Email marketing in today's post-spam world is a contentious issue. There aren't a lot of people out there who would actually back a company that strongly believes that email marketing is still a force to be reckoned with. This is probably because of the limited success that spam has had in this space. If the figures are to be believed, then spammers have a hit rate of just 15 per million mails sent; making the proposition quite dull for serious companies and corporations to indulge in. Nevertheless, free email marketing is theoretically still a force to be reckoned with. This is because it has the widest reach compared to any other form of media in the world, it is fast and immediate, the advertising to buying physical distance is practically nil, and you can target customers without worrying about targeting the wrong people. Imagine then the stigma that has been created by spam to override such a powerful set of benefits.

One of the most important benefits of email marketing lies in the costs of the exercise. At the most, a company might have to buy a server and some dedicated software as fixed costs. After that there may be some acquisition costs if there is a tie-up that needs to be made to acquire email addresses. Once these two things are set in place, the final cost can be content creation. No matter how expensive these aspects might be, the fact of the matter is that the cost per mail over time is negligible and any smart business man will try and convert all the variable costs to fixed ones over a period of time. This can be taken one step further by not incurring fixed costs at all. This can simply be done by enrolling for free email marketing services.

For the pure marketer or businessman, the importance of design might be truly understood but the ability to execute might require a specialist. This is also a problem that can be overcome with the help of a service provider. These service providers also usually offer the option of using some of the existing templates in mailer design for your benefit. This is a good way to not end up spending a bunch in salaries of a graphical team. The content team is, however, another story.

It is important to remember that free email marketing is an advertising exercise. This means that there may be a few misses but in a large part a good advertisement or an informative mailer is more powerful than any offline advertising mechanism.

Considering the low costs and relative ease of creating a campaign, there is enough reason for any business to try out this method of selling. The only thing that one has to worry about with any bulk emailing exercise is that at every gateway to a mailbox lies a spam filter that is willing and waiting to ruin your chances of making a sale if your use the wrong tone of content in your mailers.