What is Email Marketing - And How Can It Work In Your Online Business?

Email marketing is using email to deliver marketing messages. Whether you have an online business or offline business, keeping connected with your current and potential customers is a good way to grow your business and build trust and loyalty. Email marketing has become a method by which you can distribute, advertise and promote various types of communication to different recipients.

The best way to use this type of communication is by utilizing segmentation. In other words, send a targeted email personalized for a specific audience or recipient. Look at your list and divide it into groups -- perhaps just dividing into prospects and clients. Then personalize your email to each group. Using this method will avoid a potentially downside to email marketing -- sending too many emails.

There are many advantages to using email marketing to promote your business. One is the relatively low cost involved -- especially when you compare it to traditional mailing costs. Another is the speed at which you get your message delivered to your customer's or prospect's hands. There's also the ability for your recipients to forward the message to others who they think may be interested in the information. But most importantly is the ability to track and evaluate the success of your email marketing campaign. You have the ability to see who's opened the email, who's forwarded it, and who's clicked on any links.

While there are many advantages to email marketing, you should not use it as your only means of marketing. Email marketing should be used as an enhancement to your other marketing activities. For instance, you should have a website your subscribers can go to. Your website should be designed to accommodate sales while your email marketing campaign highlights the benefits of your offerings and encourages your subscribers to visit your site.

Your website should also be the focus of other Internet marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and article marketing. Once you have an entire plan for your Internet marketing strategy, you then use your email marketing campaign to enhance all your efforts and encourage your customers and prospects to patronize your business and become loyal.

One of the pitfalls, as I mentioned earlier, of email marketing is overdoing it. While there really aren't any inherent disadvantages to email marketing, its downside comes from abusing it. If you're sending emails to all 10,000 people on your list every couple of days, then they're going to get tired of it and either delete the emails or -- worse yet -- opt out of your mailing list. That could potentially cost you a lot of business. The last thing you want to do is irritate your subscribers by making them feel you’ve tricked them into signing up for something they didn't want.

Email marketing is a very valuable tool in every marketer's toolkit. Making it a part of your marketing strategy adds this powerful tool to your marketing arsenal, and enhances your overall business success. Moreover, email marketing gives you an additional method to keep in touch with your customers and prospects and to build a loyal customer base.