Email marketing is a way of directly communicating with
a target audience to market your website or increase
awareness about an upcoming promotion connected with your
site. In general, the term "email marketing" is used to
refer to any emails sent to customers or potential customers
in relation to your website.

Email marketing can be a very effective tool to inform
customers of future events, or attract new customers by
increasing awareness about what your site offers.

Success in email marketing does not come from thoughtlessly
blasting out email ads without working to build your own
customer base. The basis of successful email marketing is to
build existing in-house customer lists, augmenting them by
outreach through outside mailing lists.

Your own email list allows you to develop a long-term
relationship with your online audience -- to communicate with
and market to them over and over.

Generally email marketing can be implemented with these 3
objectives in mind:

(1) Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new
customers or persuade existing customers to buy again

(2) Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and
enhance the customer relationship

(3) Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in
emails sent by other people

Of course, it seems easy to collect hundreds of thousands of
email addresses and send everybody an email about your
website. Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple.
Essentially, you require the permission of the email recipient
to send them info about your site otherwise it may be regarded
as "spam" which is unsolicited bulk email.

In the marketing industry, spam is definitely a four letter word
and something that should be avoided at all costs. If you are
accused of spamming, there could be direct consequences such
as damage to your reputation, your website may be shut down
and your email accounts closed.

In conjunction with this, there is a strong argument from
successful marketers that long-term email campaigns only work
consistently when they are based on permission in the first
place. There are plenty of acceptable ways to market your website
by email, don't be tempted to take shortcuts because chances
are it could be your downfall.

It's important to stress that anyone considering email marketing
must read up on the subject of permission and spam. If you don't
understand the importance of permission and the risks of
ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.

Don't panic, though. It's actually relatively easy to ensure
that the address lists you use or build yourself are
permission-based.

Below are 3 possible ways to do that:

(1) New Content Notification

You've probably seen sites that offer to notify you whenever
they have new information, products, or content.

To tell you the truth, this is probably the least effective kind
of opt-in list, simply because most people won't sign-up.
Instead, they'll bookmark your site thinking they'll just come
back from time to time - but don't count it!

Of course, there are certain kinds of sites that CAN benefit
from this form of opt-in list. For example, if you have a site
that runs contests, you can offer to notify people whenever a new
contest begins.

(2) Free Report

Another kind of opt-in list involves the offer of a free report,
or series of reports. However, be careful with this!

By offering a free report, you are restricting the number of
times you can mail to your list, it's not a good idea to capture
the names and then bombard them with a continual stream of sales
material when they were only expecting one or two reports.

This would be considered spamming! If you offer a free report,
it should contain "real" information and a reason for them to
visit your website again.

(3) Free eZine/Newsletter - A great way to build an opt-in
list is by offering a free subscription to an electronic
newsletter or ezine.

Newsletters are a really good way of regularly reminding your
subscribers about your website and products. By writing a
newsletter that contains copy which is both informative and
compelling, you draw subscribers back to your website again and
again!

Having an ezine/Newsletter is one of the best ways to build
credibility and rapport with your readers and customers. If you
understand the value of a "Lifetime Customer", then you know
exactly how powerful an ezine or newsletter can be!

So now that you know how to get your opt-in mailing list, it's
time that you learn how to run your email promotions effectively
when you do it.

Below are 6 tips to consider for successful email marketing:

(1) Perhaps the most critical step in guaranteeing the success
of your e-mail promotions is that you e-mail a targeted list of
opt-in subscribers who have specifically requested to receive
information on a particular topic from you. You'll be wasting
your time and energy if you don't.

(2) Personalize each and every email. A phrase like "Dear John"
will have more impact than just "Dear customer". For that
person assumes you know him.

(3) Write benefit-oriented subject lines or you can ask a
question or trigger curiosity.. Subject lines are very critical
in ensuring whether your email gets opened or not.

(4) Make it easy to read. Check grammatical errors and proof
read everything. Keep paragraphs short, between 4-6 lines.

(5) Give the opportunity for your readers to opt-out of your
mailing list. At the end of all e-mail you send, it's extremely
important that you give people the opportunity to opt-out or be
removed from your e-mail database. This is really, really
important!

(6) Test your email promotions. Before sending your e-mail to
your entire list, take an extra 15 minutes to test how it looks
in a variety of e-mail clients like hotmail, yahoo, outlook
express, eudora etc...

Email marketing is an excellent way to increase the exposure of
your website and advertise any special offers that are currently
available through your website. Executed well, a targeted email
campaign can have a dramatic influence on your traffic,
acquisition of visitors and traffic behavior.