The Email Marketing Flowchart

This simple chart and the explanations of these steps on the next page show you how easy email marketing is from your point-of-view:

 

Yes, there is a big difference between sending normal emails to your clients and using professional email marketing software. So let's get some terms down that every email marketer should know:

Customers, clients or prospects give you permission to email them because they want to get information from you. Let's call them subscribers. You organize email lists of these subscribers based on location, spending patterns or any other category that makes sense to you. You create or write content to send these clients. This can include text, e-coupons, links, pictures and even video. Let's call these newsletters. You schedule the email delivery to some or all of the members of your lists. You may choose to have different newsletters go out at predetermined times. Customers receive your content in their email inboxes. When they read your newsletters, we call these opens. They respond to your marketing campaign by coming to your store, performing a click-thru to your links, etc. Emails that are undeliverable are called bounces. You monitor the success of your campaigns with online reports and make adjustments accordingly. The measuring of all those opens, click-thru activity and bounces is called tracking. Smart marketers use the visual graphs on opens, bounces and click-thru success to focus on what works and take the time to change what isn't as effective. Each time you create and send an email newsletter, you are sending out a new campaign to your lists.

When you compare professional email marketing to regular old emails, it's similar to the difference between hand written letters about furniture specials and receiving the IKEA catalog in the mail. And that might lead you to your next question...