So…you’ve recently learned that email marketing is one of the most effective and profitable ways to promote just about any business and you want to start using it to promote yours. What are your next steps?

To start – you need to be aware of the rules that may exist regarding the use of email marketing within your country. In the U.S., that would be the CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003, and you can read up on the important details in the Federal Trade Commissions compliance guide for business.

There aren’t many rules and they aren’t difficult to comply with, but you need to be aware of them because almost all of the services I’m about to discuss for sending your email will require that you comply with them in addition to their own terms and conditions. Now, once you’re aware of rules, we can look at just how to get started with email marketing.

The first choice to make is whether you wish to manage your email marketing program yourself, or pay a professional to take care of all of the details for you. If you have more money than you have time or internet experience, you may want to pay someone to manage everything for you.

They’ll typically use one the services I’ll get to in just a moment, but they’ll setup and manage your email campaigns for you and usually charge you a monthly fee to do so. Many web design companies offer this as an additional service so you may want to check with the company who designed your website first, and if they don’t offer email marketing services themselves, chances are they can refer you to a competent company who does.

Now, if you have a little bit of time and know your way around your computer and the internet reasonably well, you can do your email marketing yourself using one of the following Email Service Providers (ESPs)

All services here, except where noted, offer the ability to send out one-time “broadcast” messages to your email list in addition to allowing you to setup “autoresponders” which allow you to send out a pre-written sequence of emails to a subscriber on a regular basis. They also offer various means to track the number of emails that are opened and to track links clicked within the emails as well, and they offer the ability to track and manage the subscribers to your email list.

Please note that this list is loosely in order of preference based on my personal experience with these companies, but almost everyone here offers a free trial of their service and I’d recommend choosing 2 or 3 services to test and see which you like best.

1. Constant Contact– One of the first ESPs on the scene over ten years ago, Constant Contact is an easy to use service with a great selection of email templates that currently offers a 60 day free trial and monthly pricing as low as $15 a month.They  make it easy to create messages by using an e-mail wizard, will host up to 5 newsletter images for free and they also provide a handful of detailed training tutorials and webinars.
2. iContact – Another good company with a solid reputation, their features are similar to those offered by Constant Contact and they also offer a free trial and monthly pricing starts at under $10/month.
3. MailChimp – While MailChimp hasn’t been around quite as long as the first two companies mentioned, they’ve grown quickly to become one of the better ESPs going. They offer a long list of features similar to the above services, but two that stand out for me are a built in image editor to modify the photos you might want to use in your emails, and they offer a fantastic free trial offer that gives you full access to all of their features, as long as your mailing list has 1000 or less subscribers. You can email each of those 1000 or less subscribers up to six times a month, so you get to send up to 6,000 email messages a month for free with them! Once you exceed 1000 subscribers the pricing is comparable to the other services mentioned.
4. Benchmark Email – With features similar to the above services, Benchmark Email allows you to create signup forms for your website, send email broadcasts and manage a virtually unlimited number of contacts. Their pricing similar to the other services here, but can be expensive if you contact your list very frequently.
5. Emma – MyEmma is another service that’s been in business for a number of years now and while they offer similar features and pricing to the above mentioned companies, they differ from the others by not relying on template designs, but provide help (at different pricing levels of course) to design a look for your email newsletter for you.
6. Vertical Response – Vertical Response is another established company with an extensive email feature set, but they offer something I don’t think I’ve seen any other email service provider offer – the ability to send printed postcards to your subscriber list! With their tools, you can create full color, oversized postcards so in addition helping with your email marketing efforts, they can also help with your direct mail efforts too!
7. Jango Mail – With Jango Mail you can send plain text and html email messages just like you can with the other services here, but a key difference is your ability to send attachments, like word or pdf documents in the emails sent to your list. Their pricing starts at $30 and allows you to send 1000 emails.
8. Get Response– Get Response sets themselves apart from the other companies in this list by offering two unique features I’ve yet to see offered anywhere else. 1) They offer something called “email-to-speech” which promises to convert your text emails into a human voice so subscribers can listen to your emails and 2) they offer the ability to record and store video files to be included in your emails.I have not had the opportunity to try their services myself, but their unique offerings are certainly interesting and worth taking a look at for free.
9.  Campaigner -  In addition to the standard features most of the companies here offer, Campaigner offer a nice set of email templates tailored for specific industries, and they offer really attractive pricing starting at only $10 a month for unlimited emails sent to 1 – 1000 subscribers.
10. Bronto – Bronto offers an extensive list of features, but their service are better suited for the more experienced marketer who is willing to pay for assistance when it comes to crafting a serious email marketing campaign. As such, they don’t display prices on their website and require prospects to consult with them in order to determine the best solution for their business.

Please Note – The information presented here is subject to change without notice and you should refer to the websites listed to get up to date information concerning their services.

