Collect' Em: With the low cost of email communications, email trumps more costly marketing methods such as direct mail and telephone. A study by Jupiter Research found email campaigns targeted with web analytics can produce 18 times the profits of broad mailings. Relentlessly collect customer and lead email addresses all the time. Use a contact management program to handle your growing list.

Remove Barriers: Customers want fast and easy communication from companies they want to do business with. Your website contact page should have your email address. Asking web visitors to fill in a form to send a simple mail will stop many in their tracks. Gather more customer information once you have gained the initial contact. If you are worried about being spammed, invest in a good spam protection program.

Avoid Sensitive Issues: Never handle sensitive issues by email. The chance for miscommunication can make matters worse. There are times when you need to pick up the phone or set up a face-to-face contact instead of taking the easy way out with email. When you are full of emotions, stay clear of your email.

Handle at Once: Don't fall into the trap of reading emails and thinking I'll respond later. Later never arrives and soon your inbox is full of important and unimportant mail. Scott Allen, Co-Author of "The Virtual Handshake" recommends "Most people configure their email reader to interrupt them every time an email comes in. This means you are interrupted throughout the day. Instead, we suggest keep your email reader closed most of the day. Only check email once a day."

Use the 10 Second Rule: We all lead busy, time-pressed lives. Receiving a long-winded email with one big paragraph creates a response to file for later use. Readers have a tendency to skim and miss critical details. Before you send out your email message, edit down to short sentences, add bullet points, and be concise. When someone opens your email they should be able to know within 10 seconds or less what your message is about.

It's the Law: Know the rules of using email in the business world. Be aware of the laws and regulations in your business, industry, country, and state surrounding email usage. Our world is becoming increasingly transparent and customers expect your small business to handle their data in a private and confidential manner.

Incorporating these 6 simple business email tips will put you on the road to effective email management. Spend the time to master the essentials of email. Once the habit is established your small business will be email savvy.

Most email marketing software has features that assist the user in the process of organizing contacts, creating campaigns, and scheduling communication. In addition, the software usually provides features, such as an "unsubscribe check" that assist in complying with the CAN-SPAM law. Email Marketing software can also provide tracking functions such as how many people have opened an email, how many emails bounced-back, how many people visited the hyperlinks provided in the marketing message, and how many people actually purchased something as a result of the email. Each email service provider has their own take and approach to these different features some of the most common are listed below

The common features are listed below:
* Ability to create and send personalized email using data from a customer database.
* Ability to import customer lists
* Split campaign testing and segmented lists
* Surveys
* Automatic unsubscribe and bounce-back handling
* Ability to authenticate to SMTP and POP servers or send directly with an internal server
* HTML and plain text editor for creating messages
* RSS Feeds
* Reporting features such as bounce-back, opens, and link click reports
* Tracking abilities such as tracking who has opened the email, usually by using a web bug

Opt-in e-mail advertising, or permission marketing, is a method of advertising via e-mail whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it. This method is one of several developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of e-mail marketing.

Opt-in e-mail marketing may evolve into a technology that uses a handshake protocol between the sender and receiver. This system is intended to eventually result in a high degree of satisfaction between consumers and marketers. If opt-in e-mail advertising is used, the material that is e-mailed to consumers will be "anticipated". It is assumed that the consumer wants to receive it, which makes it unlike unsolicited advertisements sent to the consumer. Ideally, opt-in e-mail advertisements will be more personal and relevant to the consumer than untargeted advertisements.

A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products. In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 authorizes a US$11,000 penalty per violation for spamming each individual recipient. Therefore, many commercial e-mail marketers within the United States utilize a service or special software to ensure compliance with the Act. A variety of older systems exist that do not ensure compliance with the Act. To comply with the Act's regulation of commercial e-mail, services typically require users to authenticate their return address and include a valid physical address, provide a one-click unsubscribe feature, and prohibit importing lists of purchased addresses that may not have given valid permission.

In addition to satisfying legal requirements, e-mail service providers began to help customers establish and manage their own e-mail marketing campaigns. The service providers supply e-mail templates and general best practices, as well as methods for handling subscriptions and cancellations automatically. They also provide statistics pertaining to the number of messages received and opened, and whether the recipients clicked on any links within the messages.

The CAN-SPAM Act was recently updated with some new regulations that went into effect on July 7, 2008.

E-mail marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

• A mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.
• Compared to other media investments such as direct mail or printed newsletters, e-mail is less expensive.
• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• The delivery time for an e-mail message is short (i.e., seconds or minutes) as compared to a mailed advertisement (i.e., one or more days).
• An advertiser is able to "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to website-based advertising, which relies on a customer to visit that website.
• E-mail messages are easy to track. An advertiser can track users via autoresponders, web bugs, bounce messages, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, click-throughs, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing.
• Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.
• Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger other messages to be delivered automatically, or other events, such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category.
• E-mail marketing is paper-free (i.e., "green").
• Tracking and response metrics enables tuning and optimisation of the E-mail marketing channel by a process of testing different variants and calculation of statistically significant results.