Email campaign software is a unique invention that has come to pass recently as a result of the need for a more structured method to the madness called email marketing and bulk email marketing. For a large part of the start of the internet, there has been sheer chaos when it comes to using email as a medium to advertise products. In the beginning, most internet marketers failed to understand that email is actually an advertising medium rather than a hard sell, sales spiel mechanism. However, that realization is probably the most important part of today’s bulk email marketing fundamental.
There is another aspect to bulk email marketing: spam. Again, for a large part of the previous century when the internet finally bloomed, there were those entities that decided to send advertising and sales promotion material to email users on the internet. On its own, a benign exercise but unfortunately, this group of people abused this privilege by sending unsolicited mails to the point where people’s mailboxes had more spam than useful mails. Legislation finally meant that people had to get serious about bulk email marketing.
This is where the email campaign software comes in. Assuming that you acquire a database of prospects who wish to be mailed offers, you need a mechanism to send out mailers and newsletters to these prospects. The software itself is basically a database, which has been segregated according to some user definition and structure. The other part of the software is the sending mechanism that will automate the process of sending an email once the format has been loaded in and the specifics of who to send has been fed in. This software could theoretically also be used to send spam but the assumption is that most people who invest in the software are people who are more serious about business.
There are many options when it comes to email marketing software on the internet. Ideally, one should look for a product that allows database and list imports, survey, report, track, and add an unsubscribe link by default. The unsubscribe link is a mandate from the CAN SPAM legislation and to that effect the software has evolved with the times.
The list of customers is the most important part of the equation. How do you get people to willfully ask to be mailed? This can be done in nearly any registration form or interactive area of a website. There are even some ingenious places that you can ask for people’s email addresses that can be picked up by email campaign software. One of these is the installation wizards of any software. The last step of most installation wizards usually asks whether the user would like to be mailed information and this is an invaluable source if you are a technical service provider. There is also much to be said about leveraging the power of social networking sites and their massive user bases in fan pages and other areas.