If you are doing business on the Internet then there's a high probability that email plays a significant role in your marketing strategy.
If you are not presently using email to keep in contact with prospects and customers then you are missing out on a gigantic opportunity to increase your sales and customer retention.
The generally accepted method for getting prospects and customers to identify themselves is through an "opt-in" offer.
Such an offer typically involves giving away a free idea kit, newsletter, e-book or article in return for the prospects e-mail address.
Once you have the prospect's email you are now in a position to send them regular correspondence in the form of newsletters and special offers or promotions.
Since the prospect has voluntarily "opted-in" to the promotion you now have the right to send them email that is technically not "spam".
The list of email addresses of prospects and customers you harvest from your website can become very large over time.
Managing your list and the associated promotional campaigns becomes a major issue in the operation of your online business.
We have developed a software system for managing our marketing list and our newsletter promotions that utilizes a database on our server.
This is how the system works: When a prospect submits their email address in our free "idea kit" or "free newsletter box" their name and email address are posted, by a script (ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP, PHP etc.) to a record in our on-line database.
The database that stores this information can be a simple Microsoft Access Database with a table for the email addresses, your promotions and a mail log.
Your website host can easily and inexpensively set this up for you.
The email address is tested for validity and for it's prior existence in the database.
The prospect is then notified that they have been added to the list and a confirming email is sent to their address by another simple script.
Since you will have many email promotions (a newsletter is effectively a promotion) it makes good sense to store your promotions in a table in your online database.
You want to maintain information on the following items.
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Name of the promotion (i.e. Newsletter 11/07/2002)
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The name and email address of who the promotion is from (i.e. Tony Zito, tony@cleanairweb.com)
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The Subject line that will appear in the email message (i.e. Clean Air Tips Newsletter) - Don't use the word "Newsletter" as this may cause your email to be blocked by anti-spam filters.
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An HTML version of the newsletter if this is a more effective format for the type of promotion you are sending. Studies show that HTML emails have higher viewing percentgaes than text based emails.
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A text version of the newsletter to be sent when the mailer detects an aol address. Some non-Outlook email clients do not accept html.
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A date/time stamp to indicate when the promotion was last updated
To initiate the broadcast emailing of a promotion (newsletter) we execute a webserver based script that allows us to select a promotion from our promotions table and query our email list database.
We have a opportunity to review the contents of the newsletter one more time and submit it for processing.
A simple script then sends the email to every one on our list and merges a unique user ID and promotion ID into the body of the email text on all hyperlinks that point back to our website.
When a prospect reads the email and clicks on a link back to our website another script on our home page logs the use id and promotion id into a response table.
In this way we can track the effectiveness of our promotion and associate which email addresses clicked through on that promotion back to our site so that we have the opportunity to send them additional useful information.
An email and promotion management system can be a very useful marketing tool that can work very synergistically with your website.
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