This type of promotional e-mail can limit your costs of running a promotion, but they are harder for consumer to redeem and they might only target a small segment of your Opt-In list. The first two options are probably more appealing to larger part of your customer base.

4. Sweepstakes

We all have seen sweepstakes offers on Internet, so we won't provide an example here. Sweepstakes can create incentive for your customer to purchase, but they usually do not create urgency for a large segment of your list. Offering a free vacation or trip might be very appealing to you, but is this offer going to cause your customer to make a purchase today. If you decide to offer a sweepstakes, make sure you monitor your incremental sales that are generated. You might find that you only marginally increased sales vs. your regular monthly sales.

You have decided time frame of your offer and what you want to offer. It is time to write your e-mail! When writing your promotional e-mail, make sure you are trying to reach broadest cross section of your Opt-In list as possible. As we stated earlier, your e-mail should promote, excite, educate or entertain.

Make sure your e-mail opens with an offer to unsubscribe. Many companies locate their unsubscribe notices at bottom of their e-mail. You show your customers a great deal of respect, if you offer them opportunity to unsubscribe at beginning of your message. You also quickly eliminate customers that are no longer interested in your products of services.

Have promotional portion of your e-mail as next part of your message. This is where you make your money. If you have four items or services to promote, include them all. Make sure you provide a direct link in your e-mail to spot in your web site where customer can purchase promotional item(s). Do not make them go to your home page and navigate your web site to find promotion!

The third component is to excite, educate or entertain your customers, by providing them with third party information that you have found on Internet. If that information comes from a web site or web page, include that URL, so customer can quickly access your information. If you excite, educate or entertain your customers, they will recommend your Opt-In list to others and your unsubscribe rate will be significantly lower than other companies that only promote their products.

In summary:

Using Opt-In e-mails for promotional purposes is one of most effective and most affordable advertising strategies available to any web entrepreneur. Make sure that you promote, excite, educate or entertain and your Opt-In list will continue to grow and so will your sales.

Now that you understand nature of URL submissions, I think you can appreciate value of at least one junk email account to be listed with any URL submissions. Internet marketers generally have at least one web-based email account to be used alongside their primary email account. This web-based account allows for URL submission thank you emails from search engines and from FFA site owners to be received, while at same time not junking up their primary email account.

While it is not possible to detail all of different reasons a marketer would use more than one email account in their Internet marketing activities within scope of this article, I will try to outline a couple more.

Take for example if you're using an ezine or newsletter to court your potential customer base. In most cases, you'd want to have a distinct email address to be used only for your publications. In this manner, when someone writes to you as editor of a publication, you might feel that is important to keep those contacts in a separate email account. More than anything, this is a matter of organization. It is often far easier to keep your business in order, when you have separate email accounts for each activity.

Another reason you might want an additional email account is rampant use of email harvesting software by spammers. Any email address used to submit a classified ad posting, a newsgroup discussion posting, or to be used on a website is a good target for email harvesting software that is in use.

With subject of email harvesting software, addresses that you use, you might actually want to check from time to time in case there is really something important coming in amidst spam flooding your email account.

The uses for multiple email accounts are as numerous as activities that you might pursue on Internet.

While there is value in employing more than one email account, there are also downsides. While quite a few of your email accounts will enable forwarding of mail to your primary address, this often defeats purpose of killing mass of junk mail to your account.

Even though you have protected your primary email account from garbage mail, and you have organized your activities into separate email accounts, biggest downside is that you now have several of email accounts to monitor, and that takes time, lots of time.

Fortunately, there is a tool available to help you recoup time you have now lost maintaining these multiple email accounts. With ePrompterT software, you can now check email from your POP accounts and most of your web-based email accounts at same time. What's more is that you can leave your ePrompterT running in background and it can check mail from all of your multiple accounts, and through an icon in Systray, you will stay abreast on how many emails you have sitting in your various accounts. ePrompterT will also permit you to read and delete email sitting on your mail server, with only a few clicks of your mouse. There are far too many features in this handy little tool to describe them all here.

ePrompterT is freeware and can be downloaded from http://www.eprompter.com . ePrompterT is great equalizer. It is now time to take back all of time you lost when FFA site owners and spammers convinced you that you needed to have more than one email address.