Legitimate e-mail marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and prospects. It is inexpensive, quick, efficient and environmentally friendly. E-mail marketing allows you, your customers and prospects by their particular interests, goal, it allows you to quickly announced special promotions (either planned or spontaneous promotions based on changing conditions). Email is the perfect way to send a monthly newsletter.

How can you start with e-mail marketing? Start by collecting your customers by e-mail addresses. Even if you currently have no e-mail marketing, you collect your customers by e-mail addresses, so now if you decide to start communicating with your customers by e-mail, you already have a good list. Have a sign-up sheet at each of your cash or your reception. Be sure to register on the registration form embed on your site. Offer an incentive such as a monthly drawing from the collected e-mail addresses. Be sure to include a privacy statement on your forms and sign-up sheets, such as “Privacy notice: We do not share your information with anyone.” (This of course means that you do not share that information forever.) Remember, e-mail addresses are free (or very cheap to collect).

Do only “permission based e-mail marketing. In other words, only e-mails to people who have applied for your e-mail messages and make it easy to opt-out of future e-mails. It is a slimy side to marketing by e-mail spammers. Of course you want to be associated with the prestigious E-mail marketing as possible. When a customer, a prospect or a visitor voluntarily provides their e-mail address, you are not spamming. If you get it any other way, you are spamming. A commonly used method for dealing with subscription requests from your website is called “double-opt-in”. A double-opt-in requires the individual to the first request for information in your e-mail marketing, and then a confirmation request is sent to the e-mail address. You need a link in the confirmation email or otherwise confirm their desire to get your e-mail before they’ve added to your list. The rule is simple: When in doubt, do not send.

Make your e-mail marketing messages convincing for the reader. Keep short and to-the-point and ensure that the recipient of the value in what you say to see.  Make your message real, make it personal, and it provides a performance by the readers of perspective. If there is nothing for them, they will simply delete your message or report, perhaps even as spam.

Be consistent. Whether you send an email campaign every week, every month or every quarter, you choose be consistent. A very successful e-mail marketer even includes those words at the beginning of each email he sends: “Sent the third Tuesday of the month …” Your consistency in your marketing efforts reflects your reliability as a company.

What about the mechanics of e-mail marketing? Many small companies simply use their regular email accounts. Such a solution can work, but it does not scale and grow your e-mail list and companies. It also requires you to manage your new subscribers and unsubscribe requests. A better solution is to use a commercial e-mail marketing service. Such companies provide templates to make your records look professional. They also provide tracking information about how many actually open and read messages, automatic opt-out links to your marketing messages, tutorials, assistance in complying with the CAN-SPAM Act, and much more.

Ensure compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act. Of course this is not legal advice, but compliance means that honest in your subject lines of the content of the message, including a simple opt-out “method in every message, and with your complete contact information in each message.

Regardless of how you decide to do your e-mail marketing, now is the time to start collecting e-mail addresses. Email marketing, done right, is flexible and affordable, efficient, and potentially very profitable for your company.