Open your email on any given day and you will probably see a lot of emails from restaurants, Wal-Mart and others. For instance, I opened an email from Red Lobster a couple of days ago and had a coupon for a Lobster dinner (my favorite!). Of course, I printed it and will go. That my friends, is email marketing.

Email marketing campaigns, according to some skeptics is dead. But it is not. Many people subscribe to these emails especially for the coupons. Groupon, for instance, has many coupons to print and it saves a ton of money. In today’s economy, every little bit helps.

Now, along comes Facebook. Believe it or not, there are still some people out there who don’t know what Facebook is. They will give you a funny look when you say “friend me”. Next time, you are on Facebook, take a look at the numerous ads that are on any given page. There are literally thousands of people using facebook and email marketing to promote their businesses.

You can do this, too. It is good for businesses to promote their product. Since not many people use or read newspapers much anymore, the traditional way of advertising is far less effective today than in the past.

Moving into today with today’s technology with Facebook, Twitter and others, in addition to email marketing will keep businesses alive and well. It is almost like learning how to use cell phones fifteen years ago. None of us knew how to use them very well, but we thought they were cool. Now, even children have cell phones. Email marketing and Facebooking are in the same boat. If it’s new to you, but cool, you will get the hang of it.

Give new thought to the way you market your business. I believe that once you are comfortable with it, your business will grow and flourish and it will just become second nature to use this type of advertising, just like it is now second nature to use cell phones.

Newsletters have been great business communication tools for years. In fact, the 20th century has seen a proliferation of newspapers of various sorts. When desktop publishing became fashionable in the 1990s, everyone soon had a newsletter. It became possible for small businesses to have their very own newsletter at an affordable price – as long as they had the time to do it themselves.

Then the Internet took off. Many people were reluctant at first to go online. But the few entrepreneurs who did go online for business started e-mail newsletters. And they had great results.

Today, e-mail newsletters are as common as print newsletters were in the 1990s. However, they are much more affordable to outsource than print newsletters were. That’s because you do not have to pay for the high cost of paper. The fact that you can deliver a company newsletter for your small business means that you can have a regular newsletter for a price that is more affordable than ever before. Even if you outsource it!

A newsletter has historically been the best traffic tool for anyone with a website. You have a captured audience! And you have their permission to contact them over and over again.

Learn how to get your own digital newsletter today.

Can you send out too many e-mails? Is there ever a point at which you’ve gone too far in your e-mail marketing?

I think there is, but you can probably get away with e-mailing your subscriber list to death if you let them know right up front how often you send out your e-mails.

For a business, weekly is probably enough. Monthly might be better in some cases, but the problem with monthly e-mails is that you aren’t in the minds of your prospects often enough. That’s why I prefer weekly. However, many businesses can find profit in sending out e-mails daily. It’s a case where you have to know your audience. But what about multiple times daily?

You have to set your e-mail marketing schedule according to your audience and their expectations. If you can get away with short e-mail messages throughout the day, then by all means make it work for you. But be up front about your intentions.

You’ll get a lot more receptivity from your list if you tell them on the opt-in form that you send out multiple e-mails per day. You’ll see fewer unsubscribes and more opens. That said, for most small businesses, again, weekly is often enough.

Let something get popular for a few days and someone somewhere is going to ask if something else is dying. Social media was supposed to kill search. It didn’t. Now, it’s supposed to be killing e-mail. But is it?

Mark Evans says “no” and I heartily agree.

It will be a long time before e-mail marketing dies. And it likely won’t be social media that kills it.

Social media is about public interaction. There is also a lot of competition for your content. You have five seconds to grab your prospect’s attention and sell them something. The stream moves on. Now what?

With e-mail, you don’t have any competition for eyes. It’s your prospect and your content. If your content is good and does its job, you will get the sale. No competition.

E-mail is seen as a private space. Your prospect will not give out her e-mail address willy-nilly. You have to earn it. But if you can earn it and get inside that e-mail inbox, then you have your prospect’s attention. If you can keep it, you can turn that attention into dollars.

E-mail is still one of the biggest converting tools in Internet marketing. That won’t change any time soon.

So you want to increase the number of followers and fans you have on the social media websites you use the most? That’s a good idea. You can use your e-mail list to drive new traffic to your social media profiles and increase your following. Here are three ways to do that.

1. Send an invite – Aside from your weekly or monthly newsletter, send out a special e-mail invitation to your subscriber list to invite them to follow you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. But don’t just invite them to follow you. Tell them why they should follow you. What are you doing on those sites that no one else is doing?
2. Present an exclusive offer – Make an offer that is available only to users of a specific social media site. For instance, you could offer a freebie or a discount to people who Like you Facebook, or to people who follow you on Twitter or retweet your content so many times.
3. Add social sharing buttons to your e-mail - This one is gold. It takes just a few minutes and the dividend could be huge. Your e-mail subscribers will know that you have a social media presence by the buttons you add to your newsletter. Not only will they share your content, but they’ll friend you too.

In today’s online marketplace, it isn’t enough to have an e-mail subscriber list and a social media presence. You should be syncing them.

Are you ready to win some new customers through e-mail? Here are 5 ways that you can use e-mail marketing to help you win new customers and to make your old customers happier.

