I believe practically every small business can benefit from building an email list.

But as with every form of marketing, and particularly ones involving technology, there are low cost ways of doing it and there are very expensive ways of doing it.

1) Don’t Go To A Marketing Agency

Unless you are awash with cash which you want to disappear quickly, don’t approach a marketing or a web design agency. If you do, it’s quite likely you’ll be offered some kind of “emailing system” which allows you to edit and send emails to your direct marketing list.

Almost inevitably “bespoke” or “configured” or “tailored” systems (which you don’t need) are going to cost a lot more than other perfectly acceptable online solutions available at a much lower cost. Companies like Aweber can provide professional email marketing solutions from as little as $19 (about £12 at the time of writing) for fledgling lists up to 500 susbcribers. Over that, and you pay a little extra for volume.

2) Do Get Permission

To email your customers about anything other than a transaction, you need to get their permission. That’s why it’s worth building into your entire marketing process. It costs nothing to gain permission to market to your customers as you build your business. Online subscription forms such as Aweber provides handle the whole opt-in process with a double confirmation. Because of this process, they’ve gained a good reputation for deliverability and are perhaps more likely to get past some spam filters than other companies.

You can get permission at the point of contact via a whole variety of means: small discounts, free trials, free information etc. But the best way to build your email list is simply making a clear commitment to building your subscriber base throughout the various marketing channels your business uses.

In the UK, you are required to comply with the terms of the Data Protection Act 1998. In short it means that for email marketing, customers must be able to opt-in, be able to find out about what information you hold about them and be able to request that information you hold about them be corrected or removed from your database.

3) Start With A Plan

Before you send a single email, work out why your customers will want to hear from you. Work out what you want to achieve with your email marketing. Work out what your customer really wants to hear about. Then start trialling.

4) Short Is Often Better

People are overloaded with information. You don’t need to write lots. In fact, short emails are often better. Sometimes all your customer might want to hear about is a new product or a special offer. If that’s all they want, then use your email marketing for that.

5) Use Email to Build Trust

Repetition and visibility build trust. And trust builds customers. Email can build relationships with customers if you adopt the right tone (friendly, conversational) and talk about things your customers are interested in. If they have signed up for your newsletter, chances are overwhelmingly that they are interested in your products. So talk about them.

6) Avoid Marketese

Avoid overly promotional language in your emails. It won’t get you sales. It will turn customers off.

7) Get The Right Frequency

Too little is better than too much. If you can’t deliver an email which interests your customers, don’t do on for the sake of it. If you have the knack of engaging your customers, and constantly delivering new information/content/persepectives it;s quite possible that you could email as often as you want. Your rate of unsubscribes will help you be the judge of the best frequency.

8) Personalize

Doesn’t need to be anything more complicated than “Dear Bob” at the beginning of your email, but it works wonders. For additional punch, use their first name in the subject line.

9) Integrate

Make email marketing a central part of your business and work out how you can integrate with the rest of your sales and marketing processes. Integration means making it a tool that’s central to your business, not just for its own sake, but because it’s profitable, cheap and fast to deploy.