Benchmark Email offers free newsletter archiving, which every email marketer should be taking advantage of as a social network tool. The Benchmark Email Community offers a permanent home for all your email marketing campaigns, and it’s totally free! In the Community, your email’s longevity will be safe, even if it gets deleted from your recipients’ inboxes. You might be surprised to learn that there are so many features and functions of the Community that many email marketers simply aren’t utilizing. Read on for those and a comprehensive list of Benchmark Email Community best practices.

The first important steps take place on the Describe Email page. This is Step 1 of the email creation process. On this page you will need to fill in your Email Name. This serves as the headline for your email in the Community. If you do not designate one, it will appear as something along the lines of "Oct 06, 2010 Email."

Also be sure to click the boxes to send to Twitter and Facebook. These options are found by clicking Show Advanced Options. Often times, the people that populate your email list subscribers and social networking followers are not the same. Posting a link to your newsletters from the Community on Facebook and Twitter allows you to reach the greatest number of viewers.

There is another step that will help both your email campaigns and the effectiveness of your presence in the Community. In the Email Builder (Step 4), you can add buttons that will link anyone viewing your newsletter straight to your social networking pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This way, your subscribers can easily find your social networking pages as can anyone coming in from a search engine or the Community itself.

The rest of the information for the Community is handled on the Schedule Delivery (Step 5) page. Your company can designate a custom URL for your little home in our Community, put it in a category and tag it with keywords that will help it come up in a search engine. Every email in the Community is automatically indexed in Google. This allows non-subscribers to find your email via Google and other search engines. Be sure to have a sign up link in your newsletter, so all those newcomers can subscribe to join in on the fun.

You can also opt to include social sharing buttons for Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, MySpace and Twitter. With these buttons, an email marketer can reach past the limits of a subscriber list. Anyone that views your email can choose to share your newsletter with their various social networks and their fans or followers.

Reports are always an important way to determine the success of your email campaigns. The Community provides another opportunity to do so. You can get feedback for your content as registered users can comment and vote for your email. This could be useful for making your future emails more effective. It will show you what was well received as well as what questions sparked discussion.

So let’s again summarize the benefits. The Benchmark Email Community is a free tool that when integrated with social networking can increase the reach and longevity of email campaigns. Not only will this help your email list grow, but it will also build the following you have on social networking channels. With social sharing buttons, your campaigns will land in front of more people than just your subscribers. And having a permanent home on the web, your emails are safe from being deleted from inboxes. Plus there is the added bonus that they will be found through search engines. With so many benefits, there's no reason not to take advantage of the Benchmark Email Community.