Free email marketing is far from the effort free, painless exercise that most service providers advertise. While these service providers have made the job much easier of advertising products and services using a medium like email, service providers will not be looking at increasing your sales. Safe to say then that their job is over once the mailer is created and sent. How well the campaign went down with the clients is something that is completely your headache – an appropriate appellation considering the stress of selling online. Email marketing is a revolution that is still in the stables and not a mainstream sales attack weapon yet. This is because of the legacy of bulk email marketing and the impression that it left on the world at large.

Bulk email marketing and spamming are still considered by end users and consumers as one and the same thing. This is fundamentally where the problem lies in relying on email to get your message across. Spammers have largely ruined the market with their nefarious practices in acquiring email addresses, hacking and gaining backdoor entry to mail servers to send mails, and their completely unfocused target marketing that will not stop short of selling a ten-year old Viagra at a 10 per cent discount. The global average for response to spam mail has been pegged at 15 users per million mails sent. All the spammers are looking for those fifteen people per million to sell to leaving the rest with clogged mailboxes. This the reason for spam filters to come in and radically cut down the nuisance of spam mail. These are so aggressive that the world is starting to see a reduction of it now.

Free email marketing should be considered an advertising medium and, having said that, accept that some of your mails will end up in a spam or junk email folder. Therefore, to reduce the damage done follow some simple guidelines.

First, ensure that your copy is spam-proof. This means that your content creation team needs to do some reading up on the backend logic that goes into spam filters and accordingly start to modify their copy. The next task is to follow the CAN-SPAM rules of sending mails. Accepting this is a more honest and focused approach to marketing and remember that those who unsubscribe from services were never your market to begin with.

Lastly, invest in a free email marketing service provider that is offering good value for services. Try out the templates, check the range of reporting functionality, and most importantly, check what the rest of the competition is offering. Many service providers may be free but you may end up finding out that the exact combination of products that can only be acquired from a paid service. If you have the funding, you must get the right resources as this at the end of the day will also provide you the widest reach. With economies of scale, this cost will become irrelevant.