If you are a business owner why should you even consider email marketing when you may already be using other types of marketing? The answer is actually quite simple. Email marketing is efficient, cost -effective, and most importantly highly measurable. Let's take a quick look at each of these for a second.

Efficient means the it get to the recipient without you having to jump through many hoops to get it done. All you really need to do is create the email and click send and it goes out to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of your subscribers. It requires very little in terms of resources, and even less in terms of computing power as most of the services are web-based and hosted someplace else.

Cost-effective means that the labor required to build a mailing list, create a newsletter, and broadcast that email newsletter is very minimal. It will probably be your least expensive method of marketing, and in all likelihood have the most return on investment. Research has shown that ROI to be over 50 to 1. So for every one dollar you spend on email marketing you can expect a fifty dollar return,

Measurable means that you can quickly and easily measure and quantify the effectiveness of your email marketing, Within the better email marketing solutions you can track to whom the email was sent, whether or not they opened the email, and if you had any links in the email to your site how many of your recipients click-through to your site. Unlike billboards or radio spots email marketing lets you see just how effective your campaigns are.

As a small business Internet marketing consultant I can tell you that there are at least 7 key things that email marketing will do for you. In no particular or:

• Increase your customer base
• Increase the number of sales transaction
• Increase the size of each transaction
• Quickly and easily communicate with your customer base
• Retain more of your customers
• Reduce support call or email
• Introduce new products and service quicker, and cheaper

There are more benefits that you will gain from using email marketing but the above give you a bit of insight into just how powerful it can be.

Getting your business set-up with email marketing can be either very easy or very difficult as it really depends on your Internet skills. Let go over the  step sin a very cursory fashion as it does take more than just this hub page to properly explain how to do it.

1) Add a email capture script to your website. Usually the service you use to manage your email campaigns will provide you a small javascript that you can put on your site. This script is nothing more than a small email subscription form that your visitors will use to enter their name and email.

2) Give something in return for their email. I suggest you give something of valuable such as a free report to your visitors in return for asking them for their email For example if you are a plumber than create a simple 10 to 15 page report titled " 7 Questions to Ask a Plumber Before You Hire Them". The report is what they will receive in exchange for their email and their permission to allow you to send them more tips, discount offers, product support etc.

3) Create an email newsletter and send it our consistently. You don't have to send an email newsletter every week, but at least once a month is highly recommend, and twice and month is optimum. You should also send out a broadcast when you have something important to say or share.

While email marketing for a small business can be highly effective it can also be abused. Please don't send out useless emails to your subscriber. You want the email to have value, you want them to open the email and after reading it they should be a little better for it.

Sending useless crap will only give them an excuse for opt in out of your email list. You don't want potential customers to leave and unsubscribe from your list. It's just not good for business.

Use email to pre-sell them, to build your credibility with them. Give them useful information they can use to make better choices about your product or service.  Here is an article called "Don't Let Your Potential Customers Forget About You" that you may want to read.