Sending out emails to market and promote your business is picked up hugely in popularity over the last few years. For one, it’s free and for another, it’s very easy to measure. You can tell when someone has received your email, opened it and read it and how many have responded really quickly and easily.

But, when should you use email marketing to promote your business and how do you make sure it’s effective for you?

Email marketing is a fantastic tool to help you build a relationship with people. To make email marketing effective for your business requires a mind shift in itself. Gone are the days where you just send out a sales letter by email instead of by post. These days, email marketing is about building a relationship with your customers so that they can experience what you do without any commitment whatsoever.

That’s why providing people with useful tips or information is far more effective than just simply a sales email. It’s much more likely to be read and people are far more likely to respond to your email.

But even though you are providing people with something useful, you still have to know what action you want people to take as a result of your emails. If you’ve never contacted people before, you may want them to download a report from your website. Or if you’ve already started to build a relationship with people, you might want them to book onto a workshop, complete a survey or book a 1-2-1 chat with you.

Whatever your aim, you’re going to need to send out a series of between 7-11 emails to people to get them to do what you want them to do. I know that probably sounds a lot, but your message is going to change on every email so people are not going to get bored reading the same thing.

For instance, when people download a free report from our website, they will get a three day report, a free article, a free audio and various other bits and pieces spread over a couple of weeks – the aim of which is to encourage them to order our free CD. Everything I provide is useful and there’s no obligation, but if it does encourage people to have a look at the CD, that’s great.

But how do you manage all of this? After all, it would be incredibly time consuming for me to sit there and email everyone who has downloaded something from the website and then keep track of what messages people should be receiving on any given day.

When you have a small number of contacts, it’s easy to manage your emails just using Outlook. When your list grows though, it’s going to be quite difficult for you to do that.

That’s why I use something called an autoresponder to manage all of my emails for me. The easiest way to explain what an autoresponder is, is when you send an email to someone and it pings back an out of office reply – that’s an autoresponder. It’s an email message that is sent automatically to you without needing a human to be present.

There are various autoresponders around including 1shoppingcart.com, awebber.com and constantcontact.com which are all fairly reasonable in price and can be great for your business. Don’t consider an autoresponder though until you build up your contacts otherwise you will be wasting your money.