There are three basic types of email marketing services, representing three fundamental approaches to email marketing. This is why it is misleading to lump the different types of products and services together, and why it is so easy to become confused about what works and what doesn’t.

In this article we will break down all of the different types of email marketing service, explain the assumptions that they operate under, and look at the reasons why they are or are not effective.

1. Spamming

When a lot of people think about email marketing, they imagine getting in contact with an email marketing firm that maintains a massive “opt-in” list. They imagine that this firm has a secret ingredient that makes millions of people open to the idea of receiving marketing messages from anyone willing to pay.

This first type of email marketing service is what we refer to as “spam,” and it basically means you are hiring someone to send out junk mail to a random list of email addresses for you. The return on investment with this type of service is going to be extremely low, because the people who are receiving your marketing emails will generally wish that they were not receiving them.

2. Email Advertising

The next type, which we’ll call email advertising, is the much more legitimate and reliable cousin of spamming. This is generally done through real and reputable marketing firms, who will set up advertising contracts to place your marketing messages inside of emails sent by publishers to established mailing lists.

For example, say you subscribe to a magazine that sends you a weekly update by email. You may have noticed that there are advertisements in those emails just as there are advertisements in the magazine itself. This is an email advertisement.

Because the people receiving this type of message are generally doing so by choice, it is much more likely that your sales message will be seen and paid attention to. The effectiveness of your ads will probably be comparable to purchasing space in a printed publication (although may be less costly.) And, of course, the effectiveness will depend on the design of your ad, the value of your offer, and your placement within the email message.

3. Classic Opt-In Email Marketing

Generally when you hear discussions about reputable email marketing practices, it is this type of email marketing that is being referred to. A special, separate email list is maintain specifically and only for your business or marketing campaign, and individuals opt in to receive the messages that you intend for that list. Generally you will build your email list by offering some sort of incentive for signing up, be it information, special offers, or giveaways.

This form of email marketing is highly effective and is growing in popularity among traditional marketing experts, particularly because the troubled economy calls for marketing techniques that require little upfront investment. In fact, opt-in email marketing appears to be getting more effective.

In order to accomplish this type of email marketing, you will need to plan your email campaign, build your opt-in email list, and write effectively.

One of the most alluring facets of social media marketing is the potential for sales and branding messages to “turn viral,” meaning that people start passing them on to friends just because they find it amusing, entertaining, or valuable. But in order for this to happen, you need to really have an idea of what people in your market segments are interested in. You also have to have some good ideas about how to get them to pass your message along.

Although many people have come to think of email-marketing as a one-to-many form of advertisement, there is actually tremendous potential for viral email marketing. Here are a few basic strategies you can use.

By the way: if you blog or tweet about this post, let us know and we’ll give you a coupon code for 10% off any of our self-hosted software products! 

Highlight your “Forward To Friend” links

Although a lot of email marketing campaigns include a link to “forward this message to a friend,” it usually sits quietly at the very bottom of the message, after all the content, all alone. Sometimes people click on it anyway.

More often, if they get the idea to forward the message, they’ll just click the “forward” button in their email client. This is somewhat less good for you as a marketer, because you have no way to measure what’s happening. It’s also not likely to happen very often, because forwarding to a friend is not often the first thing that pops into our heads when we receive marketing materials.

You can improve this natural process dramatically just by making your Forward to Friend link more prominent. Write a few convincing lines about why your friends want to receive this. You could provide a special offer just for friends of your subscribers, or even a special offer in return for forwarding to a friend.

Better still, you offer up a nugget of outstanding content–a tip, trick, example, or video that is relevant to your niche–immediately followed by a request to share this info with a friend by clicking here! This type of message will perform best if you make sure it’s small, simple, and attractive. You want it to be easy for anyone to pass along to someone else, and a full newsletter-style message is not going to provide that.

Provide substantial value

The word “value” here can mean any number of things. For example:

• Give something away for free
  • White papers, reports, and how-to guides are a classic giveaway. If you provide great, well-organized information, people will save it, pass it along, and spread the word for you. But you are going to have to do some reconnaissance and find out what information people in your market are looking for.
• As I mentioned already, sales, discounts, and product giveaways can be very alluring, especially in markets where you see a lot of potential buyers sitting on the fence. The discount or special offer, couple with the social proof of hearing about the offer from a friend, can put you at a substantial advantage with these customers.
• Make something fun or entertaining. Funny works. Go to your local comedy club and offer the funniest guy there a couple hundred bucks to make you an entertaining YouTube video that is punctuated with your call to action.

