Promoting your products or services by email can be a powerful and flexible form of direct marketing. Through email, you can communicate your messages more quickly and cost-effectively than using paper-based marketing.

You can tailor your message to specific types of customer. You can also build customer relationships and acquire new customers through relevant, well targeted emails that interest recipients.

Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you're offering. So for example, if you're running a special offer on catering equipment, it will be more effective if you promote it only to people responsible for buying catering equipment.

People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that's irrelevant to them, and they're likely to delete unsolicited messages.

However, an email to an existing customer or contact, who has agreed to receive marketing from you about products or services, may well be valuable to them. Even if they don't buy from you immediately, they may do so in the future.

Keeping it relevant
If you have got a large database of customers and potential customers for your email marketing campaign, it's worth analysing what you know about them, so you can send a more relevant message.