond to your email and be converted into sales; the quality of your professional offer, which is best determined by sending out your email to a sample list of recipients who might be interested; the visual design of your email communication; as well as the timing of the email blast. All these factors contribute to the development and implementation of a successful marketing campaign.