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24/08: Is Email Marketing Still A Worthwhile Option?

For many bloggers and affiliate marketers the idea of any kind of email marketing is often not even a consideration. For some, the idea of marketing using such an old fashioned method is simply not worth it, but there are still plenty of people enjoying varying levels of success using email to get their message out, the question is, should you reconsider?

If you are a blogger you already have an RSS feed and you should have an option enabled for people to subscribe to your feeds via email and that's a great start for keeping in touch with your readership. But what about people who don't read blogs or subscribe to RSS feeds? There are always new people you can reach and a large number of them still use email far more than anything else.

The problem with email marketing is building your list of opt in subscribers, and for some people this is the stumbling block that prevents them from ever developing a "warm" email list. You should never even consider unsolicited mail to anyone, particularly if it is commercial in nature, and  a whole industry has sprung up in recent times, advising people on how to build a list, wearing out phrases like "the money is in the list!" But is it true and is it really worth trying to build that almost mythical profit machine? A lot of marketers will tell you categorically yes, 100%, so let's examine things a little more closely.

An email marketing strategy can indeed be a powerful tool for affiliates and this is why the whole list building machine still runs at full throttle. There are many ways you can build a list, or try to, so let's take a look at some of the options available.

Most people are well aware of the use of pages designed to do nothing but capture an email address - usually they will promise or offer something in exchange for which you must fill out your name and email address - capture pages. Sometimes they will offer a free report or e-book or video, the value of which can range from absolutely nothing to very useful, but the purpose is to get respondents onto an opt-in list. This is hardly news to most people, and the effectiveness of capture pages has waned as more people become more savvy, but, used properly they are still a valid way to start building a list of addresses to market your services to. To put one in place you will need your own hosting and access to an autoresponder service - this means spending money to make money, so if you still believe in free, it is not really an option. Several hosting companies including Kiosk.ws provide fully featured autoresponders and lead capture pages as part of their hosting packages.

There are countless list building programs that are ostensibly free to join but are they effective? Well, the earlier you get into one, the greater chance you have of developing a reasonable list, but you will still need to persuade new people to join, and the ultimate problem with these lists are that you are sending messages out to other marketers whose main aim is to sell or promote something of their own. This type of list is therefore less likely to see much of a return, but, they can be successful if you have something of worth to offer the demographic of the  membership. One such service is Your Lucky List which works on the basis of a regularly updated matrix, meaning that even if you don't directly recruit many new list members yourself, you will still be able to mail to a certain number of members each week. Ultimately, you are building a list for the program owner who is therefore the biggest winner.

You could try setting up something like a traffic exchange - there is a good reason for the explosion in the number of  traffic exchanges - you guessed it, building a mailing list! The effectiveness of traffic exchanges is a debate that has raged forever and despite one or two innovative ideas over the years, most of them are a dead loss in terms of promotion. Very few users of traffic exchanges are serious buyers of anything, which is why they are using free traffic generation of this nature, usually in vain attempts to recruit people into dubious MLM's and the like. However, it can be worth promoting certain free programs on them, particularly of you are working an affiliate program that pays for referrals or rewards you on a CPA basis as just one example. However, in general, the traffic exchange owners are the smart ones, they are building a list, just like any other membership site owners.

At this point I will mention safelists - these are invariably totally ineffective, simply because they rely on each member receiving huge amounts of mail from the list themselves and any savvy user just uses a dump email address and never reads a single message from the other members. They are certainly no substitute for building your own list, just as the safelist owners are doing. There are one or two safelist ideas that work slightly better than the traditional format, and one that springs to mind is Muscle Mail Safelist which works on a credit based system and requires the membership to at least read some mail if they wish to send any themselves. These types of safelist are really the only ones worth considering if you want to use them at all.

If you are cheap and still want to try your hand at developing some kind of list without too much financial outlay or effort, developing technology has seen the rise of things like direct desktop software such as Desktop Lightning. This doesn't rely on email, but enables you to send messages directly to the desktops of other users providing they continue to run the easily installed software. It's actually very good, although, as with other programs, the owner is the biggest beneficiary, and you could argue that you are still just preaching to the converted.

So, the message would seem to be, if you're serious about building a responsive list, it takes work, money and time - nothing new there then.

If you are prepared to spend a little money, there are several options and one very useful program from LeadSpinner enables you to collect email addresses from all your website visitors. It's automated and runs on your chosen sites 24/7, turning visitors into qualified prospects ethically and simply. You can find out more at the LeadSpinner website. (Update - LeadSpinner is currently out od action)

If you are already using email to market your services you might also be interested in developing your campaigns and raising them to a very professional level with the services of someone like Constant Contact who can turn your marketing campaigns into very slick looking sales copy with templates, surveys and more. At present they are offering a free 60 day trial and thereafter costs are very reasonable and should definitely help marketers see a much better ROI from email shots to their lists.

With so much focus nowadays on PPC , blogging and social networking as THE tools of the affiliate marketer, maybe adding a list building strategy of some kind wouldn't do any harm; after all, the succesful affiliate should not overlook any potential avenue for sales and conversions.

TCH 

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