The goal of all marketing is to attract interest in, build desire for, and generate sales of your products or services. Email marketing is a perfect medium to pick up where other marketing leaves off. Email marketing is still one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers. It’s far cheaper than traditional bulk postage mail and in many cases can have a much larger impact on immediate sales and long-term relationship strength than traditional advertising.

When done correctly, email marketing can be an extremely powerful and effective marketing technique. It’s a medium that allows a buyer and seller to freely communicate with one another and build a relationship based on value and trust. When done incorrectly, however, email marketing can be destructive, erode brand equity, and turn your happy clients into litigious flamers. It is for this reason that one must make sure they send only permission-based email communications to their subscribers.

Before we proceed any further, let’s define exactly what permission-based email marketing is. It is important to note that there are two types of email marketing. One can either send unsolicited email promotions or send out emails only to persons who have requested to receive them. Unsolicited email is, of course, called spam. Sending spam will ruin any legitimate organization’s reputation and brand value faster than mold grows on bread that is left outside in the middle of summer. Rule number one of becoming an intelligent email marketer is to not send unsolicited email.

Permission-based email marketing, on the other hand, is used effectively everyday by hundreds of thousands of organizations to build the value of their brands, increase sales, and strengthen the relationships they have with their clients and subscribers. The key difference, of course, is that these senders are only sending messages to persons who have requested to receive them.

Let’s take a second to understand the key difference between spam and permission-based emails.

The Axiom of Value

For the last 100 years, companies have relied on traditional advertising in the form of catchy jingles, TV commercials, billboards, print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, hot air balloons, and waving mascots. The technique is to interrupt a radio listener, TV viewer, or magazine reader with an attention grabbing ad that compels the consumer to buy the company’s product or at least have the product closer to the forefront of his or her mind next time the individual is making a buying decision.

In most instances, advertising is acceptable to the consumer. Most people don’t mind seeing ads while watching television, listening to the radio, or reading magazines—or at least they understand that these ads are necessary in order to receive the content they are seeing, reading, or hearing. While technologies like TiVo, DVR, and satellite radio are challenging advertisers to come up with new methods of advertising, other technologies such as Internet television require users to watch a 30-second advertisement prior to the start of a show. The point is, as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements.

This same axiom holds true online. As long as your web site provides content that people value, visitors will continue returning to the site even if there are a few banner ads or Google AdWords boxes within the page layout. While some web sites, such as WSJ.com, have successfully switched to a subscription-based model, many more web sites rely on banner, box, skyscraper, and contextual advertisements to earn the bulk of their income.

The same axiom, that as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements, also holds true with email. As long as one provides value—whether by providing content on a topic a recipient is interested in or a discount off a product related to one purchased previously—people will allow you to continue to contact them. Each and every email you send of course contains your logo, information on your products and services, and links to your web sites. These items are the advertising and should be surrounded on all sides by the items which make the communication actually add value to the lives of your readers.

Spam however, by its very nature, breaks the axiom. Unsolicited bulk email very rarely has any value. Spam is usually irrelevant, always impersonal, and rarely helpful. Everyone with an email inbox knows how aggravating it is to sort through forty new emails to only find two that are from persons you know. While spam may make money for persons in Eastern Europe promoting fake drugs, I feel strongly that sending spam will always have a net negative impact on any legitimate organization.

For this reason, we strongly recommend only sending permission-based email, also known as opt-in email. Permission-based email marketing can be an extremely effective way to increase visitor-to-sale conversion rates, build strong relationships with your customers, and turn your one-time buyers into lifetime product evangelizers who recommend your organization to everyone they know. Permission-based email marketing allows companies to develop and sustain relationships with their prospects and consumers by creating value. Permission marketing is about “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers” as Seth Godin likes to say.

The nature of permission marketing—building a relationship with a prospect or expanding the relationship with an existing customer over time—allows you to concentrate on the prospects and customers who are really interested in what you have to sell and are more than willing to become repeat customers.

The Five-Step Process of Permission Email Marketing

There is a simple five-step process in putting a successful permission-based email marketing campaign in place. This process is reviewed below.

