A brief review of the three types of e-mail marketing:
1. Direct e-mail
Direct e-mail involves sending a promotional message in the form of an e-mail. It might be an announcement of a special offer, for example. Just as you might have a list of customer or prospect postal addresses to send your promotions too, so you can collect a list of customer or prospect e-mail addresses.
You can also rent lists of e-mail addresses from service companies. They'll let you send your message to their own address lists. These services can usually let you target your message according to, for example, the interests or geographical location of the owners of the e-mail address.
2. Retention e-mail
Instead of promotional e-mail designed only to encourage the recipient to take action (buy something, sign-up for something, etc.), you might send out retention e-mails.
These usually take the form of regular e-mails known as newsletters. A newsletter may carry promotional messages or advertisements, but will aim at developing a long-term impact on the readers. It should provide the readers with value, which means more than just sales messages. It should contain information which informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.
3. Advertising in other people's e-mails
Instead of producing your own newsletter, you can find newsletters published by others and pay them to put your advertisement in the e-mails they send their subscribers. This particular strategy is extremely beneficial because e-newsletter subscribers tend to view the publication during ideal times of their day giving it more attention than post-mailed communications. Additionally, these users share the communication with others regularly through e-mail forwarding.
Ok, but why is e-mail marketing so important?? read on >>
