How to Send Emails That Get Opened
by Jeremy Hoover

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the (impending) death of email. From what you read on forum boards and newsletters from well-known internet marketers, email marketing is dead. Too many ISPs are taking it upon themselves to limit the number of emails you can send at one time, or are blocking your emails from your subscribers inboxes.

As a way around this, many marketers are telling you to get a blog and an RSS feed. This makes some sense, but before you invest in an ebook or multimedia course from a marketer, ask yourself if that marketer has a vested interest in moving you over to an RSS system (i.e., they conveniently sell an RSS starter kit, or affiliate for someone who does).

On the contrary, though, email marketing is not dead. Recently, on a membership-only forum, discussion centred on how Getresponse and Aweber have improved their open and deilverability rates for emails, even as high as 85% for deliverability. One contributor, owner of an autoresponder company, noted that many tricks marketers use to get their messages past spam filters (such as using "f^ree" for "free") are actually backfiring and triggering spam filters, resulting in emails being blocked. Instead, marketers should focus on trick-free, valuable content in their emails.

Apparently, email marketing works much the same way as search engine marketing does: in the long run, you are rewarded for building (and sending out) trick-free, useful, and informative content.

So how should you build your business? One quality blog post, article, or email at a time.