Email Marketing for the New Year

The single most important function of a marketing blog or website is the process of building a strong database of emails. This allows the website to directly market whatever affiliate or sponsor they wish to a predisposed audiance that is precisely targeted. All over the web you’ll hear marketers and affiliates spouting off about how big their email lists are, and for good reason.

With a good solid list of emails you can target a very specific range of people or you can target the whole list, either way its a great source of marketing that should be used conservatively. One of the biggest mistakes a new blogger or website owner can make is to spam their newletter readers with 2 or 3 emails a day. This will only cause people to block or blacklist you’re newsletter.

Once you’ve managed to grow your list to a decent size, you’ll need some knowledge in order to properly program and distribute an email newsletter or marketing piece. There are a lot of options available for this, but one of the sites that I have recently tested out was iContact Email Newsletter Tool.

For a small price of 9.95 a month you can have a great tool that makes email marketing a breeze. I’ve tried doing it myself and hand coding it, and I’ve also tried some other free tools on the market, but for a small price I will gladly take the ease of use and reliability in a paid service, especially with something as important as email campaigns.

Another good feature of iContact is the availability of templates that have already been coded for email specific campaigns. This time saver is a great bonus. With the holidays upon us, I’ve begun the setup process for affiliate campaigns for the new year. I will be testing the water a bit more in the coming months with direct marketing of affiliate programs via newsletter and email and comparing them with more traditional advertising options like Adwords etc.

If you haven’t already started planning out the first quarter of next year I suggest you get on it. Online spending is still projected to increase, and you wouldn’t want to loose out on profits. Why not try some limited email marketing along with other sources of advertising for the first quarter of next year, you might be surprised on the return of investment. iContact has a free 15 day trial if you’d like to test the waters.