Using Email Marketing The Right Way

Email marketing, as the name suggest, is the use of emails in marketing your message especially regarding your business. They should be used both in the sales and to build loyalty. Email frees us from the tedious task of managing data for daily use. It helps us manage our contacts, send emails quickly, maintain our mail history, store the required information, etc. An email is delivered instantly and anywhere across the globe.

In its broadest sense, the term covers every email you ever send to a customer, potential customer, or public venue. It is also used to refer to:

> Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again

> Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship

If you find that a lot of your emails are not being delivered, you must take the time to understand why. It is important that you know why this is so and how you can reduce the chances of it happening again.

Spam- the generic term for annoying and unsolicited emails- increased somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent of all emails in 2002. With spam came spam filters and with spam filters came the blocking of even legitimate emails.

If you are accused of sending a spam, then you may find your email accounts closed down, your website shut off, and your reputation in tatters. A long term successful email marketing with customers and others can only work if they are permission based.

An example of permission based email marketing is when your customer buys something from your online store and then ticks a box marked that says something like, "Please send me news about product updates via email". From there, you may now have permission to send that person product updates, sales, promotions, advertisements, through email. But even if they have allowed you to send them those emails, you should give them an option to cancel if they wish to unsubscribe from you at any time.

It is essential for anyone considering email marketing that he/she understands opt-in emails and spammy ones. Hence, you should be sure that the address lists you build and use have all been given permission with. As dangerous as computer viruses, emails can carry some of the viruses themselves as well as trick a customer into something he/she didn't really plan to do.

Should you need professional assistance and opinion on email marketing you can choose a website designing company that is both professional and reliable. Since email marketing contributes hugely to to your website development as well as the overall growth of your business, you shouldn't take it lightly as such that you don't mind who the emails go to for as long as they are delivered.