Consider this scenario: You are happily surfing and searching for your favorite pastime, let's say "tropical fishes" and you stumble upon a great community website with lots of excellent information. However the site does not have an E-Mail Subscription form or (even if it has) no incentive to subscribe. So what do you do? You add it to your bookmarks and make mental note to return.

The problem is that you have about 300+ links in your bookmarks! How often would you then remember to visit that site? If you only re-visit it after 3 weeks, you might have missed that 2-week sale on Neon Tetras.

That's where E-Mail Marketing comes in. The objective is to stay in constant contact with your subscribers so you can send them information about your site without relying on them to visit you. E-Mail Marketing can be defined as 'Pro-active Marketing' (you make the first move to deliver your pitch to them) as opposed to 'Re-active Marketing' (you anticipate your visitors to react to your website's sales pitch when and IF they visit you).

Here's 5 very important element of E-Mail Marketing:

1. Autoresponder Software (Automatic Responders)
   Basically this is a software that you either install on your server or on your PC that automates a series of pre-composed emails. You can set it to fire of a 5-day series, or any set interval. Apparently, buyers take up to 7 e-mails before they trust and buy from you. Planning a series of e-mails with your product information can generate sales and establish you as an authority in your area. Some popular autoresponders include AWeber (Hosted and Managed), SendStudio (Installed as PHP/MySQL) or the very basic AutoResponder Unlimited (Perl)
2. Mailing List Management Software
   Once you've collected e-mail addresses and have sent out your series of emails, you'll want to still stay in touch by sending Newsletters, Offers & Promose and such. A good MLM Software should have filters, auto-subscribe/unsubscribe, bounce management, etc. We've found GroupMail Pro to be excellent in this regard.
3. Incentives and Useful Content
   Subscribers should be given an incentive to subscribe. You can give a 3-part report on your product (e.g. "Care and Feeding of Bettas") or just a free viral e-book. You should also prepare some good articles to link to when you send out your emails. Go to our E-Mail Marketing section for more such ideas.
4. Clear Privacy and Anti-Spam Policies
   Spam has become such a problem and that's why you need to provide a clear privacy and anti-spam policy. The unsubscription process should also be simple and effortless. We can't stress how important it is to not abuse your users information if you want to do business on the Internet.
5. Good Email Software
   Last of all, you'll need a reliable email software to read, sort and flag your emails (We've found Eudora working well for us). Head on over to our E-Mail Software page for a list of popular software and don't forget our Directory of Freeware Tools, especially the Anti-Spam section so that your inbox stays clean and spam-free!

With these in place, your E-Mail Marketing campaign should be automated and working for you 24/7!

T.C. Watts has been managing email systems for clients since 1998 and plans to one day write a book of E-Mail Support Anecdotes right after he recovers from some of them.