Email marketing is a new step in the process of promoting new products, urgent sales, interesting offers and revolutionary discounts. This tool presupposes a direct contact with the target-group through the means of electronic mail. Thus every email which contains any kind of advertisement information sent to a potential or permanent client could be considered email marketing. For sending out email newsletters professional e-marketers resort to the help of special email marketing software.

Some internet-users do confuse email marketing with unsolicited mailings. Pay your attention on the fact that those are two big differences. Unsolicited mailings are sent to internet-users without their permission on it. The email addresses often are collected illegally form different forums, guest books, and on-line billboards with a low protection quality. Unsolicited mailings also do not contain any information the receiver is interested in.

Now when you already know what the email marketing is and differ it from the unsolicited mailing it’s time for discussing the types of email marketing. The whole email marketing could be divided by three categories: direct email, retention email and advertising in other people’s emails. Let us explain what all these mean.

Direct email is an email which contains any advertising or promotional message. To send such emails you need to obtain a list of potential or present customers. Such lists could be collected by yourself or rented form other companies. The difference is that your own list is a permanent one, but rent list will be yours only for a limited period of time. Only certain period of time the company provider of that list will allow you to send its customers your message.

Retention email presupposes a regular informative newsletter emailings. Despite the fact that such newsletter may include a promotional message its main purpose is to develop a long-term interest. The information provided in retention emails should be informative and in no way boring.

The third type of how your adds can reach the recipient is through other people’s emails. A lot of people create email newsletters only to sell advertising space to others. Let’s say those people are kind of postmen.

The same as every marketing tool the email marketing has its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Low cost while the range of receivers (potential consumers) is quite wide.
• Nowadays the email sending is the cheapest way of communication.
• This is a timesaving way of communication.
• It is easy to track. An advertiser can do it via web bugs, bounce messages, unsubscribes, read-receipts, click-throughs, etc.
• It is easy for marketers to administrate the target-group dividing and send them only information they are interested in.
• The advertiser plays an active role while the web-site only waits for customers to come in, which presupposes a passive role in marketing process.

Cons:

• Some companies send unsolicited bulk mail, transforming email marketing into unsolicited mailngs.
• It is often too difficult to separate legitimate marketing emailing and unsolicited emailing.
• An essential volume of unsolicited emails make people use unsolicited email filters which by mistake frequently catch legitimate commercial emails and hide them from recipients.
• Internet mail administrators do decide if your actions a legitimate and do not contradict the US CANSPAM Act. Thus the possibility of being added to blacklists such as SPEWES is very high.
• Now you are familiar with basic information on email marketing. You are able to appreciate the true value of it and decide whether you need it or not to become successful.