What Is Email Marketing? How Is It Done?

Email marketing is one of the many Internet Marketing methods which are used to promote businesses. It is a modified form of direct mail marketing. In direct mail marketing a business’ prospective customers are sent personalized mails which advertised about the company’s business, products and services. This marketing method, though proved to be effective, was very costly. The main reason for this high cost is that in direct mail marketing a lot of money is to be spent on paper, printing and delivery. On the other hand email marketing comes pretty cheap. Since they are emails money on printing, paper and delivery are saved.

Email marketing can be defined shortly as ‘The promotion of products or services via email’. In email marketing a business collects email addresses of their prospective customers. Then they email these people with information of their latest products and services. The content may also include the company’s latest offers and anything they want to tell their customers.

Let us see in detail how email marketing is done.

Step 1: Collecting email addresses of prospective customers:
When running an email campaign the email list you have should be a targeted one ie, the email addresses and contact information it has should be of your prospective customers. It is very important that you send your mails only to your prospective customers. There is no use for a car towing service in sending an email to a window cleaning company or a web solutions company. Each business has a targeted set of customers. Only that targeted set of customers must be included in an email marketing campaign.

There are mainly two methods for collecting email addresses.
1. You can purchase email addresses from many email list vendors. There are hundreds of such websites in internet from where you can purchase a targeted email list for your business. Some of the most reputed websites have millions of email databases with them.
2. You can collect email addresses by yourself. You can collect email addresses of your blog’s subscribers, collect them by offering a free download in exchange of email address, take them from those who commented in your blog etc. There are a lot of methods through which you can acquire email addresses of your prospective clients.

Of the two above methods for collecting email addresses the first one is the easiest one though you may have to spend some bucks on it. You can get 10,000+ email addresses for just $98. When compared to the time and efforts required for collecting them yourself it is very cheap.

Step 2: Designing the email template:
Decide what all things should be included in the emails that you send to your prospective customers. Make sure you include your contact details and social media profiles, and most importantly the message you intent to send them.

Step 3: Sending emails:
You cannot send thousands of emails at once using your gmail or yahoo accounts. There are many email marketing software available in the internet where you can setup an account and send out emails to your prospects.

Step 4: Tracking and analysis:
You can track how many of those received your emails opened them, how many replied to them etc using different tools provided by the email marketing software you use. Use them to see how to further increase your conversion rates and business.