Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

CHAPTER 52

MANAGING YOUR E-MAIL ON AUTOPILOT

I've dedicated a significant portion of this book to convince you that e-mail marketing is a vital part of any business or organization's marketing efforts because of how inexpensive and highly effective it is. However, the biggest mistake you can make in pursuing e-mail marketing as a strategy is to make it a manual process. The basic skills and tools for automating your e-mail efforts are vital if you are to get the full benefit from your efforts.

Here are the basics tools you'll need to understand in order to automate your e-mail marketing system:

1. 1. An e-mail management service.

   There are two types of e-mail management systems you can deploy in your business. There are hosted solutions, and then there are solutions that allow you to store all of your data on your own computers and send e-mail from your own servers. I'm a big fan of paying a reputable e-mail service to host all of my addresses and manage my accounts for me. There are several benefits in going this route including:

   • Your solution provider ensures that you remain compliant with all current spam laws.
   • You don't have to worry about your IP address becoming blacklisted, or other issues surrounding the management of mass e-mail marketing efforts.
   • You automatically stay on the cutting edge of new tools and options without having to upgrade your hardware or software to accommodate the changes.

   While some marketers enjoy being able to manage their e-mail addresses themselves ...