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| Home | Writing Subject Lines | Spam vs. Bulk E-mail | 7 Quick Tips | Earn $4,000 to $8,000+ in commission | Links |
Spam vs. Bulk E-mail – You Must Know The Difference To Keep Your Business Safe And Earn HUGE Affiliate Checks!
With that in mind, over the past few months we’ve made a point of providing Internet Marketing Center affiliates with "Cut & Paste" template e-mails written by our top copywriters that you can send to your e-mail lists – with very little effort – to earn outrageous commissions. And many of you did just that! Unfortunately, there have also been a handful of affiliates who have been a bit confused about who they should be e-mailing these promotions to. And this confusion led them down a rather dangerous path – with a few being accused of spamming! I know that with all of the conflicting information out there, it can get pretty confusing. What’s considered spam and what’s considered legitimate bulk e-mail? I think it's time we explained... Spam, also referred to as "UCE" or "Unsolicited Commercial E-mail," basically involves sending e-mail to large lists of people with whom you have no previous relationship. The e-mail addresses may have been "harvested" from AOL or CompuServe forums and member directories, classified ads, public newsgroups, etc…
Spam will enrage 90% of your e-mail list… you’ll get nasty threats and e-mails… your ISP can cancel your account… and the list goes on! Legitimate bulk e-mail, on the other hand, can make you a LOT of money because it gives you the opportunity to capitalize on existing relationships with people who know and trust you. The two biggest mistakes we typically see affiliates make are: MISTAKE #1: Purchasing Lists of Millions of E-mail Addresses You have probably received unsolicited e-mail from people/companies offering to sell you millions of addresses on a CD for $200 (or whatever price). Please heed this warning: DON'T BUY THEM! They’ll try to sell you on the idea that even if you get a 1% (or less) response rate, you will still make tens of thousands of dollars. And unfortunately, a lot of people get sucked into this marketing "myth" and lose thousands of dollars – even their business – thinking this one technique is going to make them rich. Let me explain why this won’t work… They may say that for $199 you can buy 20 million e-mail addresses. They’ll tell you that this is a great deal because even if you only get a 1% response to your offer, you will still make 200,000 sales. Then they’ll throw some impressive figures at you, telling you that even if you only make $10 profit on each order, this one mailing will earn you an astonishing $2,000,000! Finally, they’ll conclude their outrageous spiel by saying that even if you really screwed up and received a measly 0.01% response, you would still make $200,000 in profit. Those are pretty big figures, right? Well, don’t be fooled by the numbers game these companies play. It’s not worth it! They’re lying to you! FACT: You will be LUCKY if you receive one order for every 100,000 e-mails you send. And that’s assuming you don’t get shut down by your ISP (your Internet Service Provider) within a few hours due to complaints, their mail server being clogged, or any other number of problems that could occur!
Plus, with the complaints that your spam will likely produce, you’ll be lucky if you manage to get out 50,000 e-mails before your Internet access is terminated… and this isn’t even enough to make a single sale! So let’s do the math one more time: Let’s say that, by some miracle, you were able to get out 20,000,000 e-mails! (There is no way you could do this without some pretty heavy-duty equipment.) You make 1 sale for every 100,000 e-mails you send… so this means that you’ve generated about 200 sales. For each sale you close, you earn $10 profit. This means that your total profits from this mailing are $2,000. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? WRONG! To do a mailing like this, you would need to invest $500 to $1,000 in software, spend $200 on the mailing list, and numerous hundreds of dollars dealing with other problems… like your hostile ISP! If your time is worth anything – and I’m sure it is – you will have probably LOST money by the time everything is said and done. (Never mind your bruised ego from all of the people who sent you nasty messages.) I promise you that this just isn’t worth it. I’ve seen too many people do it and get in way over their heads. Why would you knowingly anger tens of thousands of people? It just doesn’t make good business sense! MISTAKE #2: Using the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) Field To Send E-mail This is another HUGE mistake we see affiliates making! There are a lot of spammers who use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field of their regular e-mail client (like Eudora or Outlook Express) to send their e-mail. They cut and paste their e-mail list into the BCC field so recipients won’t be able to see how many people the e-mail has been sent to. The general public has caught onto this trick, however, and many people have started filtering out any e-mail received