Best Practices - Preparing Your New Email Marketing Campaign

More and more small businesses seem to be signing up to use various email marketing software applications. There are two questions to ask yourself if you are in the process of building your own email marketing campaign:

1. Do I have the skills and knowledge that I need to succeed?
2. What tool is the best to help me successfully reach and affect my target audience?

Other questions to ask as you begin designing your email marketing program:

1. Who is(are) my target audience(s)?
2. Do I have permission to email them, how do I get permission?
3. What are the goals of this marketing strategy?
4. How often should I email in order to achieve my goal?
5. When should I email in order to achieve my goal?
6. What action is my email asking the subscriber to take?
7. Is my message written as concisely and effectively as possible?
8. Is the design of my email going to work in their inboxes?

Like any fully functional web site design or effective and attractive ad design, email marketing requires a trained professional and a well developed strategy in order to succeed.

My favorite tool is ExactTarget.  As an alternative, iContact has a nice platform.

Read more about email marketing tools:

http://www.email-marketing-options.com/providers

http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2008/05/hosted-email-service-price-comparison.html