Email marketing can be very effective as long as it is not viewed as spam. This is critical because when your email marketing is viewed as spam, it will not likely be read by the recipient and may not even reach the recipient if it is trapped by the Internet service providers spam filter. For this reason it is critical for business owners to work hard to ensure the email marketing they use is not viewed as spam by either the recipient or the recipient's Internet service provider. This article will take a look at email marketing and specifically how business owners can ensure their emails are not viewed as spam.

The distribution list for an email marketing campaign is one of the critical elements which can help to ensure the emails sent by the business owner are not viewed as spam. Before this can be accomplished it is important to understand exactly what spam is. Spam is essentially email which is unsolicited and sent for the sole purpose of advertising or promoting a product or service. Internet users receive mass quantities of spam on a daily basis. For some Internet users this quantity of spam is a huge source of frustration. Other Internet users have become so used to the amount of spam they receive that they barely even notice these emails. Neither of these scenarios bode well for business owners who are using email marketing campaigns to promote their products or services. Internet users who are angered by these spam emails may react harshly and report your emails to their Internet service providers. Internet users who do not even notice spam are likely to either automatically delete your emails and may block your email address to prevent future emails from getting through to them.

Paying special attention to your email distribution list and only including recipients who had specifically asked for additional information will help to keep your emails from being viewed as spam. One way to acquire email addresses for the purposes of orchestrating an email campaign is to ask interested customers to register with your website and specify whether or not they wish to receive future emails with additional information, advertisements or other useful tips. This ensures the recipients of your emails are genuinely interested in your products and services and are not likely to view your emails as spam.

Another way to ensure your emails are not viewed as spam is to offer recipients the option of being removed from the distribution list with each email. This is important even when the recipients specifically asked to receive these emails because they are entitled to change their opinion at any time. Offering the email recipients the opportunity to remove themselves from the email distribution list whenever they want is worthwhile because it allows recipients to have some control in the situation. This is a stark contrast to spam in which the recipients feel as though they have no control over the situation and no way to stop the spam from bombarding their inboxes on a daily basis.

Finally, business owners can help to ensure their email marketing campaign is not viewed as spam by including quality content in the emails they send to the recipients on the email distribution list. This may include providing feature articles, product reviews or a series of short useful tips which will likely be of interest to all who receive these emails. These emails may also include a soft sales pitch but this sales pitch should not be the focus of the emails. Putting too much attention on the advertising is likely to lead the recipients to assume the email is nothing more than spam. Conversely, providing quality information which is useful to the recipient and subtly urging them to perform an action such as making a purchase or investigating the details of a product can make the email seem much more worthwhile and less like spam.