Email marketing involves using email to deliver permission-based communications to recipients; prospects or customers in order to build relationships, increase sales and extend customer retention.

The key is permission.

Spamming also uses email, but that is definitely not email marketing in the way we want to use it in doing our business.

Basically, there are three types of email marketing based on the purpose of the emails:

1. Promotional direct email

Solo mailing to an email list, special offer, and special promo notification are examples of emails that fall into this category.

To email this mail, you need an explicit permission from the recipients. You can obtain permission by building your in-house list: collect your prospects or customers email address by having them fill out a form on the Web site or registration page, etc.

Another way to obtain permission is by renting. In this context, the owners of the lists have explicit permission from the list members that they can occasionally send third-party promotional materials to the list.

2. Email newsletter email

The second form of email is email newsletter, which basically contains information but also sells products and services as part of the package. Unlike promotional email, newsletter doesn’t try to hard sell to the prospects or customers directly.

This type of email is good for nurturing sales leads, also for readers to keep their engagement and stay as subscribers.

A newsletter aim at developing a long term relationship with prospects and customers instead of making immediate sales. This type of email plays a big role in customer retention.

3. Advertising

Instead of sending email directly to an in-house or rented list, you pay for an advertisement in other people newsletter or directly as promotional email.

There are a lot of commercial email newsletters that allow people to buy adverising spots. The owner usually provides superb content that the subscribers really want, giving them away for free, but in return retain the rights to send promotional offers every so often.

Email marketing sounds great. It is. But far from being easy, actually building the names from scratch — not mere names but permission-based, integrating it into your business, designing and delivering the right messages to the right people and getting them to read and respond are the challenges every email marketer has to face.

After sending, marketers also should track and measure the results so that they could analyze and attempt to improve the results for the next mailing.

Those topics and more will become the topic of this blog regularly. Subscribe to get your information delivered to your desktop immediately as they are available.