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What is Email Marketing?

If you don’t understand what is meant by  then you are not alone. The concept of email marketing is a relatively new marketing tool and for those still in the dark, the following is a simple explanation on what it is, what you need to get started and what advantages it can bring to you.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a system of delivering promotions to those that have subscribed to you and have expressed that they would like to receive emails with links to products or information that they are interested in.

Permission

It is important that you have the persons consent prior to sending them anything, if not the action of sending the information will be classed as spam and this will generate a lot of complaints.

Subscribing

When someone subscribes to your email marketing list it is best to confirm that this is what they actually intended to do. By double checking you reduce the risk of your email provider getting spam complaints about you and you also know that the people you are emailing are actually interested in what you have to offer.

When you have built your email marketing list you then have the option to choose whether you use it as a service or newsletter to your reader. You can send out updates, special promotions such as discounts or anything else that you feel would be of interest to the subscriber.

Getting Started

To get started with email marketing you need an email account such as hotmail, Gmail etc, Gmail tends to be the most popular, possibly because it belongs to Google. Then you need to set up your auto responder.  An auto responder is a form of software that automatically responds to email messages. This is important because it allows interested parties to receive the information they want immediately. You can also send personalized follow up messages this way and it means that you only need type the information once and the system will do the rest for you.

What Are the Advantages?

Probably the major advantage of email marketing is that it is extremely affordable. You have no cost to collate your list or printing and mailing costs. You may have to pay to send the mailings but this will protect you against spam complaints but this is a nominal amount, making email marketing cost effective in comparison to other forms of marketing.

Now that you have an idea of what email marketing is and what it can do for your online business it is down to you to how you proceed.