Direct email marketing is an email-based marketing campaign that allows you to send "unsolicited" emails to a target audience in order to create or raise awareness of a particular product that you are promoting. This is the only cost-effective form of email marketing that guarantees you a more accurate reach to your target customers.

Direct marketing is sometimes confused as spam or junk but what differentiates it are the elements used in direct email marketing. The two main elements are segmentation systems; which ensure the messages go to the right targeted group, and the use of email personalization techniques; which is a technique in which the recipient of the email is addressed individually hence grabbing his attention.

Junk mails or spam are more of unsolicited commercial emails whereas direct email marketing is more of permission based where the clients is wooed to opt in and has the opportunity to opt out willingly. For successful direct email marketing, you need to have strategies in place and careful preparation. By sending professional and attractive emails to clients, direct email marketing allows your business to generate a more specific response from each particular segmented group.

It is advantageous in that it allows your business to assess performance of email marketing more accurately, thanks to the tools and mechanisms used. Such mechanisms allows your business to assess among other things the amount of messages opened as at a particular date, the number of email recipients who opted out of your mailing list and the number of emails that were not delivered to the customer's server. There are various softwares available today that ensure high deliverability of emails to clients by helping you to create attention-grabbing emails.

Your business needs to have in place a good email marketing strategy, one that will increase the chances of your target audiences opting in or not out of your emailing lists. Know what products to market to what specific group.

Keep in mind that inasmuch as direct email marketing results are normally very accurate, they are not guaranteed. A badly planned email and wrong use of client names will end up being viewed as spam, annoy the client and be deleted from the inbox. Ensure you have a perfect email marketing strategy. Your strategy will hugely reflect on the response rate.

Apart from engendering new business, direct email marketing also builds your clients' devotion, reinforces erstwhile clientele relationships and ultimately creates the expected profit margins.