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Email Marketing Guide 1: Getting started

1. Introduction

Email marketing is cost effective, immediate and measurable. A powerful email marketing tool - with email you can promote your products and services to your customers and prospects quickly and cost effectively and you can tailor your messages to specific audiences. Outside of the direct benefits of email being more cost effective and timelier than other marketing media, the real value of email is in its measurability and the customer information that can be gained through email marketing.

A powerful email marketing tool

As a marketing tool it allows you to learn what works and what doesn't work - giving you the ability to quickly test any aspect of an email campaign, and giving you the platform to conduct market research amongst your target audience.

Email marketing has grown to become an integral part of the marketing mix and its strength as an email marketing tool is supported in a recent report by the DMA's Email Benchmarking Council (UK) predicting that the volume of commercial emails is set to equal that of direct mail in 2006.

Growth of email marketing

Another reason email marketing and email communications are so successful is because of its massive popularity and usage. People love email. According to Internet World Stats as of June 2006 almost 300 million Europeans - or 37% of the population - were on the internet. People now say they "frequently" check their work email from home and while on business trips. Users say they expect to conduct business and business transactions through email and are very comfortable with it.

Related article: Adding email into the marketing mix.

Areas covered in this guide

• > Introduction
• People's relationship with email
• Email marketing applications
• Getting your HTML emails right
• Get started with an email newsletter