1. Start using a permission-based email marketing software that allows you to easily create newsletters, automatically manage subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces, and view reporting statistics like opens and clickthroughs.

2. Decide on the type and frequency of email communication you will be sending. We recommend sending at least a monthly newsletter. You can certainly send multiple newsletters if you sell different types of products. You can also send promotional messages offering a discount or coupon for a product or service.

3. Add a sign-up form to your web site so you can start collecting subscribers and import any existing lists of subscribers that have already requested your communications. It is generally also safe to import the names of anyone who has done business with you in the past year, provided you will be sending content relevant to what they purchased.

4. Create a good email template by using a template provided within the email software, having your in-house team create one, or using the custom design services of the email software company.

5. Develop quality relevant content for your newsletter or message and send it out to your list. Continue sending your newsletters, announcements, or promotions with consistent frequency. As your list grows, you will notice increased traffic (and if applicable, increased sales) on the day of and the days following an email send.

By providing quality relevant content you will succeed in keeping your brand mindshare at the front of the mind of your customers and cement strong relationships with your subscribers.

Email marketing is a huge facet of most online marketing campaigns. It’s one of the few “low-cost” marketing methods that can drive a tremendous ROI if done properly (Marketing Sherpa claimed in 2006 that email marketing will average a return of 17 times your cost for email marketing).

The great thing about doing email marketing is that’s its pretty straight forward to get started, and there are a lot of software solutions available on the market already for any price range (even free ones).

Before You Start Email Marketing

There is one very important thing you must do before you start an email marketing campaign – familiarize yourself with Can-Spam. Can-Spam is a law passed by the US government that places specific requirements on anybody that is doing email marketing.

In a nutshell, it requires that you clearly identify your email with your legal business name and physical business address. For most commercial mailers, this is done through a small paragraph at the bottom of their emails; however there are a few companies that will include this information in other places side as to the side or right at the top of the email. As long as the address is visible then it’s legal.

The next requirement is that your “from” field must be a real email address that you own. So you can’t just send out an email from some random account, you have to own the email address.

The third requirement is that you email subject lines must be accurate. You cannot legally send an email out that has a misleading subject line.

Lastly, and most importantly, there has to be a way for people to opt-out of your mailing list, and it has to be clearly visible in every email you send. This can be something simple like a message saying “Reply to this email if you no longer wish to receive it”, or it could be something more complex like a text link that takes the reader to an unsubscribe confirmation link on your website. Either method is acceptable as long as the reader can clearly see the method in your email (so no hiding it from plain sight).

Starting Email Marketing on a Low Budget

Email marketing doesn’t have to cost you thousands of dollars to get started, in fact there are several programs out there that are free and fairly easy to use. Most web hosting companies will even provide you with a free email list manager of some sort automatically through your hosting control panel.

However if needed, there are many options out there for paid email software, most notably being AWeber, one of the most popular email list managers around. For $20/month you can get a really good email marketing solution from AWeber, which has a lot of advanced features that the free programs don’t offer.

Once you have a software solution chosen and setup, you need to create a template for your emails. You can use a simple HTML editor like Frontpage to make professionally looking email templates (or better yet, Office 2007 has the feature built right into Word).

So now you’ve got your email software setup and a nice template to use for your emails. The next step is to start promoting your newsletter.

Newsletter Promoting is Easy

Getting people to sign up to your newsletter is usually pretty easy – and you can do it for free if you know what you are doing. One proven method is to post on forums related to your website with a signature link back to your website, specifically the page on your website that has the newsletter signup form. As long as you are posting useful content to the forum and not just spamming them, there’s a good chance your links will stay and people will eventually click on them and come to your website.

Another good method is to post comments on related blogs, as most blog comments allow you to list your website. If you post constructive comments on popular blogs, then chances are that it will drive some free targeted traffic to your website.

