Sunday, August 2, 2009

Beware of a Cheap Email Marketing Solution

By Kirill Vasilyev

Many folks are trying email marketing for the first time in their life and do not fully realize what consequences they may face if they do it wrong. When it comes to buying digital supplies for their businesses, they want to pay zero in expenses but expect to achieve astonishing results. It looks like a couple hundreds of dollars more in expenses really matters when thousands of dollars are expected from the stake. Even when it comes to email campaigns, always remember the old tale: "Free cheese can exist only in a mouse trap". Wrong steps in email marketing can ruin your business once and for all.

Today, I want to speak about the problem of using third-party marketing email lists to perform email campaigns. Internet is flooded with dirt-cheap email lists and an inexperienced beginner thinks that this is normal and orders the cheapest lists or even downloads free email lists. It is understandable, we humans do not want to pay money for anything but there is a catch. Many guys who sell all sorts of opt-in business email lists are actually bad guys. They have no rights to distribute these email mailing lists because they obtained them illegally by simply harvesting addresses from various Internet resources.

Usually, these fraudsters offer a cheap and complete email marketing solution that include not only a business email list but also a free email marketing software. Later, you may find out that the software is stolen, email mailing lists are illegal and the serial numbers are fake. Using this email marketing solution you may end up violating a range of anti-spam and copyright laws and instead of money flow you may may get people in grey uniforms at your doorstep at 6 in the morning.

When you read advertisements, do not be enchanted by the magic words such as "opt-in mailing lists", "double opt-in mailing lists", "legitimate mailing lists" and so on. Who can check this? The guy does not even identify himself on his website. You can only trust a company that can show you a proof that they obtained their email addresses with the permissions of every person who is on the list. Legitimate list brokers will likely have an office, a telephone number and other attributes of a real company. Do not hesitate to contact them and ask for a proof.

Once you make sure the email list provider you chose is real, you can buy and use its email mailing lists. Every legitimate list should include a chart with rules and limitations. Never violate these rules. Sending off-topic messages is not permitted. Targeted email list is related to a certain subject so if you have access to a list about various gadgets, do not use it to send information related to health. Do not send more messages than it is allowed.

Purchase a genuine copy of email marketing software. Do not buy any packages that include email marketing software along with mailing lists unless you make sure that the seller has legal rights to distribute this software. Once you install the software, contact the developers using the Contact Us menu item from within the program to make sure you run a genuine copy. If you receive a negative answer, request a chargeback in your bank. If you carry out your email marketing legally, and by the rules, you will turn a couple hundreds of dollars of expenses into thousands of dollars of profit.

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