If your business has been around for a time, you likely have several means of marketing. Should you add email marketing to your toolbox?

Here are some criteria for you to consider.

1. Is email used by the majority of your intended audience?

Many people do depend on email to stay in touch with others, however, unless you are sure that your target market is in that group, you would be advised to find out for sure before investing a lot of time and money developing an email marketing system. That being said, if your investigation shows you that your audience is indeed a user of email, you can feel better about employing email marketing as a tool to help in your business.

2. The choice to buy product or invest in your service is not made on a whim.

While there are exceptions, generally where customers want to learn about the product or service, you have a good candidate for email marketing.

3. You have something to give away.

It might be a free report, consultation, whatever makes sense for yur particular business. The free item does two things. First, it is an inducement for the prospect to actually give up their email address (as more and more, people are reluctant to do so). Second, it gives the prospect a sampling of what you have to offer.

The tangible aspects of your free item can be discussed through follow up emails, either to explain the value of what was received, or if you have provided a free report, you can simply break the report up and deliver it in small chunks over the next seven, ten, or more days.

4. You have a back end. In others words, you have something more to sell the buyers of your products and services.

If that does not describe your business, I suggest you make plans to rectify it immediately. The reason is simple. You have already spent a considerable amount of time and effort to locate interested prospects and persuade them to buy. A certain percentage of them will want to “go deep” and buy more from you, if only you offered something more. The easiest sales you make will be sales to existing customers, and it’s not difficult to understand why. They already trust you and want what you are selling.

If you are marketing an information product on how to begin selling on ebay, you may also choose to offer a workbook complete with checklists and other valuable information, a series of teleseminars, a personal coaching program, and perhaps a certification program.

Virtually any type of business, whether you sell to retail consumers or only wholesale, whether you provides services or products only, can make use email marketing.

If you have a business, you should begin email marketing right away. This means collecting email addresses of prospects and customers, and mailing them relevant information and offers.

The question of how often to email is somewhat trickier. Ultimately the question is going to be answered by what is optimal for your market. Some marketers send messages out every day!

Here are some ideas to help you answer that question.

Take a look at the competition. Figure out what they have done, especially the successful ones. Follow their example as the place to start.

Of course, when you begin acquiring readers, you can and should inquire how often they want to get emails from your company. You should not take what they tell you as gospel however: people are not always honest in these type of surveys. As an example, people will report that they never buy from telemarketers, when their credit card statements reveal the opposite.

Instead of trying to figure out why this happens, it is better to simply acknowledge that it happens and act accordingly.

What it means is that in marketing, you should not take anything for granted. Proper testing will reveal the truth.

Also remember the distinction between autoresponders and broadcast emails.

Autoresponder emails: give some thought to how often your autorespodner emails should be sent out. You might decide to send them daily. Consider sending them out every day or every other day for a time, and then later send them less often after the first week or so.

Broadcast emails: you will have to write these emails (or have them written), so give some thought the pace at which you can crank out the emails. Even more importantly, what frequency will your readers appreciate?

With a little effort, you can arrive at the best frequency for your emails that are sent from your email marketing system.

Quite simply, email marketing is reaching your target audience through the medium of email. This is in contrast to using direct mail, telephone marketing, face to face selling, websites, radio, and television. Of course, email can work in conjunction with any of these methods and is often complementary to many of them.

The idea behind email marketing is basically to get your message out to those individuals who have “raised their hand” and expressed an interest in what you have to say. By “raised their hand”, we mean that the person has initiated the relationship by clicking on a link that adds their email address to your email list. In the case of a double opt-in list, the recipient also must confirm the email subscription by clicking on a separate link inside an email that is sent specifically to their email address for the purpose of confirming that only those who want to be on the list actually are.

It should be clear that email marketing should not automatically be labeled “spam”; i.e. unwanted commercial email. When email lists are managed as they should be, the recipient requests to be added to the email list, and in addition, every email they receive contains a mechanism for unsubscribing.

What about the content of email marketing communications?

In general, email marketing messages will include:

News relevant to your industry or subject area. If you are marketing to professional dog trainers, you may want to inform your readers about lawsuits, new techniques, and the like. By providing relevant information and helpful interpretation of it, you will eventually become a trusted advisor to your readers.

