Email marketing is basically the sending of emails to existing or potential customers. There are many reasons for sending customers  email but he the main reasons are :

• Increasing customer loyalty
• Promoting products
• Promoting events
• Promoting the business

Email Marketing has many attractions for businesses, especially small businesses; they are:

• Cost- Much less expensive that printed media
• Can be automated
• Can lead to direct sales
• Easy Tracked - No other form of promotion can be so easily tracked
• Can be used to open two way dialogue
• Instantaneous
• No geographic constraints/costs- i.e. It doesn’t matter if the recipient is in China or England or America.

Do You Need A website?

You don’t need a website to do email marketing but is usual to have one anyway. Having said that for small businesses like bed and breakfasts/small hotels who don’t want the hassle of updating a  website with special offers they can just use email as a way of promotion.

So don’t be put off using email as a promotional media just because you don’t have a website and don’t just get a website to support your email promotion.

Who is Using Email Marketing?

There are many  household names using email marketing. Have you ever bought a book from Amazon? If you have you will notice that they periodically send you an email with book  recommendations.

It is not just online retailers like Amazon. Here in the UK Tesco offer many services like mobile phones, films, Wine Club via the Web and are very active in email promotions.

The Process and Requirements

The email marketing process is actually very simple as it has only two main components:

• Collecting/Capturing the Email Addresses and Building the list
• Sending the Emails

For small lists it is possible to do all this manually using your current email client like Outlook/Outlook Express. For larger lists it is better to  use an autoresponder.

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