Email Marketing is a common way to increase traffic to your website, it is likely also one of the most abused practices. Sending mass emails is not in itself an unaccepted practice. How you use this form of web marketing determines whether your efforts are considered spam or not. We will be considering both Black Hat and White Hat email marketing techniques.
White Hat Email Marketing
If you have a website offering a product or service then you likely are building a clientele that appreciates what you have to offer. It’s only reasonable that you should keep in contact with these clients. The easiest way to do this is to collect a mailing list of your clients. In most cases you will collect this mailing list by some sort of opt in method. That means that the person willingly gave you his or her email address expecting you to notify them of upcoming “specials”, “limited time offers” or other deals.
The trick with having a successful email marketing list is to convince your clients that it’s in their best interest to give you their email address to be added to your mailing list and then once you have the email addresses being very careful not to abuse the list. Don’t send them emails too frequently and be sure that you are giving them what they expect to see from you. You can create this free mailing list simply by having a small form on your site asking if they would like to receive these notices.
Once you have collected the list you still need some form of email software to send mass emails. There are a large number of marketing email tools on the market, most of them are affordable considering the return you can get from a single email marketing campaign. You can have the message professionally created or just send out a simple note telling the person of your special. There is even special eNewsletter software available to help you compose and send out emails to your opt in list.
Black Hat Email Marketing
Usually this is a poor idea for an established website that you are wanting to promote for the long term. This usually means buying an email list from a list broker. These emails addresses are usually scrapped off the internet. They often call this form of email marketing “email blast marketing”. Once again there is emailing software available as well as several companies specializing in offering mass emailing.
Websites using this form of email marketing are usually black listed so the companies doing this quickly go from domain to domain switching to the next one each time one gets blacklisted. While it may sound tempting this is rarely good for any website you plan on holding on to.
