How about a story of failure, for a change? Here is a short article about how to pursue an email marketing strategy that will guarantee failure in the short and the long run. Here is how to lose customers, lose contacts and make yourself an email pariah.

The method? Indiscriminate abuse of other people email addresses!

1) It’s about permission

Email marketing is one of the most widely used strategies on the web today. As soon as email was invented, it very quickly became a key marketing medium.

That’s why it is so important for you to stand out as an ethical marketer. Email is so easy to abuse that abuse is more the rule than the exception.

Think: what is the ratio of genuine marketing messages to spam messages that you deal with every week? Very low! I am sure you easily get one genuine message for every ten to twenty spam messages. Do a count sometime- the answer may astonish you.

If you did not ask permission, you are just another spammer. That means that even if someone GIVES you their email, you don’t yet have permission to add that to your ezine or customer list.

If in doubt, ASK!

2) Getting to “yes”

It’s stupidly easy to get a “yes” to your request to add someone to your list. Just give them something in exchange. It’s an ethical bribe!

A survey relevant to their lives, a simple doodad to put on their desktop, an unusual screen saver- there are dozens of ways to induce folks to say “yes” to your request. You have no excuse.

3) If it looks like spam, it is.

This speaks for itself. If your recipient has no idea who you are, or what you are doing in their inbox, it’s spam as far as he or she is concerned.

This is true even if you got permission! People are selfish. Maybe Joe or Mary signed up to get your snappy Simpson themed screen saver, and have since forgotten about you.

If Joe or Mary are not opening your mails, you’ve got to delete them at the first opportunity. It only takes a moment for one of your “non-open” recipients to slap the spam button, and months or years to build credibility.

Not getting permission, not getting the “yes”, and spamming your non-opens are sure ways to get yourself in big trouble. These practices may land you in legal trouble, can damage your reputation, and even get your domain blacklisted by email servers. Why would you follow such a losing email marketing strategy when it’s so easy to do the right thing?

Head on over to Internet Marketing Tools for more on how to use an email marketing strategy.