The Road to Email Marketing Purgatory

A good email marketing campaign is the gospel of today's business community; a bad email campaign is the surest way to land your business in e-purgatory, meaning no results to your emailing efforts-or worse, directly undermining your business's objectives. No business today can really afford to forsake a good email marketing strategy, so it is paramount that, before setting out on that road, that the unexperienced new-comer learn a bit about what constitutes a good, effective campaign, and what are the pitfalls and possible travesties of the same. With a focus on what are the errors that commonly cripple most campaigns, here's a beginner's guide on how to craft the appropriate marketing strategy for your new email campaign.

? Forcing your way in! If you are prying your way into a recipient's inbox, then you are not only being a complete pain in the neck, but you're probably overstepping the boundaries that the law imposes on email activities. You need to have ready and willing subscribers to your email campaign, and this is achieved through double opt-in links on your site. This is how you harvest an interested audience, and avoid scores of contacts that don't care about your content and are likely to report you as spam.

? Selling personal info! Don't be tempted by third-party offers of monetary compensation for the personal data that you have on your contacts. Keep an ethcial conduct throughout your campaign, and what's more, keep your readers comforted and reassured that you're not engaging in any questionable practices by posting a privacy policy and no-share policy on your site with links in every email.

? Opening the floodgates! No matter how interesting the content of your emails is, nothing justifies flooding your contacts' inboxes. It's just simply terribly annoying, and will create resentment in even the most likely of customers. Keeping with the idea of ethical conduct, you need to show some restraint, which will be returned in kind over time in the form of appreciative customers and readers. Stay on your readers' good side at all times.

? Running a shabby show! If you've got something to offer, then present it in a favorable way. Christmas gifts come in pretty wrapping; billboards have cool photos and shiny lights; window displays are always neatly arranged: so why wouldn't your email need to be tidy and pleasing to the eye. Keep things simple, but elegant, with a nice color scheme and prominent, attractive logo. Don't clutter, and don't confuse.

? Leaving out the sales pitch! What worse thing could you do than getting all the other details right but forgetting to call your customers-in-waiting to action?! You need to make sure that the first and last impression that the reader will have is that there is a specific, discernable product or service being offered. Otherwise, your campaign becomes a lot of pretty imagery with absolutely no purpose...a perfect waste.

With these basic fouls of email marketing out of the way, you'll have the road open for you to advance your marketing strategy and begin to incorporate more efficient techniques, like using the proper software to monitor your progress. But, as always, the basics come first.

Consider iContact for your email marketing campaigns. Its a powerful platform that generates sophisticated results with the simplicity of a point-and-click interface. iContact is your best choice for email marketing software.