It is hard to be an online business these days. There is so much competition that your brand can easily get lost in the crowd. Don’t even get me started on the difficulties of successfully spreading any type of email advertisements. Google and Yahoo are constantly becoming more adept at blocking mass emails. This hysteria over spam emails reached such a frenzy that many of my regular emails get blocked by the filtering systems. Yes, today it is hard to be a successful online business.

However, before you panic please let me give you some good news. Due to my extensive internet marketing experience, I have identified a number of winning techniques for attracting and keeping your customers attention. The following are some of the best ways to capture new customers through the use of bulk emails, while at the same time avoiding the typical spam filters.

Use Every Opportunity to Spread Your Message

A recent study done by StrongMail discovered that 60% of businesses do not include additional promotional offers in their typical correspondence with customers. This is a lost opportunity!

When sending website registration email or order confirmations, make sure to include additional information on upcoming sales or offer special promotions. The customer is already expecting to receive an email confirming their original transaction, so they are much more likely to take your new offer seriously. Amazon.com is a master of this technique. If you order something from Amazon.com, you should expect to get an email inviting you to consider some of their other products.

Best thing about using this technique is that primarily transactional emails are not considered to be spam by FTC. Just make sure to keep your additional offers and advertisements to a limited amount.

Consider the Overall Reputation of Your Company.

Most businesses do not realize that ISPs tends to group together all of the emails coming from the same IP address. Therefore, if one part of the company engages in dubious mass mailing practices, it could cause delivery problems for the more reputable department.

When creating a mass mailing strategy, make sure to co-ordinate all parts of your business. After all you could be sending regular service updates from one department, weekly promotional offers from another, and registration reminders from the third department. Taken all together it could be an excessive use of your mailing capability and can get you flagged by the ISPs. Instead, try to combine some of these messages (look above for suggestions), and you could have more of an impact on your customers.

Choose the Right Bulk Email Software

You might think that emails should be easy. After all you just need to send a few emails to your customers. You might wonder why you even need any special software. I recommend that you purchase some type of bulk email software, because it will help you create and implement a complete marketing strategy. Without the use of special software you are piecing together different strategies that do not have common goals and might even conflict with one another. As I have said before, it is not uncommon for departments to be doing something completely different from one another.

Before deciding on the right software, consider all the emailing needs of your business. If your primary use for mass emails is to update your customers on major changes, you likely won’t need a lot of complex features. If on the other hand you need to have regularly scheduled emails you will want to consider features that provide more support. Finally if you need a well developed list management tool to track your customer’s actions and responses, you might want an email service that actually tracks when users click on your links or accept your email offers. Finally, consider such options as automatic unsubscribe feature, HTML versus text emails, availability of test emails and general support services.