Using email to market is one of the biggest advances in the field of marketing to come along in a long time. I can remember the experiences of my offline marketing efforts: place an ad in a magazine, wait four to six weeks (or more) to see your ad, the prospect either calls you or mails you a response card. Gee, I can't believe that I used to do that.

Along comes email and electronic newsletters: you place an ad and in a matter of days it goes to your target market. And "bingo," in the click of a mouse, your prospect gets your sales message or free report via autoresponder. What an advantage this is over snail mail.

In a matter of days you can determine if you have winner or not and make adjustments to your offer accordingly. This means more money faster for you!

As you begin to market online, you will hear a variety of opinions. Some experts tout "Netiquette", or working within the culture of the Internet. They will tell you that certain forms of marketing are wrong, becoming angry about this. Be careful of following opinions - what they advise against may hold the keys to your success. That is, if you take care to target your message slowly, to interested prospects.

No matter what way you market, you must work on building your email list. It will be your biggest asset online, leading to more sales and profits - if you do it right.

First contact is a difficult place to establish the proof that you can solve the problem, even if you define it. You may identify the problem and hopefully build up the promise of solving it, but the facts are simple.

It is difficult to get the prospect to part with his money on first contact. You need to develop trust, credibility, and prove that you can provide the solution he wants. And you will make many more sales by mining the real gold of online marketing, the follow up to your customer. Prove you know what you are talking about. Keep in touch with them, with their approval; if anyone objects, why send to them again?

Use your emails to build a relationship; most prospects will not buy until the third or fourth contact. Finally, if you feel like apologizing in your email for contacting them, do not bother. Negative messages will make your efforts worthless for you and your customers. How can they buy something that you are apologizing for?

Email marketing is a consistent and cost-effective way to follow-up with your customers. You need to treat every contact as a significant lead and follow up via email. Here's how to put email marketing into profitable action:

(1) Build your email mailing list as your primary business asset. Separate those new inquiries, your lead list, from your steady customer list. Finally, keep a detailed remove list of all those people that don't want your messages.

(2) The goal is to have your customer make first contact, and for you to follow-up. Respect the wishes of your visitor; don't market to someone who doesn't want to hear from you. This could lead to you losing your Internet access and subsequently hurting your business.

(3) Give them something of real value, a good special report or newsletter, or ebook to encourage them to contact you. If you don't give them something, you won't get responses. Most online businesses fail to give them anything at all.

(4) Use email newsletters and ezines to contact your customers. Give them enough information but not too much. How do you figure that out? Ask them and test. Don't forget to include your ads in these as well.

(5) Don't feel up to writing? Sit down with yourself, someone who sells the product or service (could be you), and an interviewer. Sell the interviewer your product or service. Record it. Transcribe it. Save it as a text only file in a word processor. Separate the interview into smaller sections. Email it in parts. You then can email an ongoing, valuable document that includes advertising, rather than another salesletter.

(5) Create several follow-up letters. First contact is a free report or newsletter. Second contact means checking in to see if they have any questions, and making them a special offer. Third contact should qualify them to see if they want to explore working with you. Don't give up with one or two messages unless they ask you to. Use the intelligent autoresponders available to do your followups: www.smartbotpro.net and www.getresponse.com Each has free multiple followup autoresponders.

(6) Send out surveys or contests; test out questionnaires. Set up interviews. The real goal is to get them to respond to your message. This is how you qualify people. Those that respond are potential customers, but keep emailing those who don't immediately respond as well.

(7) Explore ways to mix faxing, telemarketing, direct mail, and email to provide a diverse approach to your customer. Find the one that works best, but use email and at least one of the other approaches to truly set you apart from the rest.

Don't miss out on the many opportunities to market your products and services that email has to offer. Successful application of sound email marketing tactics can lead to big profits for you.

About the teacher:
Jim is the Publisher of WebPROFIT Tips Newsletter and author of the new manual "Online Moonlighting dotCOM" that shows Internet marketers how to build multiple streams of profits online while holding down a full-time job. For more information, visit his Web site at WebProfitSource.com/ml.htm or subscribe to his newsletter