What is Email Marketing?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the process of using emails to generate income. This can be done by sending out sales messages to individuals on a one-to-one basis. However, to exploit the leverage capabilities of the internet, email marketing can be made much more effective by using an Autoresponder.

Email marketing using autoresponders relies on the marketing building up a list of people's email addresses. Marketing messages are then sent to this list. Each message will include one or more links to web pages where products are for sale.

There are two ways that emails can be sent using an autoresponder. First, individual emails can be crafted using effective copywriting techniques and then sent out on an ad hoc basis to all the people on a list. They can also be sent to a sub-set of the people on a list. For example, they could be sent only to existing customers or only to people living in the US and Canada.

The second way that email marketers use autoresponders is to set up a sequence of emails that get sent out in series after a pre-set time interval. For example, the first email message in a series could be sent out 1 day after someone subscribes to a newsletter and the second message in a series could be sent out 4 days after they subscribed and so on.

The process of reminding people about marketing offers by using emailing systems is known to boost profitability substantially.

There are also two other features of email marketing that make it highly attractive to businesses.

1. The whole process is highly measurable. Good emailing systems will report back to you how many people opened the emails you sent out and how many clicked the links in them. You can also split the messages sent to a list into several groups to find out which email generated the most profit.
    
2. The cost of emailing is negligibly small because sending emails effectively costs nothing. There is however a time cost in writing good emails in the first place.

It is important to comply with local emailing laws when using email marketing and specifically to make sure that you comply with the CAN-SPAM laws in the US. You must always make it easy for recipients of your emails to unsubscribe from any automated emailing systems that you use.