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Once you’ve signed up with an email service provider, they should walk you through the process of assembling your first newsletter and creating a signup form. This form is what visitors to your website will use to ask to opt-in to receive your newsletter, and you should place it front and center on your website – somewhere difficult for anyone to miss.

Along with a signup form, you should also offer an incentive of some sort to encourage people to join your newsletter and tell people about the benefits they receive from hearing from you on a regular basis.

Depending on the types of products or services you offer, you could offer to give people a free product or service – or if you don’t offer any inexpensive items, you could enter subscribers into a prize drawing and give one valuable prize to someone on your list each month. The most popular incentives I’ve seen though, are those that are inexpensive to produce and deliver but have a high perceived value, like a free special report, CD or DVD.

Think of the most common questions you get asked in the course of doing business and if you can answer them in a short report or video presentation, this is something your website visitors will appreciate and will help you to get people on your email list. Give your special report or other giveaway an intriguing title like “5 Secrets to Choosing the Best ______ “ or “5 Critical Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring A ______” and experiment with different titles to see which inspires more people to signup for your list.

It’s also a good idea to be specific and let people know just how often they’ll be hearing from you. I’d encourage you to test and see what works best for you, but I think contacting your list once every week or two weeks is enough to keep your name fresh in minds without them thinking that you’re bothering them constantly. At the very least you could get started emailing them on a monthly basis, but if you let it go longer than that, people can quickly forget about you and won’t think to call you when they have a need for your product or service.

I’ve also found that including a link to your website privacy policy, a document that spells out exactly what you will and won’t do with information they give to you, can reassure people and encourage them to signup for your newsletter. You can find out more or create a free privacy policy of your own at sites like www.freeprivacypolicy.com – but if you have a smaller more basic site, just a small line of copy placed below your signup form like “We respect your privacy and will never share your information with anyone at anytime” should suffice.

Now before we wrap up this segment on email marketing, I want to leave you with a few ideas about some things you can talk about in your email newsletter. Remember that the only reason prospects and customers will read a newsletter is because they’re expecting to learn something from you. They’ve given you permission to contact them but they won’t stay subscribers for long if all they get from you is sales pitch after sales pitch, so I usually recommend about an 80/20 or 90/10 ratio of valuable content to advertisements for your own products or services.

While you can of course educate them about new products or services or yours, I find that helpful tips about how to best use and benefit from the products or services subscribers may have already purchased are really appreciated. Tell your list about different ways to use your products/services or even better, put together a video tutorial to answer some of the questions they have about them.

You can of course educate them about new items or special sales too, but you should always try to provide value to them in some shape or form which will take you closer and closer to making a sale with prospects who are still unsure about you.

Case studies or testimonials are also excellent topics to write about, because it shows people benefiting from the use of your products or services and helps reinforce the idea that you’re the expert in your field that they should be doing business with. I also enjoy reading about the people behind the companies I do business with, so maybe once a month you could profile the great employees you have and introduce them to your customers.

I hope you’ve found this short series on email marketing helpful, and next time I’ll share some valuable tips about how to use the 80/20 rule to increase your productivity and profitability.

To start – you need to be aware of the rules that may exist regarding the use of email marketing within your country. In the U.S., that would be the CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003, and you can read up on the important details in the Federal Trade Commissions compliance guide for business.

There aren’t many rules and they aren’t difficult to comply with, but you need to be aware of them because almost all of the services I’m about to discuss for sending your email will require that you comply with them in addition to their own terms and conditions. Now, once you’re aware of rules, we can look at just how to get started with email marketing.

The first choice to make is whether you wish to manage your email marketing program yourself, or pay a professional to take care of all of the details for you. If you have more money than you have time or internet experience, you may want to pay someone to manage everything for you. They’ll typically use one the services I’ll get to in just a moment, but they’ll setup and manage your email campaigns for you and usually charge you a monthly fee to do so. Many web design companies offer this as an additional service so you may want to check with the company who designed your website first, and if they don’t offer email marketing services themselves, chances are they can refer you to a competent company who does.

Now, if you have a little bit of time and know your way around your computer and the internet reasonably well, you can do your email marketing yourself using one of the following Email Service Providers (ESPs)

All services here, except where noted, offer the ability to send out one-time “broadcast” messages to your email list in addition to allowing you to setup “autoresponders” which allow you to send out a pre-written sequence of emails to a subscriber on a regular basis. They also offer various means to track the number of emails that are opened and to track links clicked within the emails as well, and they offer the ability to track and manage the subscribers to your email list.

Please note that this list is loosely in order of preference based on my personal experience with these companies, but almost everyone here offers a free trial of their service and I’d recommend choosing 2 or 3 services to test and see which you like best.

