Free Email Marketing Vs. Paid A Look at both

Emails have become the most popular form of communication among people Most people spend a lot of time reading and responding to mails they receive

Emails have become the most popular form of communication among people. Most people spend a lot of time reading and responding to mails they receive. Hence, businesses organize email marketing campaigns to promote their products or services. The other advantage of email marketing is you can target people across the world. You can also expect a quick response from people. Unlike other forms of promotion, you can start tracking the progress of your campaign as soon as you dispatch the emails.

An email campaign can be completely free of charge or you may have to pay for the same. Companies, which don?t have a very large marketing budget, prefer to organize and monitor their campaigns, on their own. So, how do you organize an email campaign for free? Well, for a start, you will have to decide the objective of the campaign. Based on that, you will have to develop content for your emails. The next aspect you need to look at is the email itself. If you know HTML, then you can use an application like Adobe Dreamweaver and design email or email newsletter templates. The other, and a far easier, option is to use a mail client like Microsoft Outlook. If you don?t know HTML, then you can search for free templates on the Internet. There is no dearth of sites that offer HTML based templates for emails and email newsletters. Once the emails are ready to go, you can send them from Microsoft Outlook. However, the process of monitoring the campaign may prove to be a bit complex.

In paid email marketing, you hire a professional email marketing company. This company handles everything from developing content for your emails to providing detailed reports of how the campaign is progressing. They also offer a range of HTML based templates, for you to choose from. Once you?ve selected the template, you can instruct the company to customize it as per your requirements. The software they provide also contains an automatic list segmentation feature. Based on the information you gather from your clients, the software will divide the email addresses into different categories. This division may be based on your clients? like, dislikes, age group and other similar details.

The biggest advantage of paid email marketing is that you have to give instructions about how you want the campaign to be. All the rest is taken care of, while you are free to expand your business. For instance, they also test your mails for compatibility and spam and correct any flaws they may find. You may find it very difficult to do the same in free email marketing. Besides, companies charge very nominally to organize and manage your campaign.

On the whole, paid email marketing is a better option than free email marketing because the workload gets reduced considerably. Though you may have to pay some nominal fees, you can expect a higher return on investment. Email campaigns require some time to make their mark on customers. However, once that is achieved, your sales are sure to get a big boost.

Ron Gomez is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/email-campaign ) a leading Web and permission-based service for sending and tracking a email campaign .