Make sure it’s easy to subscribe

If you’ve the time to craft a message that will be passed along, you want to make sure you can capitalize on your hard work. You can do this elegantly in the footer of the message, by including not only an unsubscribe link but a subscribe link as well. If you do this, you will of course want to enhance the visibility of the footer with attractive formatting, and provide additional reasons why someone would want to subscribe (or stay subscribed) to your mailing list.

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Most modern email readers display a snippet of text from the beginning of each email as a teaser that helps users know whether it is something they want to open and read. You can see this small bit of text in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple’s Mail.app client, and even the iPhone email application. This text is also what your reader will see if their email client has blocked all of your big pretty images. Some marketers refer to this text as the message preheader.

You probably already know how important a compelling title is for your email marketing campaign’s open/read rate. Good ad copy always begins with a interesting, informative headline. The headline’s job is to sell the sales copy, so that the sales copy will be able to sell the product. You can use the email snippet text to enhance the allure of your headline, to provide extra information, or to strongly direct attention to a call for action.

Email Teaser Text As A Second Headline

In traditional advertisement copywriting, the first line is one of the most important pieces of text in the entire ad, article, or sales letter. It is often seen as second only to the headline itself. The job of the first line is to convince the reader that they want to keep reading.

The email teaser can very effectively serve this function, because it gives the reader a window into the message you want them to read. You may not be able to predict how many words of teaser copy will be displayed in the reader’s email client, so try stack the beginning of your sentence with language that is vivid, exciting, and seductive. Introduce something out of the ordinary, provoke curiosity, or promise to answer a nagging question for your demographic. If you do your job well, your open/read count should see a strong increase.

Writing Informative Email Preheaders

Another tactic for utilizing the email preheader text is to pack it with important information that would have been too much for the title. This way you can formulate a punch, attention-getting headline for the title, and immediately back it up with a solid reason for opening and reading the message.

This one-two punch is great if your readers are heavy internet and email users, who will tend to quickly pre-screen their messages. You quickly grab their attention, and then offer a quick justification for why that attention was justified. Again, you have no way of knowing how much information will fit into the email browser’s preview snippet, so aim for compact and concrete nuggets of information. Numbers, percentages, promises.

Email Snippets As A Direct Call For Action

If you’re the type of marketer that likes to strike early and strike often, then you may feel attracted to the idea of using the snippet text in your email campaigns as a direct call to action. And your instincts may not be wrong. Many marketers report excellent results from this technique.

The very first line of the email is a great place to pitch an exclusive offer, a special discount, or even to request that the reader forward your email to a friend.

As Always, Split-Test Your Messages For Best Results

In many cases you’ll want to mix and match these techniques to make the most of your email campaign. And the only way you can ever really know which ad copy is the most effective in getting your desired results is to test multiple different versions against one another.

If you’re using our ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software, this is going to be a lot easier. All you have to do is write up multiple versions of your email preheader copy, tell the software what percentage of your list to use as a test sample, and let it choose the winning ad copy based on the actions of your readers.

As we enter into another holiday season, you’ll want to spend some time considering ways to fine-tune your email marketing campaigns. There are certainly unique opportunities for a variety of business sectors in this season. There are also some pitfalls that you should be mindful of if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your messages.

Everybody’s Doing It

The holiday season is the time of year when people are receiving the highest number of marketing and advertising messages. More than any other time, ineffective message are going to be lost in the crowd. To make your message stand out in the crowd, you’ll have to do two things:

1. Offer something very good
2. Be very specific about it

Just watch your own behavior as the holiday special offers come streaming into your inbox. Messages with generic or vague titles are likely the first to be deleted without being read. Whose got the patience? Try to use your title to encapsulate the full message in as few words as possible. Tell people exactly what you have for them, and the ones who want it will open and read.

The body of the email should be similarly punchy. How often do you ever spend more than 30 seconds reading a marketing email? You would have to be very, very interested in the information or offer you had received. You’re more likely to get a response from your readers if the email itself is short and to the point. If the email has done its job, your readers will follow your links to your more in-depth pages of product details, sales copy, etc.

Timing Is Everything

Before you send your messages, go back through your archives to see what time of day and day of the week your subscribers tend to open their messages the most frequently. While Sunday and Monday afternoon are the days when email marketing messages generally get opened the most, this can vary widely depending on what industry you are in and who your clients are. If you use our Email Marketing software, you can set your campaign to automatically send to each subscriber at the time of day that they initially subscribed to your list. This can be great if you have subscribers in many different time zones, because you can be assured that you’re sending during a time that they are awake and likely to be exposed to incoming messages.

Once upon a time, you could target a marketing campaign based solely on geography. Certain types of people lived in certain types of places, and that was it. There was an average American, ‘Joe Consumer,’ who was married and had a couple of kids, and liked mostly the same things that all the other Joe Consumers out there liked.

