Introduction to Email Marketing

What exactly do we mean by Email Marketing?

Here are a few things that we are NOT talking about:

  • sending spam or junk mail
  • sending unsolicited email
  • buying email lists
  • high pressure sales tactics

Email marketing is quite the opposite.  And used well, very effective.  Here is what email marketing IS about: 

  • desirable: offering something that people want and letting them choose to sign up to receive it. If they don’t want to sign up, they simply won’t.
  • verified opt-in: using verified opt-in to ensure that a request to join an email list is verified by the person who owns that email address
  • permission based: only sending email messages that you have been given permission to 

What businesses find is that once they build a verified opt-in list, conversion rates to offers to that list are higher than many other campaigns.  Not surprising when you think about it.  If you have an email list that sends out information about high quality travel offers AND people have subscribed to that list themselves, it isn’t surprising they are interested in …. high quality travel offers!

Email marketing tools automate the collection and management of your list, including subscribe and unsubscribe features. Most also provide an autoresponder facility, that lets you set up one or more emails that are delivered in a pre-defined order. 

Here are two ways you can put your email marketing tool to work:

  • Create a newsletter mailing list. Load your current newsletter as the first autoresponder message, so people who sign up automatically get your current newsletter.  When it is time to publish a new newsletter, you can broadcast the new one to the current list, and then update the autoresponse message.
  • Create a multi-part educational series. Create a group of emails that you want to be delivered 1 or more days apart.  Perhaps this might be a 5 part introduction to a product or service that you are expert in.  Set up the 5 messages in the auto-responder queue.  When people sign up to the list, the 5 messages are delivered automatically, with the delay you specify between each message.

If you would like to learn more, why not sign up to our own 5 part email course in online marketing in the tourism industry?  We include a section on email marketing, and you will also get to see how an email autoresponder works.  Sign up in the sidebar at OM4Tourism

Here are a few articles from Aweber – the company that runs the email marketing tool we use – on how to use email marketing effectively: