Email marketing enhances the relationship with their current customers, by repeating business with them. In laymen's terms, the procedure of sending emails to customers is known as email marketing. The major advantage of email marketing is that it doesn't consume a lot of time. It is a minimal consuming resource and is also cost-efficient. Within a short period of time, a large audience can be targeted. Features such as Subscriptions, bounced messages, web bugs, and click through's, help enables businesses to track potential customers. Since the customers can be directly reached, feedbacks can be easily collected. Also, In terms of cost, it is not as expensive as newsletters. Reports have proven that this is the next best marketing technique after search marketing. It is effective in tracking the returns on investments.

Email marketing is a modernized version of normal mail marketing. The advantage it has over direct mail marketing is that it takes less time to reach a customer than through a mailing. Like people that check their mailboxes daily, the "inbox" is also checked by majority of the Internet users on a daily basis. Over the period of time, lots of helpful tools and web services have been developed. List host is a web service that provides a lot of options to the marketers like managing huge emails and email address databases. If the budget is more, list managers can be hired to manage opt-in-email newsletters and databases. Software is also available in the marketplace that can do this job, too.

When the customer fills the form for the first time, there are check boxes to be ticked which reflects their interests. Depending on these choices, an advertiser sends information to them, this is known as opt-in-email advertising, because the customer has opted to receive emails and marketing like this isn't illegal. The content of the email can be elaborate, but it shouldn't be too long as people are really busy for that. The call to action, also known as effective words, in the email should be chosen with care. It's not necessary that the content should revolve around only one item; related product's information can also be included. This is known as cross selling. By using email blasting or sending an email to multiple customers at a time can save a lots of time and will also increase the efficiency.

The dark side of email marketing is spamming or also known as bulking. Some companies collect email addresses of people illegally and send irrelevant emails to them, which can be very annoying. Some hackers design an email like an advertisement, but when clicked on downloads adware and viruses that can destroy a computer, which makes it even more dangerous. To make matters worse, the Direct Marketing Association of America has petitioned to make spamming legal. Some prohibitions are also placed on providers who help out business organizations to manage their email marketing by giving them already prepared email templates.

Most of the emailing websites have added the feature of separating spam from genuine email by creating separate folders for both and this is known as spam filtering. But in the event that you receive a large number of spam emails, sometimes useful emails can end up going into that spam folder and can go unnoticed and become deleted with the rest of the spam. This kind of email is known as false positives. But the chances of this happening are rare.

There are many laws against spamming like the United States' Can-Spam act, Europe's privacy and electronic communications regulations. According to these laws, companies should get their return address authenticated, false positive addresses should not be included and a 'one click' unsubscribe link should be placed in the email. Companies that continue sending spam may end up with the lesser penalty of becoming blacklisted and on the larger scale, they can be heavily fined.

About the Author

Terry Detty finds Internet Marketing and Email Marketing his passion. In addition to marketing, he enjoys reading and occasionally goes out for a short walk.  His latest interest is a new Press Release Services program he's been using.