Email is such a powerful tool on the web and it still drives a huge portion of internet traffic in general.  Pretty much everyone who is on the web has at least one email account and checks it on a daily basis.  It has become a fundamental part of what drives communication on the net.  Now we all know that there is plenty of spam to go around, and no one wants a bunch of junk mail filling up their inbox, but there is still a huge opportunity for businesses and websites to make good use of these email marketing strategies.

First of all, what is spam?  Spam is unwanted emails that flood your inbox that you did not ask for.  As such, almost all of it is irrelevant to you and your situation.  You did not ask for the email, so it is not really targeted at you in any way.  It is just random stuff, trying to sell, sell, sell. 

A good email campaign is the exact opposite.  It is something that you asked for and is therefore extremely targeted to you and your interests.  Ideally it will have been something that you signed up for to receive and so you have a personal interest in receiving more information about something. 

The vast majority of spam email is never even opened, period.  With the type of email marketing we are looking at here, a much higher percentage of the mail will actually be open and read.  This will result in a much higher delivery rate and eventually more conversions and sales.  Depending on what your business is, personal and relevant email marketing messages could be a major driver of success for you.

Let's say that you run a website for a non profit organization that focuses on AIDS awareness and prevention.  You naturally receive a modest amount of visitors and traffic from the search engines, but you want to engage this audience on a deeper level and make more connections.  You want to somehow harness these visitors and create a relationship with them over the long term.  In order to do so, one thing you might try is to set up an email autoresponder and start building a list.  The way this would work is that you would have a simple opt in form on the website that said something like "enter your email to recieve updates about future events and new information" or something like that.  After the person enters their email, they would confirm their subscription to you and then receive the first message in their inbox which would welcome them of course.  Then you would have a preprogrammed sequence of emails that they would receive. 

Now most people want to sell, sell, sell and push whatever products and services they have at this point.  This is a bad idea and the general rule is that 80 percent of what you send to your subscriber list should be non promotional and value packed information.  Only 1 out of 5 messages should be trying to sell them or pitch them something.  The idea is that you want to floor them with value and overwhelm them with quality and keep them as a long term subscriber.  Eventually you might have a huge fundraiser coming up regarding AIDS awareness and you might need specific help with something from your audience.  If you have abused them and been overly promotional with your list then they are not likely to be very responsive as you will have driven most of them away by now.  The key is to actually build a profitable and lasting relationship by giving them a ton of value, over and over again. 

This is the quality over quantity approach to email marketing and if you follow it then you can do great things with even a relatively small subscriber base.  Most spammers need hundreds of thousands of email addresses to make any money, but with this type of quality approach, you can do some great things with less than a hundred subscribers.  Focus on providing valuable information to your list and then when it comes time to promote something they will be far more receptive to it and your conversion rate will be sky high.