If you are thinking about doing some Internet marketing to advertise your business, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Internet marketing campaign.

Many business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam. However, this is not true, as there are many options you should consider.

By not appealing to potential customers via email, your business may lose a great deal of commerce to competitors who are using email marketing campaigns to reach customers around the world. However, the first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating an email distribution list or a newsletter.

This article will discuss some popular options for doing this and should help to the reader to learn more about what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to email marketing.

Once you have made the decision to start using email marketing to promote your business you may wonder where to get those email addresses from. One common way to grow a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors. However, this method is not very effective at all and I do not recommend it.

The problem with purchasing an email list is you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of the list would have any interest at all in your products or services. Plus they have not given you permission to email them. This is very important because while you want to reach a large audience with your email marketing you also want this audience to be receptive of what you have to tell them.

Internet users are very quick to delete materials they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails. In fact some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are marked as spam. These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding out spam. Therefore you run the risk of having your email marketing effort turn out to be a complete waste if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message.

A far better way to create an email distribution list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services as well as other information which might be of interest to them.

This provides you with a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers who have a genuine interest in your products and services and who are interested in learning more about these products and services.

Once you have a list of interested customers or potential customers you can send emails or create e-newsletter for distribution to the members of your email list. These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information as well as a soft sell pitch for your products and services.

My testing show that the more you give to your subscribers, the better response rate.

This information will be valued by the readers and may help to persuade them to try your products and services. You might also want to include useful links to either your website as well as other websites which may be of interest to your readers.

Your content should also contain a portion which urges the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or at least investigating a product further.

I highly recommend aWeber.com, as it’s the one I currently use. I have used an autoresponder script I had to install on my server, but as my list grew older it was complicated. I also used Interspire’s SendStudio but had another problem: email deliverability.

Emails didn’t get to my subscribers because of spam filters. So that’s where I tried aWeber (they have a trial subscription) and I decided to stay with them, why?

• Unlimited autoresponders.
• Unlimited personalized follow up messages.
• Unlimited message length, unlimited changes, and full integrated HTML creator and/or plain text message capability.
• Unlimited campaigns.
• Templates pre-designed HTML to allow larger fonts, bold, colors, and images. Fully customizable.
• Unlimited personalized broadcast newsletters and segmented broadcast capability.
• Easy web form generator allows easy addition of opt-in forms to your website, pop-ups, pop-overs, hover pops, and exit pops along with split testing of different forms.
• Name, date, geographical, 25 custom fields, and more personalization features.
• Graphical account statistics and reporting with automatic emailing of reports.
• Automatic undeliverable email handling.
• Automated ad tracking features.
• Complete 24/7 control over your own account, via an online control panel.
• Integrated CAN-SPAM compliance checks with SPF & Sender ID email authentication included.
• FREE unlimited customer support.

They are the best out there. If you need a professional email marketing solution you need aWeber. Try them out, you won’t regret.

Right now my business is on autopilot thanks to them. Thousands of subscribers are getting my emails and visiting my pages as I write this!