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1. Email marketing, as with social media marketing, is a key
tool in today's business arsenal. Communicating with
potential and existing customers via electronic mail is a
cheap, fast method for increasing product awareness plus
direct sales. It can't be ignored.

2. Any person who visits your website and actively signs up
for special alerts should be added to a database and
receive updates from your business. They are opting in, so
actually want to hear about your company; its services
and products. Those who have bought from you and
divulge their address are also people to communicate
with, regularly. There are, however, strict rules about
sending emails to those with whom your connection is
tenuous.

3. Gathering these addresses is absolutely vital. It's all to
easy, especially for smaller companies, to not dedicate
enough resource to harvesting these important contact
details. Give every page of your website a sign-up option,
with an incentive such as a prize draw. Brief everyone who
deals with inbound or outbound calls to collect some
addresses.

4. To avoid being classified as spam, or even being
prosecuted, needs knowledge of the law. You can contact
unsolicited prospects as many as three times, but must
give them the option to not receive further contact.
Buying in cold contact lists isn't just costly, it returns
worse results than contacting 'warm' prospects with
whom you already have some relationship. Gather these -
every sales enquiry, each 'Like' on Facebook - to build a
customer base for this form of marketing who are really
interested in your offering.

5. Good design can also help you avoid being classed as a
spammer, and ending up blocked or in people's spam
folders. Try to avoid the more 'salesy' subject lines.
Always create both a plain text and full html version of the
mail.

6. The frequency with which you send emails for marketing
purposes is also key to success. Don't be tempted to
bombard your clients with daily updates if there is nothing
new to say. A well-crafted message sent every fortnight or
month, with something genuinely interesting to report,
with genuine special offers, will get a a much greater
response than a bland e-mail sent more regularly.
Consumers today are media savvy with lower tolerance
levels. Make your message impactful and useful.

7. By sending highly targeted, personalized and really
interesting emails you can increase response rates and
click throughs from the industry average of 2% to more
than 20%. And never forget to monitor the success of your
campaign. This means not only looking at spikes in sales
resulting immediately after sending, but click throughs to
your website, bouncebacks and more. Always deal with
bouncebacks, trying to verify these addresses and simply
deleting those addresses that didn't work.

8. Google Analytics and other free software enables you to
monitor visitor numbers to your site every day or hour,
which is a positive effect on any email marketing
campaign. When you create an unique landing page
specific to every email sent out, you are able to track its
impact, as only those who get your message have access
to this URL. It's like the response codes you used to use.

9. http://christianswansen.com/getresponse/