by Rahimah Sultan

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What is email marketing?

It’s basically self-explanatory. The Wikipedia definition is:

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Wikipedia


Email is one of the most trusted communication channels available to marketers. You have to have an email address to perform many things online including online banking and opening a Facebook account, so just about everyone with internet access has a valid email address.


The most successful email marketing campaigns begin with a targeted email list of qualified leads who are interested in what you’re offering.


What are the types of email marketing?

There are many. In this article I shall discuss four main types of email marketing:

Welcome
Email Newsletters
Transactional Emails
Behavioral Emails


1. WELCOME EMAILS

Welcome emails are the first communication you’ll have with prospective customers. You need to nurture your contacts and give them a chance to get to know, like, and trust you.


Welcome emails should offer a personal touch and introduce you without a sales pitch. You need to build a relationship and work on giving a good first impression. They should illustrate your knowledge and expertise and pave the way for future contact.


2. EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

An email newsletter works well for B2B (Business to Business) communication. You can use it as a method to educate customers and prospects about your products, as well as showcase employee profiles, company projects, and relevant graphics. Hubspot is a good marketing CRM (customer relations management) tool that’s free and you can upgrade later to grow your business. (I get no fee for this. It’s just a suggestion.)


When creating an email newsletter You should consider a variety of factors including:

Content length
Type of information
Placement of images and text
Design
CTA (Call to Action)


As you work on your newsletter layout and content creation, remember your goal and be sure you’re working toward it by prioritizing the design and positioning of calls-to-action.


The advantages of email newsletters are:

Creating Brand Awareness: A newsletter, like a newspaper, creates a certain anticipation in readers. They get into the habit of receiving it, so make sure you’re sending it at regular intervals, be it daily or weekly, thus building a habit in your email subscribers which allows them to recognize your brand and associate it with a positive experience.


Repurposing Content: A newsletter usually contains already published information. You can do quick summaries of your most popular blog posts and link to the articles from your newsletter. This will bring your subscribers back to the company website and connect them with more company content.


Diversification of Content: You can use an email newsletter to include different kinds of content important to your business or organization. That can be popular blog posts, new offers, upcoming events, discounts, etc.


3. TRANSACTIONAL EMAILS

Transactional emails are usually initiated by a prospect or customer interaction with a website or an app. For example, password resets delivery information and receipts, email receipts, invoices, billing statements, and order confirmations.


Transactional emails are used to enable a transaction already agreed upon by a customer and shouldn’t market or promote any product or service or generate additional revenue.


Usually, transactional emails don’t require permission, whereas you MUST get customer consent to send marketing emails. And, with marketing emails, there must always be an unsubscribe option for the customer.


Be sure you’re compliant with email sending laws in all the countries in which you do business.


4. BEHAVIORAL EMAILS

Behavioral emails are automated emails sent to people who have given their permission to have emails sent to them that may contain advertising materials, offers, company digests, invitations to events, video reviews, and other content.


These emails are sent after a user interacts with a business on social media, the company’s website, email, and other channels. They help increase customer engagement and sales. With behavioral email, site visitors receive different types of emails, depending on their specific actions.


Email marketing principles are the same for anyone, not just big businesses.

Almost everyone who has Internet access has at least one active email address.

Email marketing gives you the opportunity to build personal relationships with your audience.

Email makes it easy to combine all your marketing campaigns.


Email marketing is easy to manage, gives you full control, and allows you to establish a direct contact with your customers.


Although there are more, these four main types of email marketing will help you with your marketing strategy.


Your Autoresponder and More

by Rahimah Sultan

What is Affiliate Link URL Masking?

If you are an affiliate marketer you have links that look like the following examples.
1) http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Globa lly/dp/B003FSUDM4/ref=amb_link_353259562_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIK X0DER&pf_rd_s=center-10&pf_rd_r=11EYKTN682A79T370AM3&pf_rd_ …

2) http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=bcdefg

3) http://www.safelisttactics.com/?rid=118???

These links could and should be masked with shortened links like the following.

1) http://tinyurl.com/Kindle

2) http://tinyurl.com/6u9d26e

3) http://tinyurl.com/safelists-mktgg

Although there are numerous programs available, these are examples using tinyurl.com

Reasons for Link Masking

As with the first two examples above, sometimes your domain is too long and complicated to spell and/or write. Or you may be using free hosting that does not give you a dedicated domain but just a subdirectory of their domain. Using a shorter, more understandable and eye pleasing link will add a big boost to your online marketing.

Another big reason to mask affiliate links is to keep people from stealing your money. Anyone who is actively promoting other people’s products and/or services as an affiliate could be losing money from hard earned commissions because of those UGLY long affiliate URLs that target you as an affiliate, and scare away your visitors and/or potential customers.

Affiliate link masking sounds pretty obvious. All you’re doing is replacing that UGLY long affiliate URL with a nice cloaked (forwarded inside an invisible frame), professional domain name like the short ones listed in the above examples, that remain sticky.

Sticky simply means that the URL remains the domain name you chose, once your visitor has clicked on it, and it doesn’t redirect back to the UGLY long affiliate URL you started with. This makes you, the affiliate, look professional in the eyes of your visitors and/or potential customers. They don’t know if you are an affiliate or the actual web site owner. A web site’s stickiness is important to online advertisers because the longer visitors stay on the site the more exposure they have to potential advertising.

And lastly, people just don’t like to click on strange looking long links.

How does URL Masking work?

In case of URL Masking the Domain Forwarding server sends the client a Frames page where the Frame Source contains the destination URL you have specified. This ensures that the URL in the address bar of the browser does not change when the client sees the destination page.

As Web surfers become more knowledgeable of how affiliate programs work, more people will omit your affiliate ID or use someone else’s ID when ordering. Either way, you may lose commissions you’re supposed to get. Using full window frame page is probably the most effective (though not perfect) way to prevent such loss. In fact, practically all affiliate link cloaking software uses this method. The address bar won’t display your affiliate URL unless the affiliate site has a frame breaker (e.g.: Gmail). If visitors book mark the site, they will come back to your frame page. This means they use YOUR affiliate ID every time, and this could translate into sales.

Although masking your URL address can be very effective for marketing, in some cases it’s not necessary and disturbs the normal navigation of the user. So be sure to use URL masking only when it’s really necessary, and help convert more of your visitors into SALES!

There are many services online that offer this. Simply go to Google and do a search.

If you are a serious Affiliate Marketer and/or are just starting out online with affiliate programs then this is something you’ll definitely want to look into. Not only will you look professional in the eyes of your visitors and/or potential customers you’ll also be safe guarding your hard earned affiliate commissions with affiliate link URL masking. When visitors come to your site, the link is their first impression, and first impressions matter, especially when doing business online.