According to an AdAge whitepaper on the new 2010 census, those times are long gone. There simply is no such thing as an average American anymore. There is no dominant ethnic group, family configuration, or subculture.

Some of the more interesting findings:

• No household type neatly describes even one third of Americans
• Only 22% of American households are classic nuclear familie comprised of a married couple with children
• The single most common type of American household is now the married couple with no children
• The next most common household type is the single individual who lives alone
• “No racial or ethnic category describes a majority of the population.”
• The younger generations of Americans are increasingly more diverse than older Americans (and also more responsive to online marketing.)

What this means for marketers is that, if you want your product to have broad appeal, you will likely need to target your messages much more specifically than you ever needed to before. And if you want to do that in a way that is cost-effective, targeted email marketing needs to become a central focus.

Perhaps this is why marketing industry funding is increasingly being taken away from traditional print, radio, television, and billboard marketing. Each of these types of media target huge, disparate segments of the population simultaneously, which means they are simply becoming less effective as the population becomes more diverse. Instead, we are seeing marketing funds diverted to more targeted, individualized advertising media, such as email marketing.

Email marketing most closely approaches the one-to-one model of advertising that is increasingly coveted by savvy marketers. Targeted email marketing software allows you to subdivide your lists based not only on detailed demographic data but also on user actions. You can also use these divisions within your list to provide conditional, targeted content to each subgroup, ensuring that the most relevant and appealing messages are delivered to each individual list subscriber.

We talk a lot on this blog about the fundamentals of effective email marketing campaigns:

• Building relationships
• Establishing trust
• Solving problems

If you stick to those fundamentals, you’ll not only sell a lot of product, but you’ll also avoid the type of lawsuit that Toyota is now facing as a result of its “Maniacs” campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix.

An overly-creative advertising team at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles created a set of email autoresponder series for Toyota, each designed to make the recipient think that they were being stalked by a maniac. Then they used the video below to get pranksters to sign their friends up for these autoresponder email campaigns.

AdAge reported on one of the thousands of recipients of these bizarre messages, Amber Duick, who is now suing both Toyota and the Saatchi ad company.

Ms. Duick received a series of rambling messages appearing to be from a rabid soccer fan and riot participant named Sebastian Bowler. She received links to his Myspace page, copies of hotel bills that Sebastian Bowler was apparently holding her responsible for, and indications that he was on his way to her home to visit her in person.

According to her attorney, Ms. Duick “was terrified. She slept with a machete next to her bed and she slept with mace. She could barely sleep or eat normally.”

It was not until the ninth email message that Ms. Duick was informed that “she had been punked” and the whole ordeal had been part of a marketing campaign for the Toyota Matrix. Ms. Duick is probably not likely to purchase a Toyota vehicle in the near future.

This is a classic example of a poorly thought out marketing strategy backfiring. You don’t need to be a renegade artist to effectively sell your product, and in fact it is probably better if you’re not. All you need to do to effectively market yourself online is to follow the old tried and true principles of good business. The new media is an awful lot like the old, just a lot faster. You start with a high-quality email marketing software package, offer good reasons why your product solves your reader’s problems, and track your results.

This poor economy has left entire business sectors on shaky ground. Many have feared that marketing would be among them. However, it appears that what is actually taking place in the marketing industry is something of a refocusing on what works and what is cost effective. Our regular readers will already know that this certainly includes email marketing, among certain other forms of internet-based advertising.

A new study by Round2 gives us a better idea of the way that things are shaking out. While there is plenty of bad news for tradition print and television advertisers, there is just as much good news for the online marketing business.

The study’s main weakness was that it only provided simple yes/no information about the respondents’ spending intentions, rather than real numerical data. So we can only see what percentage of companies are spending more or less on any particular advertising medium, not how much those companies are spending.

However, the study results still provide an interesting and potentially useful glimpse into the marketing industry’s reaction to the economic downturn.

As you can see, traditional print advertising seems to be the hardest hit medium, with 46.6% of respondents reporting that they will decrease spending in this area. Even direct mail marketing is suffering a loss of support. However, email marketing sits easily on top of the new medium in terms of expanding adoption.

This is likely because email is a medium that companies are familiar and comfortable with, and that has been shown to be highly effective and efficient. Email marketing is something that can be done entirely in-house with very little up-front investment, and that allows for very detailed response tracking through the use of an integrated software package like ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Software.

We recently discussed the explosion of direct email marketing compared to other types of consumer outreach. We discussed some of the unique advantages of email marketing as a medium, as well as some of the economic reasons for its growth.

