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You get them all the time.  Depending on how much you shop online you could get hundreds a day.  Email Marketing messages fill the inboxes of pretty much everyone who has purchased online, but do you ever stop to think about how much work goes into producing that email?  Lots!  In fact millions of dollars are spent sending markteting emails every month.  Why that kind of cash being thrown around, there has to be a payoff right? Oh Yeah!

Define Your Stratagy

First lets talk stratagy. Even though you're new to email marketing, and the whole process may seem a little overwhelming, you still need to take the time to sit down and plan out your stratagy.  Email marketing is one of those things that you can't aford the trail and error method.  We're talking about your customer's trust, so you don't want to make any mistakes that could make them think less of you and in turn cripple your email marketing efforts before they even get started.  Sit down and look at your customer segments (if you haven't figured that out yet then this is a grea time).  You need to define certain criteria of your customers behavior that you can market to.  For example you may want to look at customers who have spent a certain amount of time on your site but haven't purchased in the last 6 months.  If these customers are interested in your site then an email offer may be just the thing to re-activate thier spending.  There are literally thousands of ways to define your customer segments and its really a topic that is beyond the scope of this article.

Decide on your Offer/Content

As if finding the right customers to send to wasn't enough, now we have to make sure we send the them the right thing.  If we don't then we run the risk of being blacklisted as a spam, not to mention they aren't going to convert if the content or offer doesn't mean anything to them.  The right content really depends on your customer segment, but special offers are always a safe bet.  Offers like "Free Shipping", "% Off Purchases" and "Buy one Get One Free" are always great ways to reach out to potential buyers.  Also making the promotion exclusive to the email recipients will show the value of being on your email, in many cases it will grow your opt-in list as customers who recived the offers tell others about the email specials.

Choose your audience

The most important thing about an email marketing campaign is knowing who to target.  You may just want to go after as many people as possible, but that's only going to cost you more in sends, and annoy more people.  The goal is to target those who you think will be interested and will clickthrough and convert.  

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