One of the most powerful marketing opportunities that exists for companies maintaining public Web sites is e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing can give you several new ways of finding new customers, staying in touch with existing customers and giving clients a heightened level of service that will help ensure their loyalty to your business.

E-mail also allows you to empower customers to make buying decisions right on the spot, and creates the opportunity to get instant feedback from customers. Response rates on e-mail campaigns can far exceed those of other marketing programs. But to be successful, e-mail marketing must be done right.

E-mail marketing can be defined as using e-mail to communicate value to customers or potential customers. The key word here is "value." Today everyone is busy. In the business world everyone has problems to solve. Information about goods or services that can solve someone's problem is valuable to them. Information that doesn't directly help someone solve their problem is just more clutter and usually not appreciated. Therefore, getting a message that will be perceived as valuable to the right people at the right time is the essence of good e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing is also often known as "permission marketing," because e-mail correspondence, unlike direct mail or telemarketing, works best when you have the recipient's consent. Companies that don't bother to get the consent of recipients, and send them unsolicited e-mail, also known as "spam," are considered to be disreputable because they violate the privacy and space of the people who receive their notices. Remember, an individual's Internet connection costs money and spam wastes costly bandwidth. Also, time is money and when someone's inbox is filled with unsolicited e-mail, valuable productive time is wasted sorting through the mess. That's why companies that want to have a successful e-mail strategy should always build their programs based upon the consent of their customers.

But there is another important reason for using customer consent, or "opt-in" policies. Once someone says, "yes, I want to receive your e-mail notices," you now have the most valuable prospect there is -- someone who is interested in doing business with you. Opt-in becomes a qualifying mechanism and good e-mail lists typically have much better prospects than cold call lists or even lists based on demographics. This is why e-mail campaigns often have much higher success rates than other marketing programs.