Dump The Mass Mailings

What if you could drop a marketing email into 100,000 email boxes in one day and have 100,000 potential new customers see your marketing message and possibly become long term customers of your internet business?

That sounds pretty enticing doesn't it? That is the basic marketing strategy that many internet marketers have tried to use to build their online business. This is a methodology commonly called "Mass Mailings",. That is the polite word for this technique. The less complimentary term that email recipients use for mass marketing emails is simply "spam".

Mass mailing marketing has been big business on the internet. And it is unfair to say that it has been used exclusively by scam artists or pyramid scheme operators. Many legitimate business have tried mass mailings to build their internet business on the promise that the companies who offer these services have harvested tens of thousands of valid email addresses that they will send your marketing message to for a small fee.

Compared to the amount of emails that will go out, the fee seems fair. The marketing formula for success is also a reasonable one. Usually the fee for the mailing can be offset by a small number of sales, perhaps less than ten. And with 100,000 emails going out, the expectation that you might get a response of 100-1000 inquiries that could result in 10 sales is not unreasonable at all.

The problem is that for every 1000 customers who may have an interest in your product or service, you will have antagonized 99,000 others who see your email as nothing more than electronic junk mail otherwise known as spam. The spam epidemic has reached a level of crisis precisely because mass mailing services and software have made it possible for good business, scam artists and even virus producers to spread their bad emails to a vast audience if the spam is left untouched.

The result is that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to fight the spam epidemic. These companies sell software to you to fight spam emails by keeping up on the most up to date spamming methods and catching bad emails and sending them to your deleted box or a spam folder for future deletion. This sets in motion a vicious cycle of one one-upmanship in which the spam operators find ways around the spam filters and the spam filter providers continue to update their software to stop the newest tricks of the spam operators.

It has become a huge mess and the worst part about it is that you as a valid internet marketer of a valid product or service only want a reliable method to communicate with new and existing customers. Mass mailing seems like one way to do that. But when you decide to try your hand at sending a mass mailing email, you get in the middle of the spam war and you are then faced with dealing with sophisticated email delivery hindrance systems that are there to fight the problem of spam.

So what can we do about trying to build our online businesses with this huge battle causing serious disruptions to email deliverability? For one thing, abandon the use of mass mailings entirely. They don't work and they put you in the distasteful company of spammers and internet criminals.

There are far better ways to communicate with customers such as web site memberships, newsletters and contests that the customer can opt in on. Build your relationships with the customer from the customer out and you will be able to avoid the entire spam deliverability wars and side step the email deliverability issues as well.