Introducing Email Marketing

1.1 Email Marketing Today

Since that fateful day in late November or early December of 1971when Ray Tomlinson sent the first email using a ARPANET (the predecessor of what we know as the Internet today), email has changed...a lot.

The email th at Ray Tomlinson sent was sent to himself. It has been reported that the message was “QWERTYUIOP”but he says that it was more likely to have been ‘testing 12 3 4”. It might have been the first email sent and possibly the last one that wasn’t a marketing email.

Not really, of course but email is the primary communication choice of individuals and businesses world wide.

It became too popular for its own good. Everybody who had anything at all to sell or any message they wanted to promote discoved mass marketing email. Soon inboxes all over the world were overflowing with unsolicited marketing emails which came to be called SPAM.

In 2003 the problem of SPAM had become so big and so intrusive that the Congress of the Untied States passed the CAN -SPAM Act .

It became the law of the land in January of 2004. CAN­SPAM is an acronym for Controling the Assult of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing.

The CAN­SPAM Act defines SPAM as unsolicited bulk email . Bulk email isn’t SPAM and neither is unsolicited email. To meet the definition requirements of SPAM in the CAN­SPAM Act, email must be both bulk and unsolicited.

The CAN­SPAM Act made it illegal for businesses to send bulk marketing emails to people who had not agreed to receive them. The opt­in list was bornof the necessity to gain that agreement.

The opt- in list is the backbone of email marketing today and opt- in list building techniques are possibly the most discussed subject among affiliate marketers.

1.2 Writing Powerful Emails –How Vital Is It?

So just exactly how vital is it that your emails are powerful? Let me count the ways that powerful emails make a difference in your affiliate marketing buisness.

The most used and the most effective method that is available to you as an affiliate marketer for contacting your opt­in list members and selling your products and services to them is email.

You may have contact with your list by way of a webinar or a teleseminar and be able to speak directly with them occasionally but that doesn’t happen very often. You may well publish a newsletter that you send to your list, as well, but that isn’t for the purpose of convincing the members of your list to buy a product or service.

No.

Email is the way that you contact the members of your list on a regular basis and do so for the purpose of selling them a product or service for which you are an affiliate marketer.

By writing powerful sales emails you will make a great many sales to your list. By writing weak and ineffectual emails you won’t make sales to your list.

By writing powerful sales emails you will increase the bottom line of your bank account. By writing weak and ineffectual emails you will watch the balance of your bank account dwindle.

By writing powerful sales emails you will increase your credibility in the eyes of your list members. By writing weak and ineffectual emails you will lose whatever credibility you had once established with them.

By writing powerul sales emails you willincrease your value as a joint venture partner in the eyes of other affiliate marketers and other Internet marketers. By writing weak and ineffectual emails you will lose the respect of other marketers and become a less desirable joint venture partner.