By Richard Buss

Email marketing and be both fun and highly profitable if done right. But email marketing is so much more than just sending a weekly or bi-weekly message to potential customers.

One of the best email marketing practices is a welcome program. When readers sign up to your mailing list, it’s important they receive a welcome email. That first contact helps to establish a relationship. At the same time, welcome campaigns greatly improve your ranking with Gmail’s priority boxes and establish your emails as “not spam.” At the very same time, you can begin a drip campaign: Every 72 hours, send a new email to remind subscribers about your company and your products.

The hour at which you send your emails also is important. Companies like Gmail and Hotmail judge emails by how long they sit in the inbox before they are opened. If marketing emails sit too long in too many inboxes, mail service providers may assume the messages are spam. Learn when your readers open their email and send accordingly.

Everyone likes a little bit of personalization. When collecting email addresses from potential customers, be sure to capture their names. Once you have their names, you can customize emails to make them more personal, starting with the subject lines. A subject line that calls to a reader by name is friendlier and more interesting — and, consequently, much more likely to be opened and read.

Don’t forget about keywords! You should know what keywords people are using to find your websites, and these should be included in both subject lines and email bodies. The importance of showing readers you understand what they’re looking for cannot be overstated.

Creating both email and web-based versions of your marketing messages is an easy and effective way to increase the number of people you reach. You put a lot of effort into writing marketing emails, so why not put them all online — perhaps in a blog-like format — and let search engines pick them up? That way, each email does double duty, spreading your message to current and new customers at the same time. The tactic also gives your email subscribers a link to share with others.

Go beyond the basics with your email campaigns. Get creative. Making your messages work as hard as you do will make your marketing efforts more efficient, more fun and more effective.

Richard Buss is the senior account manager for YNOT Mail and director of products and services for YNOT Group LLC.