What is email marketing and how can it help me to grow my home business?

The term email marketing covers every email you ever send to a customer, potential customer or public venue to promote your home business, in general, though, it’s used in reference to:

Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again

Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship

Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people, sometimes known as joint ventures.

You can think of the three forms of email marketing as the email equivalent of:

ª Direct mail

ª Sending people a print newsletter

ª Placing advertisements in subscription magazines and newspapers

Email Marketing is one of the most popular methods that many “gurus” use to promote their home business, but…! You must remember there is an extremely important difference with email marketing – the issue of permission.

Why Do Top Internet Marketers Use Email Marketing?

Because it works!

Email marketing is very popular for virtually any business not just home based businesses because: 
sending email is much cheaper than most forms of 
communication which means that you get more of a return on your investment:-)

Email marketing has produced extraordinary results for those who know how to do it properly

Let’s briefly review the three types of email marketing:

1. Direct email 
Direct email is the process of sending a promotional message in the form of an email. You may announce a special offer, for example. Just as you might have your list of customers you have built up over time, so you can quickly collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses. 
Did you know you can rent lists of email addresses from service companies, they started providing services to big businesses and eventually they scaled down their packages and they service home businesses now too. They’ll let you send your message to their own address lists. They can normally target your message according to, for example, the interests or location of the owners of the email address.

2. Retention email 
Instead of promotional email which will only persuade the recipient to take action (buy something, sign-up for something, etc.), you might send out some retention emails. 
These will normally take the form of regular emails formally known as newsletters. A newsletter may carry your promotional messages or advertisements, but will enable you to develop a long-term relationship with your readers. It should provide the readers with as much value as possible, this means fewer sales messages and more information that informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.

3. Advertise in other people’s emails 
You don’t have to produce your own newsletter, you can easily find many newsletters that have been published by others and you can then pay them to put your advertisement in the emails they send out to their subscribers. Did you know that there are many email newsletters that are created for that – to sell advertising space to others, big businesses do it more than home businesses because they generally have more people asking them to advertise with them, but you can always ask! I’m sure your local Internet whizz wouldn’t mind the few extra dollars that you’re willing to offer in exchange for this service, just as long as your offer is congruent with what they have to offer.

What Do I Need To Look Out For?

Imagine how much cheaper it is to send a message to thousands of email addresses, rather than thousands of postal addresses! 
Unfortunately. Apart from the complexities of designing and delivering email messages to the right group of people, getting them to actually open read and respond to your message, and measuring and analysing your results, you have to also make sure that you have permission.

What Do You Mean By Permission”?

Email marketing is based on the idea of permission. This is complex, and also the subject of intense debate in our industry. 
You need an email address owner’s permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don’t have permission, then the recipients of your mail may see your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email.

Don’t send spam!

If you are accused of sending spam, then you may get your email accounts closed down or your website closed. 
There is also a strong argument which says that long-term successful email marketing relationships with customers and others can only work when they’re permission based.

You’re wondering what constitutes permission…and that is still the main subject of debate, and will be till computers or the human race is replaced!

Permission is when your customer buys something from your online store and also ticks a box that says “please send me some news about product updates via email”. You now have “permission” to send them product updates by email, if you also give them the chance to unsubscribe when they want to. That’s why you provide value! You make them WANT to be on your list by sending them valuable information 3 times a week.

Learn

It’s important to read up on the subject of permission and spam. If you don’t understand permission and the risks of ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.

Don’t panic, though. It’s easy to ensure that the address lists you use or build yourself are permission-based. 
Now that you have some brief background information, browse the internet to find a good email marketing company, do your research, you’ll be glad you did:-)

Good Luck!