As any marketer with any degree of experience will tell you, having a well designed website is now crucial to the success of any business. In order to increase leads for your business, it will be necessary to spread the word about your products and services. Email marketing is an important and effective part of this process.

The first point of call is to establish a list of contacts. This task can be done in a few different ways. One obvious way would be to gather contact information from you existing customer base. It may also be worth approaching a specialist mailing list broker who will be able to supply you with a list of contacts from the particular demographic to which you are trying to market yourself.

The next step is to acquire the right tools to assist you in implementing an email campaign. There are a number of different types of email marketing software which are available, all with different prices and benefits. If you are likely to be sending your emails out to less than 2000 people then you may find that there is free software available for you to use. Make sure that whatever software you end up using has an option to set up an auto responder. This will handle requests from your customers to subscribe and unsubscribe from your mailing list.

You should constantly be trying to add new contacts to your mailing list. As an aide to this you would be wise to offer some sort of incentive to encourage your website visitors to submit their email address. If you run an online shop then you could offer mailing list only discounts, or you could inform your visitors that the mailing list gets advanced notice of any upcoming deals.

The key to making the most of your contact list is to write and design an effective email. Make sure that any textual content is coherently and persuasively written. Ensure that it is kept free of any poor grammar or symbols which may make it stand out as spam. Important also is the need to write an attention grabbing subject line. The subject line should not be an after-thought and must be carefully considered as if the recipient reads it an immediately shows disinterest then you have undone all the hard work you will have no doubt put into crafting the email itself.

Try to personalise the email as much as you can so that it doesn\’t appear overtly \’salesy\’. Start your message by greeting the recipient with their name so that your customer feels like they are being addressed directly. This could make a big difference in helping your email standout from the spam in the recipients’ inbox.

One of the main benefits of email marketing is that all of the interactions are explicitly trackable. You will be able to tell how many people have actually opened your email as well as how they have gone on to interact with it. It is this information and data that you will be able to use in order to tailor future emails in such a way to maximize the return you get from your customers.

Trevor Richards writes for Extravision (www.extravision.com), a leading UK email marketing company.

Trevor Richards writes for Extravision (http://www.extravision.com), a leading UK email marketing company.

Author Bio: Trevor Richards writes for Extravision (www.extravision.com), a leading UK email marketing company.

Category: Advice
Keywords: email marketing, marketing, promotion, email, internet, computer, technology, advertising