Email Advertising Facts and Fictions

Sending and receiving emails is almost the only thing that most of the Internet users know. In fact, the internet was introduced to people through email. I am sure the first time that you signed up for your first email, you couldn’t wait to receive an email from somebody. You also loved to email some of your friends, relatives and loved ones everyday. You also were used to read from the beginning to the end of each and every email you received. I was like that too.

Soon marketers learned that email advertising is a highly effective advertising method because people loved to read the emails and clicked on the links they could find in the emails. Especially when they could see their own name in the emails, they thought that the emails had something important for them.

At that time, email marketing were used to be the best internet marketing and advertising method. The conversion rate of email marketing was outstanding. There were no spam filter and almost all of the email ads could settle in the inbox of the users. But like all other things, this opportunity was abused by abusers and spammers and email service providers decided to use spam filters to prevent spam and unsolicited emails. Email users became skeptical about the emails they received and didn’t open most of the emails from un-known sender. So email advertising lost its value and effect little by little.

I remember the time that e-zine (electronic newsletter) advertising was so popular and there were many internet marketers who promoted their products or affiliates links only through the e-zine advertising. We still have the e-zine advertising but only newbie internet marketers spend their money for it because all the experienced internet marketers know that e-zine advertising doesn’t work any more or at least it doesn’t worth the money you spend for it.

There are many reasons that you should not spend your money for email and e-zine advertising:

1. You don’t know the truth!

Emails list owners and e-zine publishers always exaggerate about the size of their list and there is no way to know the truth before you order your ad. For example I ordered an ad in one of the newsletters of BraveNet.com that had over 1.2 million subscribers.

I expected to receive at least 50,000 unique visitors because the ad I had ordered was a big and expensive ad in a newsletter that had 1.2 million subscribers but I only received a few hundreds of clicks and also the quality of the traffic was so bad.

What does that mean? It means the newsletter didn’t have 1.2 million subscribers and BraveNet lies and exaggerates about the size and quality of its lists. I couldn’t know this before I order my ad and wait for the result. I have experienced this with many other e-zine ads I have ordered.

2- Spam

You can never know that the newsletter that you advertise in it, has a double opt-in email list. Of course you don’t send the newsletter and the e-zine publishers send them but having your ad in a spam email or newsletter can make problems for you too. At least it can ruin your website or company credit.

Those e-zine publishers who have real double opt-in lists prefer not to accept any ad from others and try to place their own ads in their e-zines because they know that if the subscribers receive newsletters that are full of different ads, they will un-subscribe.

The internet users have become so strict about the emails they receive and it is a long time that you can not send anything you want to your email list.

Do Not Buy any Email Lists!

There are some other websites and fake and scam companies that sell email lists. Their lists are apparently categorized into different targets and for example they sell 5,000,000 work at home related email list for $200. Never ever buy any email list from these websites. Why?

1. These emails are bought illegally from different companies and sites or are harvested from different sites and forums. It means that you are not allowed to send any email to these lists otherwise you will be charged/arrested for spamming.

2. The average life time of an email list is 3 months. It means after 3 months, a fresh email list will have loads of invalid and undeliverable emails. Sometimes more than 90% of the emails of the email lists that you buy are invalid and undeliverable.

3. You are not able to send a message to a big list. It needs especial softwares and you have to rent a server for it. Even if you do that, your emails will be blocked by the spam filters because you have to have your server IP addresses in the the white list of email service providers like AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail and this is impossible for a new and un-known server.

It is also a long time that ISPs block bulk emailing and having access to the SMTP server of the websites.

So even if you buy a 100% double opt-in and fresh list, you can not send any message to it.

So do you have to forget about e-mail advertising or I’d better to say email marketing?

The only way that you can take the advantage of email marketing is collecting the email address of your website or weblog visitors through a reliable autoresponder and email list builder system like Aweber and then sending weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter to them. Aweber is so reliable and makes double opt-in lists for you. It doesn’t have any limitation and you can make as many different lists as you want.

I will talk about list building and newsletter publishing in other articles. By now, I just want to emphasize that you should not spend your money for ordering any ad in any e-zine or newsletter.

Bottom line:

Do not spend any time and money on e-zine advertising and buying email lists. It will not work and will be wasting of time and money. The only way that you can take the advantage of email marketing is building your own email list using reliable autoresponders like Aweber.