How to Build the Foundation of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

What Is Email Marketing?
Any email sent to a current or potential customer or client falls under the heading of email marketing. Email marketing uses electronic mail (email) as its method of delivery to send messages that are commercial in nature to a specific or targeted audience.

Email marketing is an industry with an amazing growth rate. Experts estimate that US firms alone, spent over $400 million in 2006 on email marketing. It's quickly becoming the most used method for showing advertisements. Email marketing has come a long way over the years. Specialized marketing methods now allow targeting of specific demographics with an ease unheard of a few years ago.

Why Email Marketing?
While email is not necessarily the only means of communication between the seller and the buyer, it's by far the most widely used. Even though it's been the practice of including a phone number and physical address in emails and on the web sites of national and international companies, it's only now becoming common practice for the majority of Internet businesses to do so.

Internet users have become accustomed to corresponding through email. It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Email marketing was just a natural progression in email evolution. People are reading emails, so marketers can use that to their advantage. That was figured out shortly after email came into existence, I'm sure.

What's An Email Marketing Campaign?
Many Internet marketers think an email marketing campaign is just mailing out advertisements. Others think they're using email marketing to is full potential because they're sending out newsletters and ezines.

But a complete and successful email marketing campaign is much more than just newsletters and attempts to sell. The steps in a successful email marketing campaign chain are:
get new potential customers
create and improve relationships with those customers
increase the loyalty and trust of the customer
make new or additional sales.