Bulk Email Marketing in Online Home Businesses

Bulk email marketing is essential to any online home business, since you will rely on the use of emails to a vastly greater extent that any High Street business.  You must reach as wide an audience as you can for your products, and mass or bulk emailings is the quickest and best way to make contact with people who might be interested in your product.

Before your can send out emails you need email addresses.  There are several ways in which you can build up a list of email addresses, but on analysis, they break down into two: lists generated from visitors to your website, and purchased lists of people who have agreed to receive emails pertaining to a specific general topic.

The preferred method is to place opt-in forms on strategic pages of your website, such as the most popular entry pages, and to use pop-ups on the pages that statistics show most people use to leave your site.

These forms are designed to collect at least first names and addresses, and unless you are good at php programming, will be created by a software program that should be integrated with your emailing system.  You should offer an incentive for the names and addresses, and these can be in any form relevant to your product or service.  Examples are free e-courses, newsletters or ebooks.

When a visitor signs the form, you should send a thank you note.  The name and address should then be added to your email database and the product you offered in exchange for them sent out.  If that is a course, the various parts should be programmed to be emailed at set days after registration.  For all of the above you will require an autoresponder that is integrated with your emailing system.

Once you have a list, you can send emailings to prospects at set dates after registration, either to individuals, or bulk emails to everybody on your list.  Again, this needs an autoresponder.  When you choose your emailing software this might be provided with it, but free emailing systems are inadequate for an Internet business. You will require a professional integrated emailing package that you can either build up piece by piece as you progress, or that you acquire as a complete package that meets all your needs.

Many Internet marketers send occasional bulk emailings out to purchased lists.  These are people who have agreed to receive emails on specific topics, and for whom spamming is not an issue. These lists can purchased in hundreds of thousands, and with an average open rate of around 1% - 5% you can get a good return. 

Some programs guarantee a 10% open rate.  Once your email has been opened, it is up to you to make sure that it is read by means of a compelling headline and good content.  The average sales from these lists is approximately 1 in 1000, or 0.1%.  On that basis, a list of half a million email addresses should provide you with 500 sales, and you can calculate the math between cost and return from that. Some returns, however, are much less and a lot depends on your product and your persuasive sales ability.

There are lists and lists, and purchased lists never perform as well as those that you build yourself from your own website.  Your emailing package, therefore, should be capable of subscribing webpage visitors to your email lists. In fact, preferably multiple lists so that you can operate a number of websites or businesses from the same email system, and possible even integrate them if the products from different websites overlap. That is a very powerful capability if your email system can handle it.

There are a lot of such software packages available online, and you have to choose which is most suitable to you.  The best advice you can be given is to check out what others are using, especially the top 500 Fortune companies and doing what they do.  Much of the software available is not as expensive as you might think, but if you are on a tight budget do not just buy the cheapest because you will likely suffer through it. 

Many inexpensive software packages are quite good, but your bulk emailing projects are very important to your business, and you should not compromise quality for price.  You can select the elements of a good integrated system as you need them, and over time build up an emailing structure that any Internet guru would die for.

Keep that in mind when budgeting your business expenditure.  Companies without effective bulk emailing systems, and programmable autoresponders, rarely succeed and can lose at least 75% of their sales potential.  It’s like have a telesales company with just one outdated telephone and manual operators!