by Kenya Stallworth

Created on: January 24, 2010

If you are starting an online business, or even thinking of promoting your offline business on the internet; one aspect on internet marketing you should contemplate seriously is e-mail marketing. This is a field many business owners leave untouched; mistakenly believing all e-mail campaigns are spam.

In reality, this is not the case, and avoiding this particular avenue of marketing causes one to miss out on a good portion of business. Without exposing your business to potential clients through e-mail, you are giving these customers away to your competitors who use these techniques to reach clients worldwide.

Before starting an e-mail marketing campaign, however; one should begin with constructing their email distribution list. The following article will explain the more popular options for completing this task, and will assist the reader in learning what is and isn't acceptable in e-mail marketing.

Now that you have decided to use e-mail marketing for promotion of your business; the first problem you may run across is how to create a list for e-mail distribution. Simply defined, this is a list of people who have given you permission to e-mail them information periodically; which contains information about what you have to offer.

One of the more common ways to gather e-mails for such a list is to purchase them from a distributor. This method never turns out to be very effective; and is not recomended. When purchasing lists of this  type, there is no way to verify if the people on this list have one bit of interest in what you have to promote. Intrigue in your products and/or services is extremely important in e-mail marketing; although you always want as many people as possible to be exposed to your offer, it doesn't make a difference if the people seeing it aren't interested in the slightest.

When purchasing a list of e-mail contacts, a few may respond to the e-mails you send, but the majority will not pay one iota of attention to your promotion, simply because they never requested information from you personally. These people will delete your e-mail before reading the headline.

Also, most Internet Service Providers today contain spam filters, which will delete your e-mail before it even reaches its intended recipient, if the complex algorithms that scan your e-mail subject and body for phrases that are a red flag. Knowing that you are already fighting these odds, sending a campaign to recipient that have never heard of you and haven't asked for information is a complete waste of time and money, when the majority will simply discard it without thought.

A more effective approach to starting an e-mail distribution list is to ask your current and potential customers to sign up on your website for further information and updates about what you have to offer., as well as related information they may find of interest. This will give you a beginning database of people whom you know have an interest in what you have to offer.

Once you have these interested people on your list, you can send them promotional e-mails, or write an electronic newsletter to distribute to your list members. The issues of your newsletter should not only promote your business, but provide valuable information about what you have to offer, which can be the deciding factor for some of your list members to purchase what you have to offer.

Other things you should include in your newsletter are helpful links back to your website, or even other related websites your members could find interesting. Also, its good to have what's called a "call to action" in each issue, urging the reader to commit a definite action, like getting more information on a product, or signing up for a free trial for service.

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