Now is the time for email marketing! As the owner and operator of a small, medium or enterprise-level business venture, you are required to sense the signs of the times and make sure that your business is prepared for the bumpy roads ahead. Sometimes this means cutting budgets. Scaling back your advertising budget doesn't mean losing contact with your audience. In fact, email marketing is a cost effective alternative to big budget advertising.

Email marketing uses a three point package in order to drive repeat business and help you to garner more business. Whether you are in retail, hospitality, or shipping, email marketing uses professional designs, data metrics tracking and comprehensive list management to target your audiences in the most efficient manner.

Your email design:

Online email marketing services provide you with hundreds of templates to choose from. As a bonus, they're also very easy to use. The many varieties available give you options to match your marketing needs, whatever they may be.

If you need to showcase promotions involving various products, you can include images of these products to entice your audience to find out more or to purchase directly. In this case, it is imperative to ensure your digital images are premier in quality. Also, you will be able to link these images to your online sales pages so that interested parties can discover more about your products. This also ties into the effectiveness of the tracking beacon which will be explained later.

If you are sending out text based articles and newsletters, email marketing software will help you to create different article sections complete with a table of contents, images and attention-grabbing headlines. Also, by adding a "read more" link at the bottom of the text, you will be able to track the results, such as the different people who are clicking on the article of interest to them in your email.

Having a professional design for you email marketing campaigns is easily accomplished. It is simply a matter of uploading your digital images and cutting and pasting content into the given fields, then sending it out.

Tracking:

As mentioned earlier, email marketing tracking and the design process, are interrelated. Together, these 2 features can really help you to determine your audience's needs and wants. This is essential in establishing more targeted marketing campaigns, and therefore getting greater success out of your email marketing campaigns as you progress.

Email marketing services provide you with detailed tracking on which of your subscribers have opened your email campaigns, clicked on the links (whether they are images or text), and who has forwarded your emails to other interested parties. This data is accessible through export features, so you can see your data in familiar programs like Excel. You will also be able to follow-up with your leads, as you will have real-time data on each subscriber, including their email address, as well as the time and date they interacted with or responded to your email.

The tracking features of email marketing campaign will give you valuable information on your potential clients' interests. And, the better you know your clients, the better you can service their needs.

List Management:

The best email marketing programs will give you a highly comprehensive list manager. You will be able to ensure that you customize your subscriber list in any way, shape, or form that suits your needs.

Once you have data from your first campaigns, and have exported this data, you can now use the list manager to segment your audiences into their various interest groups.

Now the process begins again: recreate your campaigns specifically geared towards the needs and desires of your contact list, enticing them to purchase more and become loyal customers.

Some things to keep in mind about email marketing:

Make sure that people who are visiting your website or entering your store location are adding their emails address to your contact list. Make sure that you are constantly making an effort to grow that contact list so that you can keep the cycle pumping.

Signing up for email marketing is really easy to do, and the better services offer you various payment options to suit your budget. The most common are the pre-paid, pay-as-you-go credit system and the monthly unlimited billing plan.

With the pre-paid plan, you purchase an amount of credits up front that suits your marketing strategy. And, because the credits never expire and there are no monthly costs, this method can save you money if your strategy involves sending out campaigns 1-2 times a month or less.

With the monthly unlimited sending, you get an unlimited amount of emails to send, and your fixed monthly cost is based on the size of your list. This works great if your marketing strategy involves sending out several times a month or more.

With these three components available through email marketing, you can establish a cost-effective and targeted relationship with current and future customers. Due to the astronomical costs of big budget advertising and the need to scale back costs in this economic environment, now is the time to start using email marketing to drive your repeat business and make more money in tough economic times. Take back the control with email marketing!