A necessary part of your marketing efforts should be email. In order for this to be successful, you must have a large number of people to email. Thanks to the CAN-SPAM act that requires that you only use optin email marketing, this can seem impossible.

Optin email marketing is the most misunderstood aspect of website marketing. Many people believe that you must obtain permission yourself in order to send someone an email related to your business. This is simply not true.

While your email marketing does need to be CAN-SPAM compliant, you do not have to have a strict “permission slip” on file for every person in your email campaign. In fact, you do not have to get this permission on your own at all.

Lead lists for optin email marketing are available, legal, and completely compliant. These email leads are for people who have requested information regarding a specific product, service, or subject matter. Most of these are obtained through surveys. Some of these leads are obtained through simple affiliations with various lead generators. In the course of registering for a site, the visitor will be shown an option that allows that site to share their email address with third parties. If this is marked yes by the site visitor, they have become an opt-in email lead.

Once someone has allowed their email address to be shared, the only way for them to stop receiving emails is to opt-out of each third party contacting them individually. For example, if someone signs up to receive information about a home business, and then finds one, they will still receive your email unless they opt out of your specific email campaign. It is required by law that you have an opt-out option easily available at all times.

Optin email marketing based on survey leads is the most reliable. While these leads can be a tad bit more expensive, you can be absolutely certain that the person you are promoting to is practically ready to buy. They just need the right information and the right offer to get them started.

Do you often feel that you are wasting time with your online marketing efforts? You may be placing free classified ads, or buying random lists of opt-in leads from lead generators. However, the real profits are made when you target your efforts only to those who definitely need and desire what you have to offer. Targeted email marketing accomplishes just that.

Email marketing is just what it sounds like-sending offers and promotions through email to someone who has requested such offers. This is one of the least expensive ways to market an online business, and one of the least time consuming if you use an autoresponder. However, having opt-in leads isn’t the same as having targeted leads.

Targeted email marketing is the process of sending out emails to those who specifically require your products, services, or business opportunity. There are many ways to obtain targeted prospects, including purchasing email leads. These lists of prospects are often pre-qualified based on a series of data or a survey.

For example, if you are trying to sell books about parenting online, you need to target parents. Such information is publicly accessible, and parents may be contacted in a number of ways by a lead generator with an offer to opt-in to information about parenting. Once they have agreed to receive emails from third parties regarding parenting, you can purchase their email address on a list of other targeted email marketing leads.

Targeted leads are much more reliable than any other type of email leads you may generate. As with any method of marketing, success is in the numbers. The more contacts you make, the more sales you will make. However, the numbers get a lot easier to master when the contacts you make already have a need and/or desire for what you have to offer.

Email Marketing is the fastest and most cost-effective way to keep in touch with subscribers. You can promote an offer to an vast amount of people, with the click of a button. However, if you don’t use this valuable tool right, it will have little-or-no effect.

Here are some rules to follow when you send out an email:

1. Keep it “Quick and Clean.”  There is nothing more aggravating then having to think about something, especially after you’ve come home from a long day at work.

2. Don’t release all of your content, in the initial email. Outline the main points, and present a powerful “hook,” to get your subscriber to click on your desired link. If you structure your email’s correctly, your link click-through rates should rise significantly, because the subscriber must click on the link in order to get the full story. This keeps your list active and responsive.

3. Frequency. The frequency of your contact, varies among nature of the topic. For example “Foreclosure,” is an urgent topic, so a monthly newsletter wouldn’t be proper. For different topics, like Internet Marketing, you have the freedom to choose any frequency. However, like many things you must watch out for something. In this case, it is over-contacting your subscribers. This will lead your subscribers to unsubscribe.

4. Quality. The quality of your content must be acceptable. The reason why most people subscribe is because of content. If they think your content isn’t of good quality, they will leave.

In the end, just use your knowledge to create valuable content that people will want to read and share with others.

Most newcomers to internet marketing initially use list-builders to get their information out to their potential clients.

To do this they join list building programs such as:
1. List Joe
2. the List Auction
3. Viral URL
4. List DotCom

These are just a few of the many list building programs available on the internet today, and new ones are appearing all the time, if you would like more details of them just visit my website and follow the link to advertising.

These programs are a good starting point to building your own list or promoting a product or opportunity you are involved in. However one thing you need to be careful of when you are promoting through these is their email personalisation facilities. The majority of these programs allow you to personalise your emails so that when they are opened the recipients name is inserted into them.

A lot of affiliate programs supply you with pre-written emails for you to send out that have a personalisation code written in, they would open with something like:
Dear {Firstname},

The {Firstname} is the code for the autoresponder used to insert the recipients first name into the message. That code will only work for specific autoresponders, if the list builder uses a different autoresponder the code will be different.

Here are some example personalisation codes used by specific programs to insert the first name:
List Joe {FIRSTNAME}
ViralUrl {firstname}
ListDotCom [[NAME]]

As you can see from these examples they are all different, if you don’t change them to the correct coding all the recipients will see is what was originally written on the copy you received from your program. (Dear {Firstname})

You need to read the instructions on sending emails from your list building program to make sure you use the correct code for that program, if it does not allow personalisation you are better to either remove the code all together or change it to something like, Dear Friend

That will reduce the chances of your email being opened, I know I generally ignore an email if that simple rule is not followed as do many of my colleagues.