How to Use Email Marketing to Build Your Business

Email is an extremely powerful marketing tool that can help build your business and drive sales. Email marketing primarily refers to building a contact list and sending them email newsletters on a regular basis.

We use email marketing for several of our businesses. My son and I have two travel blogs / websites, travel4people.com and travel4seniors.com where we share our love and knowledge of travel. We use email marketing to build a list of readers, people who like our site and like to read our articles. We have sign-up forms on the websites and over the past five years have built the database to well over 10,000 subscribers. Like a magazine needs readers or a television show needs viewers, we need web visitors to generate revenue for our business. The more visitors, the more revenue.

There are many companies that provide these complete services, usually charging by the number of contacts you maintain. We use one of the big ones, Constant Contact (constantcontact.com) for our travel business and my son uses Mobile Storm (mobilestorm.com), another large provider for his music business. Constant Contact charges $15 a month for up to 500 contacts, $30 for 501-2500 contacts, $50 for 2501-5000, $75 for 5001-10000 and $150 a month for 10001-25000. This pricing allows you to send unlimited emails a month and you can break them up into groups if you have different businesses or want to send different emails to differnent hgrouips of your contacts. Other services charge similar amounts and many, including Constant Contact, offer a free trial.

These email marketing services allow you to easily compile a mailing list, create and send compelling newsletters automatically through their system, and then track the performance of those messages, to see how many people are clicking through on the topics and links you include.

Successful email marketing involves several basic steps regardless of the type of business:

Build a Contact List
First you build a contact list of email addresses by importing existing contacts from your email programs and via a sign-up form on your website.

Create and Send Email Newsletters
After you have built your list of contacts, next create and send regular emails to those contacts, automatically. The emails can include text, images, video and most importantly, links back to your website or to purchase products or services.

Track and Monitor
Email marketing companies allow you to see how many people opened your email and also which links they clicked through, in great detail. This tells you which stories or types of information or products people are most interested in.

Email marketing is not SPAM. We never want to send an email to someone who didn't request to be on our mailing list. We have a double opt-in system. That means if you sign up for our mailing list on our site, you get a confirmation email. You need to confirm via that email or the system will not add you to the list. That ensures everyone on our list wants to be there and wants to get our information.

Here are some key tips to help you get the most out of your email marketing campaign:

Ensure Opt-In Only
Sending unwanted emails will hurt your business and may subject you to fines, through the CAN-SPAM laws. Email marketing companies take this very seriously and will disable your account if too many people complain your emails are SPAM.

Use all the available steps and technology to ensure your list is "clean", an industry term that means all the subscribers have opted-in and have been verified as such.

Communicate Regularly
Sending regular emails builds that communication between the company and customers. It reminds them you are there and what you are doing. We always see a huge spike in traffic and revenue whenever we send out a newsletter but know if we sent them every day, the impact would be lost.

Communicating regularly doesn't mean every day. People can get sick of even the most interesting emails. You may also consider a longer monthly email newsletter and a shorter weekly one, giving subscribers the option to select one or the other, or both.

Include Valuable Content
No one wants to read a bunch of ads. Create informative, valuable content that engages and excites readers. The whole goal is provide content so interesting they click through to visit your site. We normally include a paragraph or two summary of our new articles, travel reviews and news, encouraging newsletter readers to click through if the want to read more.

Respect Privacy
Ensure you have thorough systems in place for only allowing opt-in joins on your mailing list. Provide simple and easy unsubscribe links on the emails. Never sell or give the information to third parties or use it for purposes other than what you inform subscribers when they sign up.