1. Constant Contact– One of the first ESPs on the scene over ten years ago, Constant Contact is an easy to use service with a great selection of email templates that currently offers a 60 day free trial and monthly pricing as low as $15 a month.They  make it easy to create messages by using an e-mail wizard, will host up to 5 newsletter images for free and they also provide a handful of detailed training tutorials and webinars.
2. iContact – Another good company with a solid reputation, their features are similar to those offered by Constant Contact and they also offer a free trial and monthly pricing starts at under $10/month.
3. MailChimp – While MailChimp hasn’t been around quite as long as the first two companies mentioned, they’ve grown quickly to become one of the better ESPs going. They offer a long list of features similar to the above services, but two that stand out for me are a built in image editor to modify the photos you might want to use in your emails, and they offer a fantastic free trial offer that gives you full access to all of their features, as long as your mailing list has 1000 or less subscribers. You can email each of those 1000 or less subscribers up to six times a month, so you get to send up to 6,000 email messages a month for free with them! Once you exceed 1000 subscribers the pricing is comparable to the other services mentioned.
4. Benchmark Email – With features similar to the above services, Benchmark Email allows you to create signup forms for your website, send email broadcasts and manage a virtually unlimited number of contacts. Their pricing similar to the other services here, but can be expensive if you contact your list very frequently.
5. Emma – MyEmma is another service that’s been in business for a number of years now and while they offer similar features and pricing to the above mentioned companies, they differ from the others by not relying on template designs, but provide help (at different pricing levels of course) to design a look for your email newsletter for you.
6. Vertical Response – Vertical Response is another established company with an extensive email feature set, but they offer something I don’t think I’ve seen any other email service provider offer – the ability to send printed postcards to your subscriber list! With their tools, you can create full color, oversized postcards so in addition helping with your email marketing efforts, they can also help with your direct mail efforts too!
7. Jango Mail – With Jango Mail you can send plain text and html email messages just like you can with the other services here, but a key difference is your ability to send attachments, like word or pdf documents in the emails sent to your list. Their pricing starts at $30 and allows you to send 1000 emails.
8. Get Response– Get Response sets themselves apart from the other companies in this list by offering two unique features I’ve yet to see offered anywhere else. 1) They offer something called “email-to-speech” which promises to convert your text emails into a human voice so subscribers can listen to your emails and 2) they offer the ability to record and store video files to be included in your emails.I have not had the opportunity to try their services myself, but their unique offerings are certainly interesting and worth taking a look at for free.
9.  Campaigner -  In addition to the standard features most of the companies here offer, Campaigner offer a nice set of email templates tailored for specific industries, and they offer really attractive pricing starting at only $10 a month for unlimited emails sent to 1 – 1000 subscribers.
10. Bronto – Bronto offers an extensive list of features, but their service are better suited for the more experienced marketer who is willing to pay for assistance when it comes to crafting a serious email marketing campaign. As such, they don’t display prices on their website and require prospects to consult with them in order to determine the best solution for their business.Please Note – The information presented here is subject to change without notice and you should refer to the websites listed to get up to date information concerning their services.

If you own a lawn care business for example, distributing your flyers directly to homeowners with lawns is smart, sticking them on windshields at the local Walmart – not the best, because you don’t know if those people live in homes or apartments, or even if they live in your service area.

The easy thing with flyers is producing them, as you probably already have all you need to design them on your computer, and they can be printed by just about any local printer or copy shop for a few cents each.

Once printed though they’ll need to be distributed, and here is where you’ll need to do the work yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Many cities have flyer distribution services so do a search online and see what you can find in your area, but you can always hire a few local high school students to help you out after school or on weekends, or post an ad on Craigslist and hire someone looking to make a few extra dollars.

How’d you like to have your flyers produced and distributed for free? That’s easy – just do the following…

- Find one or two other business owners who want to advertise to the same prospects you do.

- Have them design their flyer and deliver it to you.

- You have the flyers reproduced and charge the other businesses enough to cover your production and distribution costs too!

If you’re going to do a space ad, it will generally get better results if you use the same layout as the editorials so it looks less like an ad and more like a news item. Use the same font styles and sizes for the headline, body, etc. If the newspaper uses 2 columns per article on the page your ad will appear, use 2 columns in your ad. If they use 3 columns, you use 3. The “advertorial” approach almost always does better than traditional space ads that scream “advertisement”.

Learn to experiment in many creative ways to find out what works best for you and always test different components of your ads to see what brings you the most results.

I know one local paper that has both classified ads and space ads and I noticed that one company has their space ad featured upside-down in every weekly issue. At first I thought it was a mistake, but after seeing it upside-down week after week, I suspected they found that their upside-down ad stands out from the clutter. People think it’s a mistake and read it. Yes, it’s a gimmick, but you need to test different approaches and see what works best for you.