Free email marketing is a method of bulk email marketing that is used by most email marketers that are aiming for a serious presence on the internet. This method is not without its difficulties because many bulk email marketing activities also include spamming. Spamming is however quite different from bulk email marketing making the distinction in the two types of mails: junk mail and spam – though how comfortable email marketers would be with the name “junk” is a matter of debate. Spammers differ in their lack of scruples and focus in their activities.

Spammers usually acquire their database of email addresses using some nefarious means like spider software and purchasing databases from others in the same fraternity. Basically, they do not get the mailbox owner's permission before mailing them. Additionally, spammers will mail anybody and is akin to dropping a nuclear bomb on a city to kill one rodent in a specific sewer. Curiously, the futility of their efforts is also quite astounding. This is because the average number of people who actually bother opening or acting on spam mails is 15 per million mails sent. Yet this is the target market that all the world's spammers look out for.

Free email marketing is different because mail addresses are acquired after a user specifically asks for sales information about a specific product. You might have noticed some of these opportunities during registrations on certain sites. Apart from this, email marketers also take the trouble to conform to government rules like the US Government's CAN-SPAM act, which allows unsolicited emails but also requires that the sender use sensible methods of sending mails and respecting users' privacy.

Most importantly, email marketers don't take the gloves off after pressing the “send” button. This is in fact just half of the task done and, like any offline monitoring exercise, email marketers or service providers of this service will offer statistical data on the result of these campaigns. This statistical data includes numbers on how many mails would have made it to the target, how many were opened by the target, how many clicks were made, and other statistics that can end up telling you if the exercise was worth it in the first place.

Another important part of cost reduction and creativity going together is the use of templates. Instead of hiring a content and graphical creation team every time you have a mail campaign, one can simply use a set of mailer design templates, populate the relevant data, and then begin the free email marketing campaign.

This all doesn't fundamentally prevent the appellation of spammer being stamped on you but from all indications, this is the start of a new internet revolution and perhaps in the future one would see more citizens of the internet buying after being prompted by an email. This is quite possible as if one was to equate a television advertisement to a bulk email, not every advertisement necessarily results in each viewer buying the product. The same rule applies here. However, time will dictate the fate of the medium.