Chapter 1: The Best-Kept Secret on the Internet

Responsible e-mail marketing is one of the best ways to help build your business quickly and increase profits dramatically, while keeping your costs very low. Yet only a handful of online marketers are using it to build their businesses.

Unsolicited E-mail Marketing, aka spam, is a very controversial subject. However, a lot of businesses don't realize that there is a huge difference between "spam" and responsible e-mail marketing. I do not teach nor endorse "spam" marketing. As you will find out in the next chapter, spamming will get you in a lot of trouble. It is just not worth practicing.

Very few people know how to use this powerful medium effectively to promote their businesses. Many people get in a lot of trouble by not using it the right way. Hence, without realizing it, they are spamming others. Many others never attempt to use it due of lack of knowledge on the subject or fear of getting into trouble.

As a result, e-mail marketing is still the best-kept marketing secret on the Internet.

Why E-mail?

Why is e-mail marketing so amazing?

When you use responsible e-mail marketing as I will show you in this manual, you will discover that it is very safe, reliable, lightning fast, and will not get you in any kind of trouble at all.

Responsible e-mail marketing is a quick and low-cost way to build your business and increase profits. I know of no other method that can bring in profits as quickly and efficiently as e-mail marketing can.

E-mail marketing, when done right, is very powerful because:

• It costs just pennies to execute yet the profit potential is huge.
• You can totally eliminate the additional costs of postage, printing and mailing when sending your offers to prospects and customers.
• If your offer doesn't do well, you can improve on it and mail it out again easily - it still doesn't cost you much.
• It delivers your hottest offers to prospects and customers instantly, sometimes within a few seconds.
• You can sometimes start receiving orders just minutes after sending your messages out.
• You can e-mail product information out or answer questions from prospects within minutes - they don't have to wait 2 to 4 weeks for something via postal mail.
• You can quickly build a strong relationship with your customers by keeping in touch with them regularly and thus, continue to sell your products to them for many years.
• It is virtually the quickest way to build your business and to start earning a profit immediately.

The Cost of Marketing

The extremely low cost is probably the greatest benefit that businesses experience when using e-mail marketing. Whether you're sending out one or one thousand e-mail messages, your costs are about the same...just pennies when you compare it to the cost of sending out a 1000 promotional pieces by regular mail.

Using regular mail to send out new product offers, customer surveys, or information on specials & sales can become very expensive, very quickly.

Just trying to keep in touch with customers on a regular basis to establish good relations and build trust can be quite expensive if you use regular mail. Keeping in touch with customers is something all businesses should do on a regular basis. However, most businesses just can't afford it.

Businesses have to spend money on stationary, printing, mailing, and postage each time they send information out by regular mail. Additionally, when using regular mail, the bigger the mailing list, the more money (and time) is spent each time a mailing is done. This is not the case with e-mail.

Also, if your offer doesn't do as well as you expected it to, you don't make any profit - you actually lose money. All the time and money you spent on the mailing goes to waste. Then, you have to spend more time and money on getting another offer prepared, printed, stuffed, and mailed. Most businesses can't afford this type of test marketing. As a result, they either go out of business or lose a perfectly usable customer base.

With e-mail marketing, if your offer doesn't do well, you don't lose that much. You can improve on the offer quickly and test it again soon thereafter. You don't have to spend money on printing and postage or have to wait a few days (or weeks) for the printshop to get your job ready.

The "Old" Way of Doing Business

Most businesses don't realize that they have some major flaws in their business plans. Here are the most common ones:

1. High Cost of Operation:
   They use regular mail to send out product offers and to keep in touch with their customers. As we've established, this is a very expensive way of doing business and can wipe out your budget very quickly.

2. Low Conversion Rate
   They advertise to, and attract, a lot of prospects but are able to turn only a handful of these prospects into "customers." They spend money on advertising to find prospects for their products. Then they spend time and money in converting some of these prospects into buyers - usually a very small percentage of the prospect pool. Those who buy their products become customers. Those who don't buy are lost forever. (Not the smartest way to do business.)

3. No Repeat Business
   They "unknowingly" treat customers as disposable napkins. Out of the handful of prospects that get converted into customers and buy the products, most or all of them end up being "one-time" buyers. After that first sale, they are forgotten about and the business spends more money on more advertising to find new customers.

Wrong, wrong, very wrong! That is not the way to do business. That is a very efficient way of blowing your advertising budget and losing your shirt.

That is the old way of doing business. Unfortunately, most businesses don't know any better. Therefore, unknowingly, they are committing financial suicide.

It's no wonder every 4 out of every 5 new businesses go out of business within 2 - 3 years, if not sooner.

The "New" Way of Doing Business

When you use e-mail marketing as I reveal to you in this manual, you can eliminate all 3 of these old ways of doing business. You can then replace them with techniques that are low cost, lightning-fast, and gives you more bang for your advertising buck.

With responsible e-mail marketing, you can:

1. send out product offers, updates, and keep in touch with your customers very inexpensively.

2. convert many more prospects into loyal customers, and easily keep in touch with those who haven't bought yet.

3. sell to these customers again and again for years to come without spending any more money, instead of selling to them just once and then abandoning them. (A business has to spend time and money to acquire each new customer. This investment of time and money should not be wasted.)

Unfortunately, these new ways of doing business are still 'secrets' that most businesses don't know about.

When you learn the new way of doing business, you will learn how to milk every single penny out of your advertising dollars for all it's worth instead of wasting most of it like many businesses do.

I am not exagerrating one bit. This is real! I have done it and continue to do it right now. There are very few other "smart" marketers who are using this technique effectively and reaping the huge financial rewards! A few of the smarter big companies are doing it too. But most of the online business world, large and small, have not caught on yet. Fortunately, you won't be one of those who don't know.

You will learn, first hand, how a "select" group of online marketers, and some of the big names like Microsoft and Excite, are using the best marketing technique on the Internet to dramatically increase their profits!

Please note: I do 'not' guarantee that you will make "a certain amount" of money by using the techniques in this manual. There is no way I can guarantee that since I don't know who you are, what your skill level is, or what type of business you own. Every person, and business, is different. Your success with e-mail marketing will be dependent upon the efforts you put forth. Your success will also depend on how closely you follow the steps outlined in this manual.

I will also show you what not to do. This is just as important, actually more important, than learning what to do. You see, by doing it the wrong way, you will pay dearly. You will be instantly labelled as a "spammer." And trust me, you do not want that!

In the next chapter, you will find out why "spamming" and "responsible e-mail marketing" are so completely different from each other. It is important that you see the difference very clearly - so important that I have an entire chapter devoted to it. If you want to succeed in e-mail marketing, do not skip any chapter of this manual, especially the next chapter.

Now...let's find out why responsible e-mail marketing and spamming are so different - almost like night and day.

The next chapter: Chapter 2: Spam Verses Responsible E-mail