And a final tip for getting free publicity for your newsletter is to submit your website to free directories. These websites will list your website in a relevant category, which may drive some traffic. A good source is the Yahoo Directory, which has thousands of people searching it every day. It is possible to get listed for free in the Yahoo Directory, but it’s a lot faster and easier if you just pay the listing fee of $300 per year. Yes that is a bit steep, but it can be well worth it.

Besides, getting into a directory like Yahoo will also help your website rank higher in the search engines, which in turn will drive even more targeted traffic to your website!

Of all the marketing strategies is doing business online, email marketing is one of the best that you should be using in your marketing campaign? There a lot of businesses today that incorporates this strategy because of its effectiveness, and you should too.

This marketing strategy would entail having a big number of emails on your mailing list. If you do not have enough for your email campaign, then you would have to buy or rent them from third party lists. This may actually cost you, so you better make sure that your email has been tested to work efficiently.

Now, since your goal here is to market your product to sell, you must make sure that you have all the positive descriptive words that you can use in the marketing email message that you will be sending your customers. Let’s say for instance, you are currently selling books online, and you would like to update your customers with a new series that you have, you have to start your email with greetings, a little bit of inspirational thoughts about the book, and after your catchy pitches.

Email marketing will definitely work for you if you are good at making various letters. The more personalized the letters that you send to your customers, the better. Another thing that you should look into after you have created an effective email to send to your customers, is how you will be sending this email to them in bulk.

The best way to do so, is to have a bulk email sender software. This email software can definitely assist you in sending those emails in no time. Instead of them being sent manually with all the confusion, you can do all the work by yourself through the use of this software.

You do not have to worry about utilizing such software because email sender software have a user interface that you can easily follow. This would absolutely save your time, as well as your effort is sending those newsletters and emails instantly.

Email is an important marketing tool. Regardless of whether you are sending out a single email or a newsletter or broadcast to stay in contact with potential or existing customers, it will be a waste of time if the recipients do not open your email. Follow these tips to make your email communications user friendly and compel recipients to read them.

Here are two suggestions to get people to open your email.

1. Write subject lines that indicates the content of your message. Many receivers may delete your email without reading it if your subject line is not compelling or does not indicate the content.
2. Keep the subject line brief. Many email programs cut off long subject lines.

Below are eight useful tips to make your email message user friendly.

1. Include your name at the end of your message. People often don’t remember email addresses and may not know who sent the email. Also, including your name personalizes the communication.
2. Quote the email you are responding to. If you don’t, the reader may not know what you’re talking about. You can do this automatically by highlighting the message you are responding to before hitting reply.
3. Use a clear and concise writing style.
4. Keep messages short, preferably under 25 lines.
5. Write short sentences and short paragraphs (5 lines maximum) to keep your readers focused.
6. Break up text with white space. Use subheadlines and bulleted lists to visually break up your copy into easy-to-read sections, highlight benefits, and keep readers reading.
7. Avoid using all CAPITAL letters.
8. Be sure to use spell-check before sending out an email. Spelling and grammar errors can suggest that you are not educated or knowledgeable.

Make sure your readers can read your information! The email message you send may not look the same when displayed on your receiver’s screen. Follow these tips to avoid incompatibility problems between email software.

1. Know your audience so that you can determine whether to send plain text or HTML messages. If the receiver can not view email as a web page, they will end up seeing your text all mixed up with HTML code instead.
2. Be cautious with attachments. If the recipient does not have the software you used to create the document, they won’t be able to read your attachment.
3. Avoid placing graphics in the body of email messages. Graphics add to the file size of an email message and could very well take over the file size limit of the reader’s software. Also, graphics can greatly slow the downloading and opening of your email.
4. Avoid formatting such as bold and italics. Different email programs read them differently.
5. When mentioning a web address, include http://. This allows most email software to link to a URL and allows the user to click on the link and go to the web address. Many computer newbies don’t know how to copy and paste a web address into their browser.
6. Format articles and newsletters to around 60-65 characters per line with hard returns after each line. If a reader’s software wraps lines differently, your text may be hard to read.

Increase sales with user-friendly and compelling email messages. You don’t want to lose prospects and subscribers because they have trouble reading your email.