The goal of any marketing campaign, including those using free advertising methods, is to attract interest and build desire for your product or services. One of the most cost effective advertising methods is email marketing.

To ensure that your email marketing campaign is a success you must first be prepared!

Here are some quick tips to get you ready:

- Know your target market.
- Your website should be ready to capture leads and provide information.
- Develop an attractive offer.
- Create professional copy or hire someone for the job.
- Test. Know your results before you start.
- Think of ways that you can build relationships and trust through email.

Of all the ways to get traffic to your site and make money online, nothing beats email marketing. Of course, email marketing can be a waste of time if not done correctly. After all, it is important to realize that the people you are sending your message to are very, very busy. Another good assumption is that they probably receive several hundred emails a day.

Today I'll cover different email marketing techniques that you can use to help build your online businesses and also reveal what works and what doesn't. Here we go.

1. The subject line for your message should be short yet informative. Most of us use the subject to filter out emails we don't want to read, so it's important that a subject encourages the reader to open the email.

2. Do you read every email you get? Of course not! Keep the content of your messages short and use headings and bullets to emphasize important information. Don't waste time; just let your readers know what you are offering.

3. Leave your reader with a call to action. Include contact information such as your phone number, email address. It must be clear what you expect of your readers if they are interested in your offer.

4. Your content should be friendly yet not to familiar. Make sure to include a name in your from address.

5. Keep in mind that most readers will not read the whole message. Include your key information in the first paragraph. In fact, keep your messages to just one paragraph.

6. Send your emails out in text format. HTML format may look nicer, but many email clients now block HTML emails by default.

7. Don't bother sending out unsolicited email. Only send out emails to those who have requested information from you. The majority of readers, who receive emails that they actually requested, open on average, 78% of them.

8. Why would people continue to allow you to contact them? By providing value. Give your readers a reason to want to open your emails provide useful content on a topic of interest or a discount related to a product that they already purchased.

9. Remind your readers to add your email address to their white list.

10. Many readers depend on the name in the from field or the subject line to determine whether they will open an email or not. Compelling subject lines could contain discount offers, free shipping offers, product announcements or interesting news.

Finally, think of email marketing as person to person, not business to business. Before doing any form of free advertising, remember that you are dealing with real people, so make sure it is written by a real person.

The benefits of email marketing are many; low cost, high conversion rate and easy to track results are just a few. More consumers are becoming acceptable to email marketing every day, so give it a try!

Copyright 2008 Joe Rispoli