Starting an email marketing campaign? Be sure you invest plenty of time, research and effort as an email campaign can land you big bucks – or in a heap of trouble.

Research and Fine-tune
To be successful in any marketing campaign, you must research and learn all that you can about your demographic. Are you sending the right message to the right people? Immerse yourself with your future customers to be sure you are delivering exactly what they are seeking.

Ask Permission
If you send emails to potential customers without permission, you’re not a marketer- you’re a spammer. Spamming can destroy your reputation, campaign, and possibly even your entire business. Be sure you have permission before clicking “Send.”

Build Relationships
Email is personal, and the backbone of an email campaign is a personal relationship with your reader/consumer. Every email you send should be professional, welcoming, and in line with your overall objectives and mission.

Be Honorable
Your online reputation and your company’s reputation help internet service providers determine what exactly to do with your emails when they arrive. Keeping yourself honorable and professional will help your emails arrive safely in an inbox rather than a spam folder or simply disappearing into the abyss of the internet.

Effective Delivery
Obviously having your emails arrive safely is the first, critical step in an effective campaign. Avoid spammy or too-intense content or other flags such as a dirty email list or unusual HTML coding. You should, of course, be monitoring your delivery and success rates carefully.

Meaningful Content
When you send an email, it must contain meaningful content. And in this case, meaningful is determined by the reader, not the sender. Do your research and learn what your customers are interested in by their clicks and other site patterns. Does your message contain points of interest for the reader gently interspersed with clever marketing for your products? This should be your goal – not necessarily a hard-sell flyer delivered via email.

Visual Interest
Your email message should be conducive for all manners of inbox. This means the primary message of the email should be delivered in simple text, not elaborate designs or graphics that may be obscured by preview panes or blocked completely by the email system or user preferences.

Compile Statistics
You must constantly monitor your success and failures. Compile statistics on your email marketing campaigns through process metrics, but then translate those statistics into reports everyone can understand – return on investment, revenues, and generated leads.

Continually Modify
Never get lazy with email marketing. There are always new customers to seek and your campaigns should always be fresh and meaningful. Continually modify your approaches to find better returns and stay at the cutting edge of both your industry and the email marketing community.

Bring in the Experts
If you’re struggling with an email campaign or understand the value of an effective campaign, but lack the in-house resources to implement one, consider bringing in an expert. Hiring out your email campaign might be the most time and cost effective method of marketing for your business, but only you can determine that.

View our Email Marketing Solutions Comparison Chart to view top 5 email marketing solutions chosen by our experts, and read the reviews.