Online Mailshot Service

What is an Online Mailshot

Online mailshots are bulk email advertisments sent to potential customers to advertise goods or services. They can be "warm", meaning that they are more specialised. Or they can be "cold", similar to the weekly grocery store ad's that arrive through your letterbox once a week.

Even if you don't have a product to sell, your online mailshot is still of benefit to you. Online mailshots can help to create brand awareness for your company, product or service. A mailshot is a form of advertising and has become one of the most successful ways of selling a product or service. The main aim of a mailshot, just like any other advertising scheme, is to raise awareness and interest of the product / service that is being sold. Just as in the conventional market, directly mailing your offers to prospects is a very attractive way of reaching a targeted audience. The difference is that sending out an email mailshot is far, far cheaper than its postal equivalent.

There are basically two types of email marketing, unsolicited bulk email (spamming) and opt-in email. You can totally ignore the first option. The only recommended form of email mailshots to use is the opt-in lists. Opt-in lists are individuals who have requested to receive commercial emails relating to subjects they have indicated an interest in. (Please see our mailing list service).

In the long term, a better way to use direct email by far, is to generate your own lists rather than rent them from opt-in sources. This is in much the same way that your own database in the traditional marketplace is always going to produce more effective results, than a bought-in list of prospects with whom you've never had any relationship before.

The easiest and most basic way for you to begin building your own list is to produce your own blog, ezine or newsletter somewhere along the line. It's a great way of capturing email addresses and thus building your own personal online database. This will allow you to keep in regular contact with your prospects and customers and to offer new services / products or make them regular offers etc. (Please see our ezine and newsletter promotion service or our blog service).

Even in the early days when you have no blog, ezine or newsletter, or indeed if you never intend to publish one, you should still encourage your visitors to email you. Encourage them to ask you questions, to pass on their comments about your site ... anything ... as long as you can encourage communication. Do this and every day you can add to your own self-generated list (which can build up extremely quickly).

Sending out a plain text email mailshot is not only a good idea it is also fairly straightforward, but sending out a graphical email to your subscriber can be far more effective.

Advantages and Disadvantages of an Online Mailshot

Most businesses send out online mailshots several times a year, whether they are large-scale mailings or batches of individual emails to a dozen key customers at a time. If the targeting and the offers are right, you get a positive response. If you get them wrong, it is junk mail. You need a proven product and a strong offer, embodied in a compelling email pack. But writing a successful mailshot need not be difficult, if you set about it the right way.

An online mailshot sent out by email can be a powerful way of creating a good impression. Even a text message that has important content will get attention. However now using HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) an e-mail message can look just as impressive as a web page of the company website. Indeed without being aware of the move, a visitor can switch to the website by clicking on a link in the e-mail message.

A disadvantage to this is that many people now use spam filters, sometimes automatic ones provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP) or perhaps others they have installed themselves. So it may be that your online mailshot does not get through to those you wish to see it and is rejected as spam.

Tens of thousands of email messages an hour can be sent with a marketing message or promotion at, comparatively, very low cost, using an internet connection, and an email address list. Compare email with the cost of conventional marketing techniques like magazine advertising - which rely on a publication's circulation, or postal mailshots - which require an address list, printing, envelopes, administration and postage etc. No paper is wasted using email, also, if a recipient doesn't want the email - they can just hit the delete button, which means email marketing saves earth's resources and is ecologically and environmentally friendly and when correctly implemented, internet marketing is the preferred future tool for business promotion. Therefore the main advantages of email marketing are protection of the environment, low cost and speed.

What we do for you

A huge 87.65% of the traffic to my web site currently uses the Internet Explorer browsers version 7 or 8 and, by a leap of logic, a high percentage of them will therefore also use either Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail or Windows Live Mail as a mail client. In my opinion it follows that the age of graphically rich HTML based email is finally upon us.

We will build a HTML web page which will be used as your mailshot and install it in your mail clients templates folder to be used as and when you require. If you require your mailshot to be sent out automatically please see our Autoresponder service.

Most computer based email clients have the ability to use templates and we can accommodate for them, please tell us in advanced what email client you use.

This service cannot be used with some online based email clients and we will advise you regarding this once we know which client you use.

The Products

Outlook / Outlook Express / Windows Mail / Windows Live Mail
To convert prospects into sales, you need to communicate with customers — and potential customers — every day. Typically, you'll type or paste the same text or form letter into a lot of e-mail messages. Microsoft's mail clients offer you an easy, quick, and accurate way to create and send these emails.

Every time you meet with a potential customer, you send a follow-up e-mail message thanking them for their time and giving them additional information about your company. Because you send this message to every customer, it's a good candidate for an online mailshot template.

In a Microsoft mail client, you can create templates that contain text or graphical HTML pages you send over and over again to different recipients. You can compose and save a message as a template, and then use that template whenever you need it. Just add any new or personalised text before you send the message.

ONLINE MAILSHOT COSTS £60.