What!? you may be asking? Marketing with e-mail? Isn’t that just, well, SPAM?

Not when you do it correctly; not when you do it professionally with e-mail marketing and design. For one thing, the correct and proper way to market via e-mail is to send your e-mail just to people who have requested it (more on that later).

E-mail marketing and design and the marketing campaign you’ll perform is less expensive than banner ads, pay-per-click and other SEO work.

 In addition, your e-mail will go just to people who have requested it - who have responded to a free-report you’ve offered on your site or an e-mail course, or some other freebie (such as a newsletter) you will send your visitors via e-mail. Once they’ve signed up, you have their e-mail address and your e-mail marketing and design campaign may begin.

As you e-mail additional marketing messages to your list members - as you execute your e-mail marketing and design campaign - there are a few things you’ll want to track:

1) Are all your e-mails getting to your readers, or are they bouncing back to you? This is called your “bounce rate,” and your messages may be coming back to you for any number of reasons: the address is no good, or the recipient’s mailbox is full.

2) Of the e-mails in your campaign that you know are arriving in the correct mail box, how many people are actually opening them? This “open rate” will help you decide which of your e-mail marketing and design messages are of more interest to your recipients than others. Which sales pitch is most successful; which offer is more intriguing? Your open rate will help you ascertain this and you can tweak your campaign accordingly.

3) Related to your open rate is your “click through rate.” That is, of the e-mails being read, how many result in people clicking on a link you have in your e-mail to your website? Again, studying which e-mails result in more people opening the message and then clicking through to your site will help you tweak your e-mail marketing and design for better results.

Remember, in e-mail marketing and design, as in any marketing campaign, you should embrace the data. Study which e-mails are opened and which result in the reader then clicking through to your site. Numbers are your friend; they will tell you what’s working for you and what is not.