Tips and tricks. A method often employed is to give some level of basic education. A good use of this technique would be to send out an email course on how to grow roses. Alternatively, you might speak to one problem that aspiring rose growers often deal with.

Offer products and services for sale. This probably will not surprise you: a marketer might want to sell you something! The specific action you encourage your reader to take will depend on your individual circumstance. If you’re not offering something for sale today, you will likely be leading them farther along your sales funnel.

Here are some examples:

* Checking out a sales page

* Pick up the phone and call for more information

* Sign up for free teleseminar

Commercial bulk emails can be classified as “broadcast” messages or “sequential” messages. The latter are often labeled “autoresponders” for the fact that process behind including a subscriber to your list is automated, and in addition, the system keeps track of when to send follow up messages.

To make a good choice of an email marketing system for your business, it is a good idea to become aware of all of the options. Several alternatives exists to fulfill this need, and there are three variations that will be highlighted here.

First, you might choose to manage your list of emails from your own desktop computer. Individuals will occasionally attempt to maintain a list within their current personal email program, such as Outlook.

Don’t do it! This arrangement will have to managed by hand, will not allow you to do autoresponders, and will preclude you from using the latest deliverability tools.

Second, you can buy a program and install it on your own server.

This arrangement has the advantage of no monthly fees and additionally will allow more control over your email campaigns. The downside is that you may have to pay for upgrades, and will have little if any support dealing with the inevitable deliverability problems.

Your third options is to employ a hosted service. These services “host” the email software application on dedicated servers and you pay a fee every month for the services they provide. These services will often include specialized tools for composing email messages and for proper management of your email system.

The advantages of a hosted service include the continual upgrade of the system which is part of your monthly fee, and they give you top-notch support in get your legitimate emails past the spam filters. The disadvantages include the fact that you do actually have to continue to pay the monthly fee for as long as you use the service, and additionally you must do things “their way” to a certain extent.

Regardless of which choice you make, make sure you get a system that can send broadcast messages and more importantly, automated email messages or autoresponders.

By broadcast messages, we mean that the capability of sending out a message to every person on your list. All systems will have this option. For example, you can prepare a newsletter every week.

Autoresponders are email messages sent in a sequence that begins when the individual was first included on your list. This is a powerful way to communicate with your audience because it is “hands off” after you initially set it up. One way to approach this is to release a series of messages, say one every other day. The messages may include training, recommendations of affiliate products, promotions of your own services and products, or even better, a combination of all three.

An effective email marketing system is an essential tool to your online marketing success, and once you begin using one, you will wonder why you waited so long to begin one!

An extremely effective way of marketing your products and services is email marketing. Every size and type of business is using it. Why are they using email marketing? Because it works!

Why does it work? Partly because of the following advantages: low cost, speed, viral (messages can easily be transferred to others, without your direct involvement), can direct traffic to an otherwise offline offer, and with certain applications, messages can be customized.

Amazon.com is a great example of customization. Amazon only sends recommendations related to what the customer has bought before. People are interested in some subjects but not other subjects, and the more closely communications are based upon the things that appeal to the individual, the larger the chance that the message will come across.

Email campaigns can easily direct traffic to an offline offer. One method is sending out coupons. This system is utilized by the bookstore Borders with great success, as they frequently send out coupons that can be used in their local store. “Good for one day only” coupons are also used by service businesses to fill empty slots.

Don’t have the tools to manage an email marketing system yet? You have two major choices. Your first is whether to buy a program that installs on your own server, or whether to go with a hosted service and have your email database stored on a third-party’s server.

There are many advantages to purchasing your own program, such as increased flexibility, no monthly fees, and customization. Auto Response Plus and Mailloop are acclaimed examples.

Hosted services may cost a small amount upfront, but undoubtedly require a monthly fee. However, there are advantages. Services like Aweber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart, and EmailAces are run by experts in this area, who will help in the event of spam complaints.

Email marketing can be an excellent part of your marketing mix. If used properly, it can easily increase your revenue and help you retain customers.