E-mail marketing is tough. A study by Forrester research shows that while 83% of companies attempt e-marketing less than 5% are successful. What's the secret?

There's no secret, per se, but film and video distributors targeting license buyers need to be informed about all the potential pitfalls. A good e-mail marketing campaign demands research, strategy, patience, a smooth follow-up process, and a little high-tech. It's hard to know where to begin, and it's natural to be afraid of making a major mistake and alienating your potential buyers.

On the other hand, a good e-mail campaign has proven time and again to be the most cost-effective way to market, and in the film and video licensing industry, it's becoming a standard and expected practice. Take some time to analyze what needs to be done, let your creativity and passion for your material inform what you do, and you will reach the film/video license buyers who are searching for the kind of content you offer.

To help get you started, we've put together a list of five easy-to-make e-mail marketing mistakes, and How to Avoid Them.

MISTAKE #5: - E-mailing directly from Outlook This is a very basic mistake.

A lot of distributors use "Blind CC" to send to multiple addresses—this is the trick where you send an e-mail to yourself, and put all the other addresses BCC. This is a convenient way to reach a lot of people without revealing your whole e-mail list to every recipient (which is what happens when you CC), but these cumbersome BCC messages are red flags for mail server spam filters. Not only is your message likely going to get blocked, but your entire IP address might be blacklisted. This means that you will never be able to send ANY message to this address again, unless you contact the hostmaster who blacklisted you and beg for forgiveness.

Tools like Listrak, Campaigner, and ExacTarget solve these problems and elegantly handle lists with thousands of names. These services all charge a monthly fee. PHPList and OpenEMM are powerful OpenSource solutions, but require you to provide your own tech support.

The biggest advantage of these tools: they track the e-mails you send. Who opens it, who deletes it, who sends it to a friend, when, and where. You'll need this data to do follow up, segment your lists, and to tweak your campaign.

MISTAKE #4: - Websites are not doing follow-up for you.

When a user clicks on your perfectly composed e-mail they need somewhere just as professional looking to go next. An ideal e-mail gets the reader to click quickly. A landing page (a specially designed webpage for e-mail campaign clickers) doesn't need to be elaborate, but at the very least it should act as a sort of digital sell sheet, offering the extra information a potential buyer needs and makes it clear what they need to do to take the next step. Add an easy to use 'send us a question form' or invite buyers to sign up to a newsletter and suddenly a passive e-mail recipient has become a real prospect.

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