ALT-1 How to become an Expert in Email Marketing Systems
Becoming an expert in email marketing systems relies on a knowledge of some general principles and strategies of internet advertising in general. First you need to know some of the history that has shaped the way email marketing works today, in part to avoid doing anything illegal. Second, you need to determine how you are going to get email addresses to market to - I'll go over that as well. Finally, you want to make money doing this but not compromise your integrity, so you need to learn strategies to have high CTR (click through rate) on the e-mails you do send out - to maximize your income and not waste the time of uninterested parties.
The current email marketing industry has been largely shaped by FTC and CANSPAM regulations, which stipulate that you are not legally allowed to just go out on the web, find someone's e-mail address and send them unsolicited mail. This came in response to spammers who would simply create programs that automatically searched for and copied down e-mail addresses from all over the web. In light of that fact, you need to get people who may be interested in your products or in using your affiliate merchants (which give you a commission for referring customers).
The best way to get e-mail addresses is with what is called a 'rapid conversion' page, that quickly gets people interested enough to voluntarily submit an e-mail address into your system. For example, you might want to promote or sell X-Box games, so you make a nice-looking but simple site that talks about how neat the X-Box is and that you can guide people to great discounts and/or selections, etc... on games. All the person has to do is type in their e-mail to find out more, and then you have their address. The advantage of this from your standpoint (and ethically) is that you're not sending out e-mails about X-Box games to just anyone. Instead, you are targeting only interested people.
Next you have to decide the content of the e-mails you plan to send. Typically diversification is the key to this. You might have your own game-selling site (using the above example again) but it might not be the best for everyone's needs. For example, you might only sell games, but what if the person you send the e-mail to wants to rent games? Well, the answer to this is: you add affiliate links to your e-mails as well. These are links that work as follows: a person who clicks them gets taken to a page (lets say Netflix-for-Games in this case). Then, if they make a purchase (or in some cases if they even fill out an information form or sign up for a free trial) you get a commission or cash for just bringing them there. By splitting your targets like this you can maximize your revenue AND do the most good for your client - because they can choose your site or some other, but no matter what you will make money if they buy or sign up for things.
You can use PPC advertising (such as Adwords, MSN Adcenter, etc...) to bring people to your landing page but keep in mind: this will cost you money. You can also promote your landing page for free through SEO (search engine optimization) or other techniques, such as blogs and forums. What approach you take to getting people to your page depends upon (1) how much you are willing to initially invest in the project and (2) how much you think you will earn, on average, from each person who visits your page. If you're quite sure you'll make an average of $5 per visitor then it is well worth your investment to pay Adwords $.50 to get people to your page in the first place. If you're not as sure about your page's potential success, try getting free traffic as mentioned above and see how well it does. If it performs well, you can up the ante and start paying to market the page.
