Creating Bulk Email List & Building Strong Relationship with It

Creating Bulk Email List

Companies and organizations have found the Internet an opportune place to promote their products and services. They use the strategy known as bulk email marketing, or bulk email sending, or sending advertisements and promotional letters to email users.

An essential element of successful bulk email marketing strategies is a clean list of targeted email addresses. This assumes that the list contains only valid email addresses of people who are really interested in receiving the emails from the company or organization. Otherwise, your unsolicited advertising will be classified as spam mail. Although sending out magazines and newsletters through bulk emailing is free, companies cannot risk the equity of their brands by offending people. A clean email list will help you assess the success of your email campaigns; and more importantly it will reduce the risk of breaking the anti-spamming laws.

So, how to build a clean targeted email list? There are a few "DON'T" here:

• don't generate email addresses using special tools you may find on the Internet;
   
• don't harvest the email addresses from web sites;
   
• don't purchase a ready made list. Such lists usually come from email service providers and agencies that conduct surveys.

Ready made lists that you will probably purchase are never validated and are full of dead and undeliverable email addresses. Plus, those lists are sold and re-sold many times and the email addresses' owners are already fed up with emails from other email marketers and I have a great doubt that they will open and read your message since they receive hundreds emails every day. The email addresses that you will harvest from web sites belong to people who did not hear about you and will hardly want to receive your emails. As a return you will receive a lot of complaints from people for sending them unsolicited emails, and ban of your email account.

But... there is a quite different way to build your clean targeted email list. I mean a subscription form on your web site. Before you start with bulk email marketing, get your web site up and running. Or, probably you already have a site where you advertise your products and services. Setup a subscription form somewhere on your web page and get others to sign up for your mailing lists with their consent. Spread the word about your mailing list through word of mouth. The beauty in this is that the list of emails will be self-screened and the database will only contain the people who are interested in your offers. Make sure you have their consent beforehand. Its not as quick and easy as generating or harvesting email addresses but its more reliable way. You wont send unsolicited emails as you have a proof that the recipient has subscribed himself to your mailing list.

Building Relationship with Your List

When you have an email list of subscribers who have specifically agreed that you send emails to them, you have an asset that can be leveraged over and over again. You can use that email list to drive traffic to different websites and sales pages again and again and this is why you must cherish your list like an apple of your eye. The better you treat your list, the better the return will be when you want it.

To have a very profitable email list, you should simply build a relationship with your subscribers. You want them to like you, feel like they know you, feel comfortable buying from you and most importantly you want them to look forward to and enjoy reading your emails. If you can build a strong relationship with your subscribers, then you have more chances of getting them to purchase your products and services.

Here are a few tips how you can build a relationship with your email list:

1. Send emails regularly. Make sure you are reaching your subscribers at least once a month in emails or other medium. If you emailed to a list of people and had little or no response does not necessarily mean your audience isn't interested in your product. Experiment with different emails, get to know which email strategy works best, and keep using it to reach your subscribers.

2. Send useful information and tips. Your emails should contain something that the customer wants. It shouldn't be just the information about your company or yourself. Focus on giving more than just what you sell. Specific content, messages, and other targeted information that interests your customers are good to include. This is a great way to make readers look forward to your emails as they will know that they are going to receive great information from you. Provide value in your emails and don't try to profit in some way form every one of them.

3. Send the videos of you and talk to your subscribers about things they want to know about. Videos are usually better than regular emails because they are more personal and show there is a real person giving the information.

4. Make sure your subscribers can read your emails. Although the videos, graphics, flash animations, and logos look impressive on an email, they are often blocked by email filters. Upload video, graphics, and flash files to your site and use a flat text with hyperlinks to the site. Once your recipients get to your site, you can show them as many graphics as you want.

5. Create a way for your subscribers to interact with you. This can be a forum, a comment system, an email submission area, a live chat room and many others.

Note that not every email you send has to have some way of profiting in it; just make sure the readers enjoy it, make sure they like you and they like your emails. Make your readers to feel as though they can trust you and everything you say in your emails.

Did you find those tips useful? You can learn a lot more in the "Ultimate HTML Email Guide":