What is eMail Marketing?

Introduction to eMail Marketing

Internet marketing enables companies to reach out targeted audience with help of numerous tools available in their arsenal. One of the most popular and used tools is eMail. We will explore eMail marketing in this session of "Internet Marketing - Read me daily".

So, as the name suggests eMail marketing is the use of eMail in marketing communications with prospective, new or existing customers. This would raise a question on what "kinds of"  marketing communication we can manage with eMails.

1. Sending direct promotional emails in order to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to re-visit your site and 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
4. Sending a "Thank you" note to all customer orders on fulfillment

eMail marketing is not as simple as it sounds. Its not a simple process of create an e-mail and dump a huge contact list in the TO or BCC and send it across. Of course, its cheaper to send than 1000s of postal mails. But, its rather quite complicated and needs specialization in order to design the mail message, deliver the message to right target audience, getting them to open, read, and respond to the email. And, one of the more complex item of all is to measure and analyze the results of e-mail marketing campaign(s). But, above all the key issue here is of "Permission".

What is Permission Marketing?

Its all about being "responsible". Meaning, with greater power comes bigger responsibility. You should not target your email campaigns without the permission of the recipient. The key is you don't want the recipient to block your emails forever if you send unsolicited email messages to them. 

You need to design your site such that you seek the permissions of the reader or visitor to genuinely collect email address from them for a particular campaign they might be interested in. Also, you need to provide "unsubscribe" option in the email message, just in case if the recipient thinks this was a mistake and they don't want to receive the messages anymore.

You may check out this link for email marketing softwares and tools are compared.

Additional Reference(s):

1. Email Marketing By the Numbers: How to Use the World's Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level
2. The Complete Guide to E-mail Marketing: How to Create Successful, Spam-free Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience and Increase Sales
3. Email Marketing: An Hour a Day
4. Successful Email Marketing Strategies
5. Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles: Proven Ways to Produce a Continuous Flow of Prospects and Profits with Effective Spam-Free Email System
6. Email Marketing: A guide to the Internet's most effective marketing tool