Is Email marketing right for your business?

Email marketing is not a new concept. We have been dealing with it, mostly in the form of SPAM, for years now. When deciding to use email as a marketing tool, it is important for you to carefully evaluate the long term effectiveness of such a campaign. A marketing strategy involving Email is not for every type of business or product.

The success or failure of such a campaign will depend entirely on your target audience. Does the product or service you are offering directly relate to a group who regularly uses email to communicate? To make it even easier consider this: are the the people who will use your product or service in a class that would be considered computer literate? If so then Email marketing should be considered along with other essential marketing tools.

Having decided that email marketing would work for you, how do you proceed? There are numerous strategies for getting started and choosing one that works for you will probably be a result of trial and error. However you decide to proceed, be very careful that your process is not considered "SPAM" or you will hurt, rather than help, your marketing efforts.

The best way to avoid spamming is to get your audience to voluntarily sign up for email notifications or newsletters. If you have a web site, and I believe every business today should, you can include a place for visitors to sign up for a subscription. That way your loyal fans can keep up with changes to your site to include sales and new offers. I use FeedBurner which provided the code to include on my blog and tracks the statistics for me. Of course there are many such services available but I've been happy with them and you can't beat "Free".

Another tool you can use is to purchase email marketing lists. Just do a Google search and you will find hundreds of companies selling lists of email addresses. Now you have to be careful here. Make sure that what you are buying are "Opt in" lists. This means that the people on the list have agreed to receive emails for the category of goods or services you are offering.
Many of the companies selling these lists will also do the mailings for you. All you do is supply the information to go into the email. So shop around and look for the best value for your dollar. Most of the online companies will design an ad and email it to the specific number of subscribers in a specified category i.e. 300,000 in the Travel category.

There are many more tools for using email as a marketing strategy and most of them can be found on my Email Marketing site at www. eMail.TellMeAboutThat.com. You can also go to my blog at www.TellMeAboutThat.com and click on the "Hot Links" tab to get information on a lot of other subjects. If you visit you will find up to date articles, news, ads, books and other tools to help you along. If you like what you see don't forget to sign up for my blog to keep informed of the latest happenings.

Tom Stabler is a retired Air Force logistics specialist. He has traveled extensively, mostly in the Middle East and Central America. During his travels he gained experience and insight into a variety of subjects. He uses his articles to talk about his life experiences as well as promote his blog and 94 websites at www.TellMeAboutThat.com. Although the articles are mostly written so the reader can laugh a little, Tom has some strong opinions about how the government is being run as well. He currently lives in South Carolina with his wife of 32 years and works at finding jobs and training opportunities for the disabled.