1. Hold A Contest – Send out an e-mail blast with a contest and give away something valuable. It can be a service or a product that your business provides or it can be something like an iPad or a Kindle that is in high demand. Make sure that you explain the contest rules clearly and what you are offering. Make it simple to enter the contest and make sure you are giving away something of value.
2. Mail A Coupon – Through a service like Groupon you can send out a coupon for your products or services. People like to save money so give them an opportunity.
3. Feature In Your Newsletter – Have a company newsletter? Start a featured client column. People love to see their name and photo in print.
4. Celebrity Column – A variation of the “feature in your newsletter” theme is the Celebrity Column theme. Find a celebrity in your niche and ask them to write a column for your e-mail newsletter.
5. Special Offers – Special offers are one time deals. Your subscribers won’t see this deal again – ever. The scarcity of something of ultimate value, a one-time deal, could spur your e-mail subscribers to action. It’s at least worth a try.

These 5 e-mail marketing tactics have won new customers for other marketers, they can work for you too.

E-mail marketing, after twenty years and counting, is still one of the most powerful and effective means of marketing a small business online. Here are 5 reasons you should be using e-mail for marketing in 2011 and 2012.

1. Everyone is using e-mail – Just about everyone has an e-mail address today. Even people who may not be using e-mail have considered it. But if you started sending out frequent e-mail blasts, you’d hit at least 90% of your target market right where they spend the majority of their reading time.
2. It is cost effective – There is no form of marketing that is more cost effective than e-mail marketing. You can send out an e-mail blast to 100,000 readers for the same price that you can send one out to 1,000 readers.
3. High click-through rates – E-mail still has the highest response rate in town. It’s less expensive than pay-per-click advertising and you are reaching warm leads who gave you permission to contact them.
4. You have their permission - And that brings me to my next point. Since you have permission to contact your list, you will get fewer complaints and you’ll find that your reputation is more intact. Use a double opt-in process and your marketing will be ten times more effective.
5. You control delivery – With snail mail, you are at the mercy of the post office. With e-mail, you have more control over delivery options. And it’s cheaper.

Start your e-mail marketing today. It’s the most effective online marketing available.

For years we’ve been listening to online marketing experts talk about how e-mail marketing is the most effective marketing online. Is it really?

Yes, I’ll have to agree.

For one thing, postage rates are going up. That means the cost of direct mail marketing is getting to be out of reach for a lot of businesses. But you can often get great results – in many cases, better results – from e-mail marketing than you can from direct mail marketing. And at a lesser expense.

If you are a company still tied to the old newsletter model of business, then I encourage you to update your practices. You might be reluctant to do that, but I think there are some real practical reasons to do so. These include:

• E-mail marketing is less expensive
• Most companies who switch realize an equal or greater response than their direct mail response rate
• E-mail is more convenient for most people
• E-mail is at least opt-in and best practices is double opt-in so you’ll get fewer complaints and better responses
• Since it is less expensive, you don’t need the same response rate to realize an ROI
• Tracking results is easier and more accurate

There are lots of reasons to switch from direct mail marketing to e-mail marketing. I highly recommend that you consider doing that now.

After 20 years (give or take), e-mail marketing is still one of the most efficient and effective ways to promote a business or brand. Since online marketing first took of in the mid-1990s, e-mail marketing has been the No. 1 way that serious Internet marketers made their cash. It still is.

Why does e-mail marketing work?

I think there are a number of reasons why e-mail marketing still works. First, it’s a trusted medium. Just take a look at all those e-mails your friends share with you – I’m talking about the urban legends that keep circulating. How many of your friends will not hesitate to copy you on an e-mail that is obviously a fake news story without even bothering to check into its validity at Snopes.com or a similar truth-telling website?

More people use e-mail every day than any other digital tool. Most people who use e-mail have more than one e-mail address and use e-mail as their primary communication tool. They use it multiple times throughout a normal business day.

E-mail marketing prospects are very responsive. If you were to send out a direct marketing piece by snail mail, you could hope to get a 2% response, which would be awesome. But your margins would be lower with a similar response by e-mail since you’d have to pay for printing costs and postage. With e-mail, a much lower response means a higher profit margin. However, successful e-mail campaigns generally produce a higher response rate. Why?

The reason e-mail marketing is so effective is because you have to get permission from people before you send them an e-mail. They have to sign up for your list, which isn’t necessary for snail mail direct marketing.

Once you have a person’s permission, you can send them any number of e-mails you want. They’ll either respond or they won’t. But if you send out quality information by e-mail, then you will get a response. The reason e-mail marketing is so effective is because your clients have asked you to send them information. It’s a warm list.

What can a grocer possibly know about e-mail marketing? Everyone needs groceries. It’s not like you have to sell the benefits of eating, right?

While it’s technically true that groceries are something that everyone has to buy, it’s also true that they have plenty of choices in where to get their groceries. They don’t have to get them from one place over another. And that’s why marketing is important. It’s about positioning your company above the competition. E-mail marketing is one strategy for making that happen.

One grocer is using e-mail marketing and getting a 55% open rate on its e-mails. That’s phenomenal!

One particularly telling comment in the Constant Contact interview is the answer to the very last question. I love this answer:

Don’t use it just to sell; use it to inform. Use it to build a relationship. Once you start down the road of a hard sell, that’s when you start losing folks because it’s not information that they want — they want information they can use that will make their lives easier.

That’s clearly the answer of someone who understands e-mail marketing. It’s not about selling you product. It’s about building a relationship with your customers. Give them rock solid information they can use and they will open your e-mails, read them, and call you when they have a need for your services.