I have been perusing through the threads and posts on email marketing in this forum and I thought it right to share with other forum members some tips on the subject through this article I wrote recently. I hope it will be to the benefit of many others. Here is the article:

Electronic mail marketing, popularly known as email marketing, is one of the most used marketing tools in advertising. However, most internet users and potential customers hate receiving mails that are delivered to their email boxes as junk mail. It’s therefore important for you to learn how to best benefit from your email marketing campaigns without abusing this wonderful marketing tool.

Email marketing has several advantages to the users. It’s faster. You can send marketing messages at once to thousands of customers, which helps you to save time. It’s less expensive compared to other paid marketing tools and it enables you to instantly communicate to your customers. It generates high response rates and quick feedback. But for you to gain from your email marketing campaigns, you need to take the following factors seriously.

1. Build your own opt-in list. Although it takes long to build your own email marketing list, it’s much safer and more effective than buying an opt-in email list because emailing people from such a list is regarded as spamming. Learn how to build your own list slowly by slowly. Never spam when carrying out your email marketing campaigns.

2. Select email marketing programs with the best features and options. Although most Internet Service Providers such as web hosts offer email accounts to their customers, these accounts cannot effectively be used to handle bulk mail and are limited in features. This is one of the reasons why you have to use other email programs that have the ability to handle a large amount of mail and which can enable you to organize your email marketing messages properly and in the way you want.

3. To be on the safe side, ONLY send your email marketing messages to people who have opted or requested to receive them. Sending unsolicited commercial mails is very unprofessional. You risk having your IPS address blacklisted, which can easily damage your business. Besides, it’s easier to make a sale by sending your commercial mails to already interested people and these are the ones that have subscribed to receive your messages. Always send your email marketing messages to people, who have subscribed to receive them.

4. Learn to write effective email marketing messages. Although, writing emails seems to be simple to most people, to make a sale requires you to know how to write emails that can attract your customers to perform the desired actions. Learn how to write winning email headlines and a captivating email body if at all you want to benefit from your email marketing drives.

5. Manage your email marketing campaigns profitably. For you to effectively manage your email campaigns well, you need to pay attention on how you communicate to the people in your opt-in list, when to send your email marketing messages to them and how often to send them out. Knowing when and how to communicate to your potential customers in the email messages you write to them is a requirement to the success of your email marketing campaigns.

6. Track your performance. Tracking your email marketing campaigns is really very important in any online marketing and advertising campaigns you make. Not only does it help you to improve your marketing messages but it’s also a basis for you to know what works and what doesn’t. Use software tools that track, record and analyze all the data concerning your email marketing campaigns.

7. Automate your email marketing process by using auto responders. It’s one of the lessons I have learnt since I started my online business. Automation helps to save time, to make follow-ups to your potential customers and to give instant replies to the requested information. Remember that it’s difficult to succeed with your email marketing campaigns without using auto responders.

As I conclude, I would like to remind you that success in your email marketing drives will depend largely on the above tips and the appearance of your email messages reflect your professional image. Learn to write effective email marketing messages.