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Opt-In Email Vs. Bulk Email Spam

In the current business world there are many organizations that rely on spamming to create awareness about their products and services. Some companies send legitimate emails promoting legitimate products while others use this concept for malicious reasons. However, as a marketer it is important to know the difference.

Bulk email spam by definition refers to emails sent for commercial purposes without the consent of the receiver. Opt-in emails are defined as those emails sent for commercial purposes to individuals who have specifically requested to receive them. There are many benefits of opt-in email campaigns as opposed to bulk spam campaigns. Firstly you are sending your promotional emails to people who want to receive them. Therefore, ideally your conversion rates with opt-in emails should be higher. Other advantages of opt-in email campaigns include building long term relationships with customers, preserving your organization’s reputations as a non-spammer, lets you target your campaigns and shows customers that you and your company respect their privacy.

Although bulk spam emails have been worked in terms of boosting sales, they come with many disadvantages. Some of these disadvantages include a drop in conversion rates, drop in open and click rates, organization’s reputation at stake, unable to target the messages and inability to accurately measure the effectiveness of the email campaigns. Taking these facts in to consideration, it is clear that the advantages of opt-in email campaigns far outweigh those of bulk email spam campaigns.

Website Promotion - Know the Basics

Once you have developed your website you need to tell everyone that it is available. If you do just the basics right, you should see traffic starting to flow to your website within a matter of days. Here is how to do it.

Search engine submissions - make sure your website is search engine optimized. Add meta tags, meta and title tags and make sure that the web page is in order. Submit your page at as many search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing and Alta Vista. These search engines will crawl your page, but that could take weeks. Therefore it’s better to submit it manually to see results faster.

Submit to Directories - Submitting your website to directories like Yahoo, Looksmart and AOL means that users of these directories can easily find your website under a specific category. Being listed in a directory also helps with link popularity. Follow the guidelines for submission by the directory owner as your site will be reviewed by humans and will be accepted or rejected based on specific criteria.

Build Link Popularity - Building link popularity is important for search engines to find your site and rank it and for people to navigate to your website. Having a blog means you can link to others while writing and they will most probably link back. Post comments on related stories on other blogs and articles thus creating a link back to your website.

Advertising - once you have used up all the free resources, you can use online advertising to promote your site further. Google, Yahoo and Facebook are great places to start.