Everyone in business understands how competitive the market is and the challenges they encounter in trying to market themselves to potential clients. Those who have relied on traditional forms of print marketing be it mail inserts, fliers what have you are now learning the hard and expensive lesson that print does not have the penetration it once had.

With the Internet permeating all facets of life many people are looking for ways to find great deals online and any business without a web presence is really missing out an opportunity. There are a wide array of was to market to people online however choosing the one that is most effective requires some insight and planning.

Some people are big proponents for pay per click advertising however that can become pricey so in the aim to maximize results without selling the family farm many savvy business people are relying on E-mail marketing as a pillar of their online success.

Long before the Internet became rich with streaming video and face to face video conferencing the primary tool of the Internet was E-mail. It was a way for people to communicate with each other without using costly telephone or postal services. It created a manner of collaboration beyond borders that has never been realized.

The challenge with E-mail was how to leverage it as a tool for commerce and entered the idea of E-mail Marketing. There are two primary channels of E-mail marketing black hat approaches which involve spamming peoples inbox. Spam is the term given to unsolicited E-mails being sent to individuals. Spam has costs many Internet Service Providers a great deal of time and frustration as it takes up bandwidth and space on servers that could be used for other applications.

To the end user Spam is a nuisance as a lot of time is spent reviewing messages trying to determine whether or not this E-mail is relevant to you.

The other form of E-mail marketing is using white hat approaches where messages are sent to potential clients who have \”opted in \” to receive communications from the sender. This is also known as Can-Spam compliant. Any E-mail marketing solution must provide Can-Spam compliant solutions as many ISP\’s clamp down on those who flaunt the rules.

A major reason why E-mail marketing is relied upon is you can actually gauge the responsiveness to a particular E-mail. With print or other forms of media you never really know for certain how many individuals actually read your material, the best option is guess. With E-mail marketing you are able to get reports on how many people actually opened the message compared to how many simply deleted it. As an added benefit for tracking purposes you could add a special link in your message so when a client clicks on it and it leads to a sale you are able to establish metrics and then fine tune your approaches to maximum those conversion rates.

With the costs of E-mail marketing so low it would behoove anyone to take advantage of it.

Author Bio: Trevor Richards writes for Extravision, a leading UK email marketing service.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, marketing, ecommerce, internet, website, email, sales, money