A lot of non-marketers think of marketers as nothing but spammers.  It’s easy to understand why. We all get mountains of spam emails on a daily basis - regardless of whether or not we gave out the email address.

But unless you want to be prosecuted and condemned for sending spam emails out, you’ll want to take precautions to be careful about who you email and why.  Spam is defined as unsolicited email messages that are sent out to the masses.

True Internet marketers don’t mess with spam because it hurts their credibility, risks their accounts, and doesn’t convert as well as targeted, welcomed email does.  You can have your ISP ban you for sending spam, and you will lose your autoresponder account, too.

It’s far better to use an opt-in form where people willingly enter their first name and email address.  In fact, it’s best to utilize the double opt in option most autoresponders provide.

A single opt in is when you just let the person enter their information once.  But what’s to stop one person from going around entering another person’s contact information for unethical reasons?

You want a double opt in to protect yourself.  Here’s how it works:

The user lands on your website and sees an opt in box, asking for their first name and email address.  They enter it (usually in exchange for a free download or the promise of information at a later date).

Then the autoresponder tool automatically sends out a verification email.  The end user gets the email alerting them that they’ve signed up to be on your list, but it asks them to verify their subscription by clicking on a link in the email.

This means if someone goes to your site and signs someone else up, that person will get a notification and have the option to decline if they weren’t the ones who really opted into the list.

Make sure you abide by permission marketing standards.  These people trust you enough to hand over important details, so don’t sell their contact information or abuse it in any way.  If you respect the people on your list, it will grow and you’ll have a readymade list of prospects that can help you earn more money on both a short and long-term timeframe.

There are a couple of options with email marketing, either use a dedicated autoresponder service like Aweber. Another option is a 3rd party script installed directly on your site, they both have their pros and cons. But personally for me, I let aweber handle my subscribers. It does cost a monthly fee but it’s well worth it for the service they provide. Plus they work with the major ISP’s to get your email delivered in the inbox and not the spam folder!

One thing which is a problem with using a script installed on your site, many hosts these days limit how many emails can be sent out. Normally it’s limited by the hour, for example 300 emails. Although it’s ok while you have a small list, but what about when it’s in the 1000’s? it’s going to take hours to send one email.

Most people have a hosting account with on a shared server, so there could be a few hundred other sites on the same server as your site. Which is one reason for the limit on emails that can be sent out, so you don’t hog the server resources. One option is to purchase hosting on a dedicated server, so only your sites on the server. Then your hosting provider is likely to increase the limit if you ask.

But if you only have 1-2 sites and not at that level of needing a dedicated server, it far cheaper to stick with shared hosting and use a autoresponder service.

© Neil-Harvey.com