E-mail newsletter and drip marketing needs play a major role in a company’s marketing strategies. If you are not using email as a medium for business marketing and communications, you are simply not taking full advantage of the Internet to position your company as an expert and sell products and services.

Most online sales stratergies focus heavily on customer acquisition. Getting new customers is not cheap, however, meaning a smart marketer needs to work hard to cultivate repeat business from an existing customers. While SEO and PPC advertising is a great tool to find new leads, permission-based bulk email software, when used responsibly and ethically, excels at:

1. Converting them to sales
2. Solidifying a relationship that will produce repeat sales

Some modern email marketing techniques are:

• Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)
• Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)
• RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)

Auto-responders

E-mail autoresponse systems are a powerful tool to keep in your email marketing arsenal. If you have never set up a “drip campaign,” you should do so immediately. It is one marketing tool that you can truly “set it and forget it.”

The downfall of any marketing technique is if it requires too much human involvement in order to work. Ideally, you want to design a marketing system that almost completely runs itself. With a drip campaign autoresponse system, you can do exactly that. Here’s how it can work:

1. A user signs up on your website (or you add them after a phone conversation)
2. They instantly get an email with a free report or instant download of some sort. For real estate agents, it could be something like “How to short sell your home and avoid foreclosure.” You want to create a helpful resources that readers will want to enough that they will be willing to sign up to receive it by email.
3. They automatically get a follow-up email an hour, a day, or a week later. You can even refer to “the email I sent last week” because your drip system automatically schedules the delivery of each message in the sequence.
4. You can automatically send more follow-ups at key time periods. You can say “A month ago, I emailed you a free guide entitled….”

Broadcast Email Marketing

Broadcast emails are distinguished from drip campaigns because they are sent as a broadcast message to the entire list at the same time. Email newsletters are a perfect way to establish your expertise as a niche expert in your business, or you can use it to simply broadcast product announcements and company promotional materials. You decide what goes in the broadcast newsletter. The key is to gear it toward the interests of your users as closely as possible.

An email newsletter marketing system should allow for email scheduling as well. With this feature, you can pre-write some announcements far in advance and have them repeat each year, such as “It’s April 1st, have you done your taxes  yet?”

RSS Email Updates

RSS Feed subscriptions are a great feature for marketing blogs. Browsers like Firefox make subscribing to a website feed easy, but the savvy email marketer knows that most people don’t read their bookmarked feeds – but people do read their email. So if a subscriber is interested enough in your blog content to subscribe to your RSS feed by email, you are much more likely to keep her reading your blog than if she just bookmarked it in her web browser.