If you’re not engaged in email marketing, then you’re missing out on one of the more effective means for getting you message straight to consumers. If you’re an adult business, however, starting an email marketing campaign isn’t always as easy as it sounds. That’s because many of the best email marketing tools today are “hosted” services, and most of them have rules that prohibit using them for adult-related marketing purposes.

So what’s the solution? If you have access to your own server, one solution is to license and install your own software. For example, if you want to run your own email marketing software, you could start by looking at www.phplist.com. The good news is it’s full of features, and the better news is it’s free open-source software.

Once installed, phplist gives you a Web interface to running and monitoring your own email marketing campaigns. It’s ideal for newsletter, or making the occasional announcement to customers. It’s also smart software, designed to reduce the chance that any one subscriber will get hit more than once with the same email due to errors or multiple subscriptions. It can handle very large lists, or small lists, and it can help you track clicks to guage the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

If you’re new to email marketing however, there are a number of things you need to think about:

Always Get Permission. If you plan on sending commercial emails, it’s important that you have the permission of the people you contact. Sure you may get a ton of spam yourself, but sending unsolicited spam may be against the law. (For more information about spam laws in the United States, see the FTC’s website ftc.gov and search for details about the CAN-SPAM Act.) A good way to get yourself in trouble is to buy an email contact list from a third party; the people on that list didn’t ask for your newsletter or special offers, and many of them are bound to be less than thrilled when you add your products or services to the daily bombardment.

How do you get permission? When you collect email addresses, make sure to explain clearly what you plan to send, and how often. And, don’t “activate” an email address until the subscriber has received a confirmation email from your email software and confirmed his or her interest. This is a process called double opt-in, and it ensures that someone isn’t just signing up all her enemies for your porno newsletter.

Refine Your Campaigns. You will want to be somewhat limited with how many emails you send to your entire list, so it’s a good idea to get your campaigns right before you blast everyone on a large list. First, always check your emails for errors before you send them. If your software has the ability to send “test” emails, do it every time as a first step! Sometimes your email looks great when you compose it, but gets mangled when sent – this is mostly a problem when you send HTML emails and don’t get them just right. And check your emails for spelling or grammatical errors.

Second, you can refine your campaigns by utilizing small, targeted test mailings. Let’s say you want to send an email out advertising the launch of your newest website, and you have a list with a total of 10k subscribers. Try generating several different versions of your advertisement with several different sets of subjects, titles, keywords and rhetorical approaches. Send each version to a smaller subset of your list, like one version to 500 subscribers and a second version to a different 500 subscribers, etc. By comparing the results, you can determine which approach got the best response and use that one for mailing the entire list.

Keep Your Message Simple. When designing your ads, choosing subjects for the email, etc., always think of how it will look from the consumer’s end. When the consumer gets the email, will it make sense? Will he or she understand what you’re offering? If the recipient is interested in your offer, is it obvious what he or she needs to so to take action and accept your offer? If your message is confusing or requires too much mental energy to act upon, you’ll lose your audience lightning fast.