where their e-mail address doesn’t appear in the "To:" or "CC:" field. The message is assumed to be spam and automatically deleted! This is why, when doing a legitimate bulk mailing, you need to avoid using the BCC field. You don’t want people to delete your newsletter, e-zine, free information, or promotional letter before they’ve even seen it! Rather than using the BCC field, you should be using a program like Mailloop to personalize and individually send e-mail to your customers and subscribers. This will prevent your readers’ e-mail clients from automatically deleting your message. Mailloop will also ensure that your readers’ mail servers don’t delete your message! Many mail servers are now set-up to automatically delete e-mail messages that have more than 15 to 20 e-mail addresses in the BCC field (or how many they have chosen to set their limit at). So it won’t matter if you’re legitimately sending a newsletter to someone who has requested it, without a program like Mailloop that puts each individual e-mail address in the TO: field, many of your e-mails will be deleted before they ever reach your clients and subscribers. If you want your customers and subscribers to receive your e-mail, you need to be aware of these spam filters! Another problem with using the BCC field to send bulk e-mail is that it is very slow. While it may look like a fast process when you are sending the e-mail using your e-mail client, most of the e-mail addresses will actually be handled very slowly once they reach the server! In fact, if the server is busy, it can take a day or two before all of your messages really get sent. Worse yet, if the server’s SENDMAIL program crashes in the middle of your mailout, you will lose some of the mailings but never know which ones or how many. E-mail clients such as Eudora or Outlook Express have not been designed to handle bulk mailings. As a result, many people have a lot of problems with their e-mail client "timing-out" before their mailing is complete. If the server is busy, Eudora or Outlook Express will "time out" before all of your messages have been sent. This is a problem because the next time you press "send," the mailing will start from the beginning again. You’ll have no way of knowing how many people have already received your message! This is one of the fastest ways to upset your customers and subscribers – you need to avoid making this critical error. Fortunately, if you use software such as Mailloop, you will not have this problem at all because it has protection mechanisms in place to prevent this – it will simply restart from where it left off. Rules To Follow When Doing A Bulk Mailing The best way to guarantee that each mailing you do generates the dramatic, positive response that you want – and that you don’t get accused of spamming and damage your reputation – is by following these few simple rules: Be sure to include your full name.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I know many of you may be worried that, if you give people the option of unsubscribing from your mailing list, everyone will ask to be removed. This simply isn’t the case. The only people who are going to ask to be removed are those who either (a) really have no interest in your product or information or (b) have no interest in purchasing from you. Why would you risk damaging your reputation by angering these people? They don’t want what you’re selling – and you want a targeted list of e-mail addresses! Always include the option for people to unsubscribe or "opt-out" of your list with each mailing you do.
E-mailing your previous customers, opt-in lists, and newsletter subscribers
with information that is relevant to them. (Provided that you give them
the option of opting-out of your e-mail database.) Basically, your best bet is to always be sure that you provide people with the opportunity to "opt-out" of your e-mail database… and be sure that you keep your database up-to-date! (A program such as Mailloop can be set up to automatically update your database.) The Debate Rages On... Spam is a sensitive issue. Everyone has an opinion, and there seem to be a lot of conflicting views on what, exactly, it is. So here’s what I recommend if you want to stay out of trouble… Do NOT send large quantities of unsolicited e-mail to people that you
have no previous relationship with and try to sell them something. You’ll
get yourself into some serious hot water if you do this. The argument is that if the bulk e-mailer did not make it clear to the person who asked for the free information, report, eBook, etc… that they would be e-mailing them again, then it is unwanted e-mail -- and therefore SPAM. Fortunately, most new laws don’t agree with this viewpoint. Most will argue that if a "relationship" has been established, it is not considered spam. However, the best thing to do is tread softly… and under no circumstance should you use large lists of harvested e-mail addresses to bombard people with blatant sales messages. You will be most successful as an affiliate, and earn the highest commission checks, if you carefully follow the rules I've outline above.
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