The first internet marketing strategy - email - should still be a key part of your marketing mix.

By Mark Helfen

What might be the original internet marketing strategy – email – is still alive and kicking, and a can be a valuable part of your overall marketing mix. Or so says Laurie Beasley, founder and president of Beasley Direct Marketing. She is also President of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.

Beasley will speak at the Monday, February 8 SDForum Marketing SIG meeting on the topic “Building Blocks to successful B2B Email Marketing.”

Email is still a widely used strategy, and its use is growing in a difficult economy. As one example “every software company does email marketing,” according to Beasley.

From her perspective, email marketing includes a broad variety of information sent by companies to their customers, or potential customers. Software updates, company news, customer retention marketing, and prospecting all fall in the email marketing area.

“Its difficult to pack everything into a single hour,” said Beasley, but she commits to giving attendees the “core foundation for success” of an email marketing strategy.

Since much of the email marketing I get has subject lines like “Size does matter,” or “Term Life With No Physical?” I asked her about how spam affects the strategy.

Her answer was that spam isn’t illegal, just not very effective.

The idea is to use opt-in marketing. When you send email to a rented list, everyone on the list has opted-in. The objective is to get a relevant offer in front of the right people, something that spam isn’t very good at.

Beasley listed three main topics for her presentation:

1. What a relevant email offer is.

2. Tried and true techniques for growing your own email list.

3. Why subscribers choose to opt-in for an email list.

So come to the Feb 8 meeting, and “If you are, or will be responsible for email marketing, you will learn how to plan and resource an effective email marketing project.”


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Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant. He can be reached at:
mhelfen@wordpixel.com

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/markhelfen

Facebook: www.facebook.com/mark.helfen

follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mark_helfen

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