Avoid Spamming Your Customers

First things first!

Spam Emails are becoming more and more common place. Emails are excellent tools for businesses, especially for marketing purposes. Let us look at an example, you own a small internet business which sells books. You have 1000's of customers and you have each of their email addresses. You decide that you wish to send periodic emails to these customers letting the know whenever you get new stock in. This is a good idea as it lets the customer know that you have new books available for purchase. However, if you decided to send an email every single day updating the customers of your stock your customers would get fed up with this and just stop reading the emails and would most likely start sending your emails straight to the email junk folder.

Using emails to keep customers up-to-date about new stock you have aquired and about any sales or events your business is going to have will please customers. Using emails to keep customers up-to-date about every single item and deal that is happening will annoy your customers. For example, only send out emails once every month filled with all of the major updates.

Message Boards, when used correctly can be an extremely effective and usually free form of advertising your business. When using message boards and forums you must choose them wisely, the topic of the boards must be relevant to your business. These boards and forums are chock full of potential customers if only you make sure they do not think you are spamming.

Let us create an example. You own a business that sells books. You have decided to sign up to some message boards and forums to advertise your business. RULE 1 is make sure that the forums you sign up to are book related. If you sign up to a message board that is about insurance and start posting adverts to your business in there the vast majority will just ignore your posts because it would be considered spam. RULE 2 ensure that the discussions you take part in are relevant. If you start posting a link to your business to every single conversation occuring in the forum you will annoy people and this will be considered spam. For example is you post a link to your book business into a conversation about babies you are not going to be very popular. RULE 3 make sure that your message board posts do not just contain a link to your business. Always add content to to your posts. For example, if you use the SquidU forum and every single post you make contains nothing more than a link to your lens the squidoo community will begin to realise that you do not wish to contribute to the community and thus will not look at your lens.

Most forums, including SquidU, allow you to create a signature that will be present in all of your forum posts. Put links to your business (or lens) in your signature so that when ever you create a post, or reply to a post your link is automatically there in an unobtrusive and inoffensive way. Also try to avoid just saying things like 'hello' in your posts try to put content into your posts and replys.

Banner Ads have gained popularity over the years. Banner ads come in a wide range of sizes and types, some are just text, some are graphic, some are a mixture of both, some are even animated. The banners also appear in a wide variety of positions within a website. Banner ads can be part of an affiliate or exchange program between two businesses. Banners for O2 could appear on the McDonalds website and vis versa because they have affiliations with each other. It is important to understand that it is very bad form to place banner ads in every available space on your page as this would be considered spam and wil alienate customers and potential customers. Limit the number of banners contained within your site and you will have yourself an effective banner ad campaign. Attempt to seamlessly weave the banner ads into your websites contents while making sure the banners are eye catching.