Promoting your products or services by email can be a powerful and flexible form of direct marketing. Email marketing is one of the most powerful customer relationship and customer acquisition tools available to marketers. You can communicate your messages quickly and cheaply. You can also tailor your message to specific types of customer more cost-effectively than with paper-based marketing - one reason why email is continuing to replace paper communications.

However, you should plan your email marketing with care to make it relevant, well-targeted and interesting to recipients. You also need to be aware that you must always obtain their consent before sending them marketing emails.

This guide shows how to get customers' permission to receive email from your business and how to ensure you reach the right people. It also covers how to monitor the effectiveness of email marketing and newsletters and the legal issues you need to be aware of.
 
Target the right people

Focus on your best prospects. Even though it costs very little financially to send an email, it can still take up a lot of your time if your campaign is not targeted.

 Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you're offering. So for example, if you're running a special offer on computer hardware, it will be more effective if you promote it only to people responsible for buying it.

But an email to an existing customer or contact, who has agreed to receive marketing from you about products or services, may well be valuable to them. Even if they don't buy from you immediately, they're more likely to do so in the future. 

People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that's irrelevant to them, and they're likely to delete unsolicited messages from your business without reading them.

Unsolicited marketing emails - or 'spam' - are illegal, but because they continue to be a major problem, computer security software can be used to block them. Unsolicited marketing emails, or spam, are illegal, but because they continue to be a major problem, computer security software can be used to block them. People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that's irrelevant to them, and they're likely to delete unsolicited messages from your business without reading them.

to relevant parts of your website can sit alongside each story in the newsletter so users can click straight through. Build your mailing list It's worth promoting the newsletter in every way you can. Remember to put opt-in tick boxes for email information on website forms and all your marketing material. Word of mouth, or viral marketing, is also a powerful form of promotion, so you might encourage recipients to forward your newsletter to a friend or colleague. They may not be directly interested in the newsletter content at that precise moment - but they may have a friend or colleague who is. Opting out Remember that you're legally required to give recipients the opportunity to stop receiving your newsletter. You should have an 'unsubscribe' option on every edition you send out. See the page in this guide on legal issues.