Email Marketing can help your business gain and retain customers and it is easier than ever to establish a good Email Marketing campaign.

I’m NOT talking about SPAMMING. I’m talking about an Email Marketing campaign aimed at past clients that have given you their email addresses, people that voluntarily ask for an Email Newsletters from you and people who may belong to an organization or association that you are a member of.

Retaining past clients is a crucial to your business. By sending a well written, professional looking Email Newsletter to previous clients you will be showing them that you care about their past business and you will be the first one that they think of when they again need or want services and products that you offer.

Gaining new customers is just as important as or possibly more essential than retaining your base of past clients. By placing an opt-in request form on your website, which people can use to request your Newsletter, you will be able to grow a list of new and potential clients.

USE THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR EMAIL MARKETING

It sounds like all of this will take a lot of work and time doesn’t it? If you did all of the things mentioned above manually it would be a lot of work. However, there are now tools available that can perform all of the List Management and HTML Newsletter creation tasks for you with just a few mouse clicks.

I’ll bet you’re now thinking that something that can automate a lot of your Email Marketingwork is going to be expensive and learning to use the toll will be time consuming and difficult. Sorry – you’re wrong. It’s easy to learn and very inexpensive to use.

EASY-TO-USE EMAIL CREATION TOOLS

We know you’ve got talent ‘cause you’re thinking about Email Marketing. But if you’re worried you don’t have enough online experience to subject yourself to a mass email campaign, fear no more!

Choose from a range of Email Newsletters creation methods, depending on your level of expertise. Dive in with an entry-level Email Wizard which has many predefined graphic templates to choose from. Or if you are on the geek end of the spectrum, utilize your own pre-built HTML.

LIST MANAGEMENT

You know you want to grow your list, but where do you start? The first step to generating a loyal audience for your business is to get them in your Rolodex. Ok, carefully back away from that ballpoint pen.

Make your way calmly to an opt-in form builder and start building your customer email database today. Ask anything – name, email, address, and add custom fields such as shoe size or age. It’s easy to get started using a opt-in form wizard. Then sit back and watch your lists grow!

You can also upload any separate lists that you may already have or manually create a new list from information that you have saved somewhere on your computer.

TRACKING AND REPORTING

In addition to the extra time it takes to send Email Newsletters manually, when you send your emails manually or use an ordinary email client program you don’t have any idea of how many people actually opened your Newsletter.

Wouldn’t it be great to know just how effective your email marketing campaign and Newsletter are actually working? Here are some of the various reports that you can generate:

Campaign Totals – View the number of emails Sent, Opened, Bounced and Unsubscribed.

Click-Through Performance – View your click-through rate on any links you have contained within your email.

Response Curve Reporting – Graphs inform you how your campaign did for the first 24 hours as it relates to clicks and opens.

Campaign comparison statistics – Graphs and charts enable you to compare response for up to 5 campaigns.

TRY EMAIL MARKETING FOR FREE

I initially used a “free trial” offered by VerticalResponse and was so pleased after sending out a “trial” Email Newsletter that I am continuing to use it.

There are no contracts to sign. You don’t need to input any credit card information to use the “trial”. You are able to send 25 emails when using the trial for no charge whatever. After you have used up your 25 free emails you can purchase additional “email credits” (one credit per email recipient) as you would like.

Why spend $0.015 to send the email when you can done so for free using my normal email client? The answer is simple. For a less than the cost of a can of soda I was able to create an eye catching professional looking Newsletter quickly. And most importantly (to me) I am able to track and generate reports about the email campaign.

SIGN UP FOR THE FREE EMAIL MARKETING TRIAL NOW

To try VerticalResponse Email Marketing for free go to the small business web site design and maintenance website of Tom Rumish Website Development (www.tomrum.com/) and scroll to the very bottom of any page on the website. At far right of the bottom you will see an animated graphic for VerticalResponse. Just click on the link and you will be taken to the Vertical Response Free Trial sign-up page.

Go ahead and sign up for the no risk or obligation trial. After you have signed up I suggest going to the Education & Support page of Vertical Response (http://www.verticalresponse.com/education-support/) and click on the “Demo’s” link on the right side of the page to watch videos on how to use the various features that are included at no extra charge.

I’m sure you’ll be as pleased with Vertical Response Email Marketing as I am. If you like VerticalResponse after you have used your free 25 email credits, as I am sure you will, I suggest buying $5.00 worth of email credits. That way you won’t have to dig out your credit card every time you send out an email campaign. $5.00 will buy you 333 email credits which should last you the better part of a year.