This has it's pros and cons. A little knowlege is often a dangerous thing and this is certainly true of email marketing.

Get your email marketing right and it'll provide you with an untapped revenue stream (or river!) which takes your business to the next level. Get it wrong and you run the risk of alienating your entire customer base in one fell swoop.

What's the difference? Well in a word: Relevance. If you contact your customers, there are some basic rules of thumb to follow:

1. Address the customer by their name in the email.
2. Send them something relevant that will interest them.
3. Don't put all your customers in one group.
4. Don't send emails to customers who haven't asked you to
5. Make it easy for them to do what you are promoting.

1. By personalising the email and using the recipien't name you massively improve the chances of both the email being read in the first place, and more importantly, the recipient responding to your proposal.

2. Fail to send something relevant and interesting and you will be able to see almost immediately that your unsubscribe rate increases, loosing you valuable customers.

3. By grouping your customers by age, area, purchases made, etc... you can then send them a message with much closer appeal to their needs. Sending an amusing cartoon email to a pensioner will probably not go down well and is likely to cause them to unsubscribe; send it to their grandchildren and they'll be much more inclined to click on it and visit your site.

4. The risks of sending a unsolicited emails are massive. You risk damaging your reputation, alienating customers, all kinds of internet-connection related issues, and generally dragging your name through the mud by doing this. You'll also upset your ISP and be in breach of a number of Internet codes of practice.

5. By sending a relevant, interesting, targetted email you have only won half the battle. The other half is to get the recipient to do something, like send the email to a friend, visit your website, or make a purchase. Considering every mouse click as a barrier; you need to break down the barriers between the email and the end goal, providing incentives and interest along the way.

What is the difference between spam and solicited email?

Spam, by definition is: "an unsolicited, often commercial, message transmitted through the Internet as a mass mailing to a large number of recipients".

The key word here being unsolicited; spam is the internet equivalent of flyering a street with leaflets, sending letters to every address in an area addressed something like "dear resident" - basically contacting anyone who hasn't given you their express permission to do so.

Spamming is generally adopted by people marketing less reputable types of products - such as those selling adult pharmaceuticals, augmentation-related surgery, potions and pills - who see marketing as "a numbers game" and simply by sending their unsolicited emails to enough people, however irrelevant or offensive, they aim to achieve their goal.

If like most reputable firms, you don't want to associate your brand or business with this sort of approach (or get a court summons), then make sure that you are always communicating legitimate subscribers, and not illegally harvested data.

To sum up: Spamming doesn't work. It ruins your reputation. It alienates your customers. Why bother?

On the other hand, sending solicited email (when someone who has given you their permission to contact them) is one of the single most cost and time effective marketing methods there is!

So how does someone give you permission? Usually it will be when they sign-up to a website to make a purchase or register for some reason. There is normally a tick box where they either agree or disagree to receive email marketing from you. Other methods are having a newsletter sign-up box on your home page or in your navigation pane.

In these instances, the customer has given you their permission to contact them, but you should never abuse it. Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient: Imagine you make an online purchase where you tick "please don't email me about products or services), and then five minutes later you receive an email doing exactly that - You'd probably not choose that site again for your next purchase. Conversely, imagine you did want to be contacted by them, and then immediately after your purchase an email arrives giving you 50% off an accessory for your purchased item - you'd be tempted to go and buy it. What a difference it makes!