Email marketing can be a great tool for expanding your business. It would be advantageous to develop an email list to market to over and over again, with their permission of course. It can leave you with a steady stream of customers as long as you are in business. This email list can serve more than one purpose. As well as being a constant customer base, your email list is also available to be a test market. Through them you can send surveys periodically and ask them what they are looking for so you can provide it for them. This is a great option for any internet marketer.
What worries some people who are considering beginning an email campaign is being accused of spamming people. Spam is unsolicited email when those people did not consent to receive email from you. If you do this, you can get into a lot of trouble you will not want to be in. The people you send unsolicited email to can complain to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The result may be that you lose your email account; all the money you spent or all the hard work you may have done to build an email list will have been wasted. Your Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or domain names will be recorded and placed on a list, called a blacklist. Once you are on this blacklist you will be prevented from sending email from these sources. Email marketing will be over for you.
There are things that you can do to prevent the above from happening. Actually, there are things you should not do and you will be less likely to be accused of spamming your list. The first thing you should not do is rent an email list. Sending an email to a list of people and asking them to join your list is better than sending out a completely unsolicited email, but it can be considered spam, even though you are asking them for permission to send them email; the first email asking permission is still an unsolicited email. The best thing is to have an opt-in list. With an opt-in option, people can enter their names and email addresses into your sign-up form which will be sent to you. An email is sent automatically to them from your autoresponder requiring them to click a link subscribing them to your email list. If everyone does this, you cannot be accused of spamming them. Further helping you stay off blacklists is to have an unsubscribe link in every email; it is a requirement. Following these rules can keep you off of blacklists and keep you earning money from your email list.