One thing we did not explore is the fact that opt in email marketing may be getting more effective over time. This is counter-intuitive to some extent. Most marketers would expect that the more email newsletters and special offers a company sends out, the more likely they are to induce consumer fatigue become invisible to their most important market segments.

In certain ways this is true. You don’t want to send out a deluge of messages only to find that you have desensitized your audience. But even though email marketing may not necessarily gain effectiveness at the individual level, on the whole you can count on the fact that people are becoming more technologically savvy. As this happens, people should become more and more comfortable with online marketing replacing their traditional offline counterparts. More importantly, they should become more responsive to online direct marketing.

According to a new study by the prominent marketing firm Epsilon, this is exactly what is taking place. The study found that the upcoming generation of adults (ages 18-25) are more receptive to opt in email offers than their older peers.

A higher percentage of millennials report that they want to receive certain types of permission-based emails more than once a day including specials/offers from online merchants (34%), entertainment (32%), sports (28%), special offers from traditional (offline) retailers (26%), electronics information (21%), and telecommunications information (21%).

Millennials want to receive offers more often and are willing to stay in programs rather than their elders who are more likely to unsubscribe.

The researchers concluded that using email segmentation to target specific demographics is particularly important in light of this data. While we agree with this conclusion and strongly support the use of highly personalized and well-segmented email marketing campaigns, we also see a message of encouragement for early adopters of internet-based forms of marketing and advertisement.

As the important younger generation of adults continue to fill positions of power and prominence, the companies that have worked to form relationships with them will also prosper. This is an important time to start gaining experience with direct online marketing. The sooner you buy email marketing software and start building up your mailing list, the more entrenched you’ll become in the most valuable segments of your market.

Email Marketing succeeds as a form of direct marketing because compared to printed mail or printed newsletters it delivers immediate results, statistics are easily tracked, and it is inexpensive. Email marketing not only receives quicker response rates,  it also saves a significant amount of time.  Unlike mailed advertisements there is little delay and unlike web sites which rely on site traffic to generate sales,  advertisers can push sales without waiting for someone to visit their web site.  Mailings that are regularly sent out on a lets say weekly, bi-weekly, or a monthly basis are an affordable way of automatically attracting repeat business.  Mailings that are properly formatted and contain brand logos reinforce brand identity and product awareness.

The immediate impact of email marketing can be seen in generating web site traffic.  This represent a golden opportunity for marketers to make money through email advertising.   This is all the more true when taking into consideration that ideally you will be reaching out to a vast pool of subscribers who have opted in to receive mailings based on subjects that are of genuine interest to them.  You can use embedded links in your mailings to direct customers to areas of your site that hold their interest.  Then you can follow up with personalized mailings that contain targeted content.

Newsletters afford marketers the interactivity and personalization that print based marketing never had any way of achieving. Managing your list of subscribers with a database that may include any number of subscriber fields allows you send mailings in bulk and at the same time keep a high level of personalization. You can generate subscription forms that contain any number of subscriber fields with customer data such as address, zip code, gender, and country.   You can then include this information in mailings by using personalization tags or you can create sending filters to send to groups of subscribers based on subscriber fields.

Email marketing is especially attractive to marketers because it delivers results that are measurable.  Newsletters allow advertisers to track users through statistical tracking which can include bounces, unsubscribes, read opens which track which subscribers have opened and read a mailing, and link tracking or click through rates.  These statistics can be used to correlate   Marketers can then employ new strategies in order to strengthen response rates.

Email marketing has been widely hailed as second only search marketing as an effective online marketing tactic.  Unlike mailed advertisements there is little delay and unlike web sites which rely on site traffic to generate sales,  advertisers can push sales without waiting for someone to visit their web site. There’s also an eco-friendly reason for going with email marketing route.  Unlike its print based cousin email marketing is green friendly as it is paper free.

While email marketing is legitimately used by reputable businesses in order to market to their existing client base, unsolicited mailings known as spam continue to cloud the industry by infuriating about anyone that has ever had an email account anywhere.  As previously mentioned this is not only disruptive but it also cast a shadow over anyone that email markets as sometimes even legitimate permission based mailings are misidentified as spam.

Because the medium has been pervasively exploited legislation has become necessary in order to combat spam which has universally become a headache for individuals and businesses alike.  Businesses interested in email marketing should thoroughly investigate anti-spam legislation such as the United States’ CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act).  The name itself points to spams seedy nature in delivering mailings that our not only unwanted but offensive in nature.   Also be sure to study the European Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 or your Internet provider’s acceptable use policy.   Some ISPs have restrictions on the  mailings that you are allowed to send so that is also something you will need to check before hosting your own email marketing service.