If you are looking to help improve the profit margins of your business then one of the avenues you may wish to explore should be email marketing. Although social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter seem to be all the rage with marketers at the moment, however a well managed email campaign will enable you to reach a potentially unlimited number of clients by writing just one pitch. If you are something of a novice when it comes to running email campaigns then the chances are you could use a little help. Here are a few useful pointers to get you started.

The first step is to decide who your customer base is likely to be. You may be looking to contact businesses, individuals or particular types of people depending on what product or service you are looking to sell. In the event you want to contact businesses then you should visit as many relevant company websites as you can and encourage them to sign up to your mailing list. It is important that you don\’t simply \’scrape\’ email addresses up from sites as this will simply be unproductive and have the effect of bombarding companies with unexpected (and therefore unwanted) emails. An alternative method of building up a mailing list is to partner up with a company who has lists readily available to sell to you.

It is important that your marketing email contains a \’pitch\’ along with a strong call to action. It is easy to fall into the trap of writing your email in such a way that it appears too sales-like. This can often be off-putting so make sure that you write your sales copy in such a way as to appear more personal and less formal.

If you have several products which you are looking to promote in your email then make sure that you lay them out in order of importance. Even more important is that you only send your email once. You may have seen the situation where you recieve 2 marketing emails and it stands out straight away as being spam. Your \’potential customer\’ will then flag your emails as being unwanted and they will simply delete any further correspondence.

The benefit of email marketing campaigns is that they are relatively inexpensive when you compare them to other types of online advertising. After all, your email account is free and you only have to write one email every so often. The system is effective enough that it is used by countless businesses to help them get started and build up a profitable customer base. If you are relatively new to setting up online marketing campaigns then you can be forgiven for finding the prospect of setting up an email campaign may be a daunting one. There really is no need to worry, however if you would prefer you can also approach companies which will off you a specialised email marketing service and will be able to take care of all the work for you.

Author Bio: Trevor Richards writes on behalf of Extravision, a UK email marketing service.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, email campaign, ecommerce, internet marketing, e-commerce, email, sales