Email marketing continues to remain one of the most cost effective ways to build sales. Its importance sometimes gets blurred due to the large number of spam mails that most of us receive every day. However when properly executed a good email marketing campaign can bring you a large number of repeat customers at a very cost effective price. We discuss some of the key ingredients of a good email marketing program here.

1. List: You might need to rent out a list the very first time, but for long term success you need to create and maintain your own list. Your own list will come from a base of your own customers, readers and their referrals. Focus on quality instead of quantity when it comes to the membership of your list and allow your members to unsubscribe easily. An effective way to generate a good list is to have a landing page with basic information and then have detailed information upon submission of email address.

2. Medium: Based on your product you need to select between HTML and plain text. You also need to decide whether it is going to be a newsletter, special deals, announcements, press releases etc.

3. Frequency: You need to decide whether your emails are going to be daily, weekly, monthly etc. A good way of establishing this is to see the number of times a typical customer shops with you in a month.

4. Content: The subject line should be catchy and then your email should have interesting information that will involve the reader and then point them to the links of the product that you are going to promote. Example, a subject line of "Great deals on Golf Balls", followed with a body about the difference various golf balls make to the number of yards your swing carries hyper-linked to the golf balls that you plan to promote. This is better than just having a picture of golf balls with their price as it has a greater chance of involving the user.

5. Segmentation: You need to decide whether you will send a generic email to everyone on the list or will send two or three versions of the list. For example if you are a retail store, can you make two emails one for electronics and one for clothes and then send it to the people on the list based on their age and gender profiles.

6. Tools: You need tools that will help you set up a system that automatically sends notification to people who have joined your list. Lets your customers add and remove their email addresses without your intervention, removes dead addresses and provides intelligence information on which links were most clicked and how many people clicked them etc.

These are some of the key factors that will take you a long way in your email marketing program. The key is to build a list and build trust with those on the list.

Free Subscription To Online-Webmaster-Tutorials.com