How to Manage Email Marketing For Your Business

An extremely effective way of marketing your products and services is email marketing. Every size and type of business is using it. Why are they using email marketing? Because it works!

Why does it work? Partly because of the following advantages: low cost, speed, viral (messages can easily be transferred to others, without your direct involvement), can direct traffic to an otherwise offline offer, and with certain applications, messages can be customized.

Amazon.com is a great example of customization. Amazon only sends recommendations related to what the customer has bought before. People are interested in some subjects but not other subjects, and the more closely communications are based upon the things that appeal to the individual, the larger the chance that the message will come across.

Through email campaigns, you can easily drive traffic to an offline offer. One way to do this is by sending out coupons. This can be done for either product or services. This model is used with great success by the bookseller Borders, who regularly sends me coupons that I can use in my local store. Service businesses can easily use this method too. If you own a beauty salon and notice several open slots for the next business day, a carefully crafted email with a 10-25% off coupon -good for one day only- could easily fill all your empty slots.

If you don’t yet have the tools to manage an email marketing system, you have two major categories of services and products from which to choose. Your first choice is whether to purchase a program that installs on your own server, or whether to use a “hosted” service. A “hosted” service means the program and your email database are stored on a third-party’s server.

Using your own program would give you more flexibility and opportunities for customization, but it’s your choice. If you want to look into it, popular options are Auto Response and Mailloop.

A hosted service is generally going to require little or no upfront cost, but will require a monthly fee because you are paying for a separate service. Advantages of this type of system include: expert third-party help in the event of spam complaints, and no need to set up and maintain a program on your server. Commonly used services include Aweber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart, and EmailAces.

Email marketing can be an essential aspect of your marketing system, and has the capacity to expand your profits and increase your customers.