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One important key to an effective e-mail marketing strategy is to only focus on permission based mail. This means that customers need to choose to receive mail from you. This is known as “opt in”.

You should never rent or buy an e-mail list since this is considered to be spam. No matter what the owner of the e-mail list will tell you, the majority of the addresses on the list did not opt in to receive e-mail or to have their personal information sold to you. When you send e-mail to people who don’t want it you’re sending spam. Spam will give your company image a cheap look and take away any trust that customers have in you. You want leads that are quality and not quantity and this means building your own e-mail list. You’ll find that the final results will be tremendous to you and your business.

E-mail marketing should be considered an extension of the customer service that you provide. You want to be able to communicate with your customers at every point in the sales process. When you give your customers what they ask for, without abusing any permission, you establish the base for a relationship that is founded on respect and leads to long term customer loyalty.
Build your E-mail List

It takes time to build an e-mail list but once you do you’ll have the names of people who are genuinely interested in what you’re selling. The one thing you need to remember is not to abuse a person’s trust once they give you their private information and e-mail address. Let your customers know that you value their trust and will respect their privacy. You can do this through a privacy policy on your website where you promise not to sell information to other businesses or vendors. You can go so far as to let your customers know what you’ll be e-mailing them and how often they can expect it. Always provide people with the option to remove themselves from your e-mail list. This promotes customer confidence.

If you take part in joint promotion and/or co-branding with another online company make sure that you don’t trade e-mail lists. What you can do is include information about that company in the newsletter you send to your customers. All e-mail should come only from you. You’ll lose your customer’s trust if they think you’ve sold their personal information to another business. And this means that they will disregard any future communication with you and your business.

To get people to join your e-mail list don’t ask them for much more than a few bits of information at a time. You need to gain their trust before asking for too much information. You can start out by asking for their name and e-mail address. Your future marketing promotions will help you fill in other information such as age and demographics. It will take time to get a clear idea of who your best customers are and what they want to get out of your website and e-mail newsletter.

If customers have trust in your business it won’t be hard to get an e-mail list together. Gaining trust is as easy as holding a contest, offering discounts or coupons, regularly changing your website content, or providing informative newsletters.

Should you have on offline store, a great way to gather e-mail addresses is by asking people to give you their business card if they want to win a free lunch. Other offline methods of gathering e-mail addresses include networking events and trade shows. A good rule of thumb is: if someone gives you their business card that has their e-mail address on it you can safely assume that it’s okay to send them an e-mail at least once. If they don’t respond back you should then assume that they are not interested. Take these non-respondents off your e-mail list.