Email marketing has been around since the early days of the Internet (for business purposes.)

Internet marketers use email marketing campaign to promote their own and/or affiliated products to prospects.

The power of email marketing is in the size of the mailing lists. The more mailing lists members, generally means the more sales the Internet marketers make.

Internet marketers build up mailing lists through various methods, including ‘borrowing’ mailing lists – either the spam-free opt-in lists or the spam-invested non-opt-in ones – from email marketing companies.

But then, with the larger number of email spams out there and the more wise and tech-savvy email users today, email marketing is heading into extinction. Or is it?

Email marketing campaign vs. email spams

People love to email spam for one obvious reason – hopefully, their spam emails are getting the attention of the email recipients, and get them converted into ‘buying’ what the spammers offer – most of the cases, ‘products’ that main purposes are for identity theft and digital robbery.

With the countless email spams out there, the legitimate and real emails from Internet marketers are often accidentally regarded as spams.

This in itself loses thousands, if not millions of dollars of the Internet marketers’ money.

Email marketing campaign vs. tech-savvy email users

Tech-savvy email users regard email marketing campaign as a mixed-blessing – in one hand, the products Internet marketers offer can be very useful for them, while in other hand, they simply just want to get the free offers that often offered by Internet marketers to build up the mailing lists.

Free offers?

Yes – it is common that Internet marketers offer something free to get prospects to sign up to claim the freebies. Free offers come in the form of free services, free products, or free reports.

What tech-savvy users do is this: they set up a free email account from Yahoo!, Gmail or others for the purpose of getting the free offers. This means, they won’t read any incoming emails from the Internet marketers, which also means zero conversion – very smart, eh? :)

Despite all that – is email marketing dead?

In my opinion, not quite.

Like I mentioned above, there are prospects who opt-in to receive offers through their email accounts.

The prospects can be product and/or service users, or Internet marketers themselves that hope to make money online through affiliation. They want to receive offer, thus increasing conversion.

One problem, though – opt-in email lists are hard to built, simply due to the nature of the lists – members are voluntarily choose to include themselves into the list.

One of the solution to overcome the problem is through partnering with an email marketing company that offer you opt-in mailing lists.

Remember, the keyword here is ‘opt-in’ – there are literally thousands email marketing companies that spam their mailing lists. You should stay away from them, as using their service will damage your products or services reputation.

One of the opt-in email marketing company I know is iContact – starting from $9.95 per month, you can benefit from their email marketing services, including email templates, autoresponder, surveying, etc. And, oh, they have 15,000 customers and 100,000 users.

If you are interested in using email marketing services, I suggest you to read this email marketing white paper provided by iContact.

As long as Internet marketers can offer quality products and/or services, the email marketing is pretty much far from being extinct.

Ivan Widjaya
Email marketer
Image by Seattle Municipal Archives.

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