Why is email important to my business

When procuring or setting up your web presence you must give serious consideration to what email capabilities you will have in addition to the web site.  

All too often the focus is on the web site, the words and graphics, and having an effective and reliable email system is relegated to second place.

The most important part of your business are your customers and prospects.   Communicating with these online can happen in the four phases below

1. Customer acquisition
2. Educating the customers about your services
3. Transacting with product purchase
4. Developing a dialog with the customer

Email can play a very important part in each of these and must form part of your campaign planning.   Email marketing in the U.K. was worth £170 million in 2003 and it is growing.

Another factor to consider with well designed email communications, on a stable email platform, is that they can be considerably lower cost than your written and telephone communications.  In addition, the tracking information that can be gained as to who opened the communication and which sections of the newsletter they read, is light years ahead of that you can gain from standard direct mail and advertising.

If you have acquired your customers email addresses you can send information (with permission) to them. For this reason valid email addresses are valuable and should be treated carefully.