Large email marketers are in the business of high volume email marketing, a branch of bulk email marketing. There are many levels of being in the bulk email marketing business and the graduation is from simple marketers sending out a few hundred mails using simple email clients to becoming a sender of over hundreds of thousands of emails by integrating the sending mechanism with your CRM software. Of course, this is assuming that CRM is the way that you choose to go. There are many challenges that come up with scalability and email marketing scaling up also causes challenges to crop up.
It is interesting to note that opt-ins remains the biggest problem in bulk email marketing. An opt-in is a procedure in which a person voluntarily offers his or her email address to a website to receive regular updates on promotions or general news. As one can imagine, this is a really difficult process and many bulk email marketers end up circumventing the opt-in and send unsolicited mails. This is not illegal but in large part is of no use. Therefore, it is imperative that you acquire opt-ins. How you are able to entice your audience then is the question. Large marketers use the following opt-in practices when indulging in high volume email marketing.
Strategic tie ups: This is probably one of the best ways to get a bulk of your recipients email addresses. What you need to do here is to form a strategic business tie up with certain other entities whether online or offline. This will help you to leverage the partner's reputation to get people to sign up to receive your mails. After you form the strategic tie up, convince your partner to place a sign on form on their website to elicit opt-ins.
Surveys: Another good way of getting people to give you their email IDs is to place a survey on your website. In a large part, this will probably get you existing users only but sometimes can also get you the new users to the site. You could also add interesting widgets like calculators on your website, which people can use for free as long as they give you their email addresses. Take care to ensure that people know that they will receive updates via email.
Social networking: This is an avenue that not many corporations have undertaken so you would be pioneering this. On a famous social networking website, make a fan page and the get people to sign in to receiving updates from you. When you do send individual mails to them via the mailing application of the site, also add the opt-in link for them to be added on to your mailing list. Large marketers in the business of high volume email marketing should always stick to their own email mechanisms and not only rely on other sites' mailing applications as you could be reported as a spammer anytime.
