What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of marketing which uses electronic mail over the internet to communicate commercial messages to an audience. Email marketing employs the use of emails to achieve certain aims such as:

· Enhancing the relationship of the merchant with his present and previous customers to improve customer loyalty.

· Acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to subscribe for a service or buy a product immediately.

· Encouraging your own customers to patronize other companies or persons by attaching ads from these companies to your own emails. On the other hand, you can attach your own marketing messages or ads in emails sent by others.

Email marketing is a very cheap form of advertising in which hundreds of thousands of customers can receive your marketing messages in one go. This is termed bulk email marketing. Most companies use this form of advertising to reach a wide national and international audience thus enhancing product sales. Bulk email marketing is not as easy as that though because it does not guarantee that a person will read your promotional message and respond to it appropriately.

Proper email marketing is permission based. This means that you need the permission of an email owner in order to send him/her messages. If you do not have the permission of the recipient, then your email message may be regarded as SPAM. SPAM messages are unsolicited bulk messages which are restricted by law. The European Union introduced a directive that restricts the use of email addresses for commercial purposes in Article 13 of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. Under the U.S law, the United States Controlling Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 directs that a fine of eleven thousand dollars be paid for spamming each individual recipient of a bulk email marketing campaign.