Email. How do you use it? In our six-part series we will discuss following:

-The importance of keeping in contact. -When a “Dear John” letter is a good thing! -Subject Lines. -What is your goal? -Keep it simple. -Make it easy to reply.

The Importance of Keeping in Contact. While this may seem to be stating obvious, you may be amazed by how many marketers either don’t know how to stay in touch, or just don’t care. While I can’t imagine any decent person responsible for marketing to not care, I’ll deal with only first item – not knowing how.

In talking with others involved in marketing, I get these types of questions. Will my prospects and customers want to hear from me via email? If they do, how often should I contact them? When I do contact them, what should I say? Let’s address each of these questions in light of staying in contact via email.

1 – Will my prospects and customers want to hear from me via email? The answer is an absolute YES, if you have something worthwhile to tell them! If a customer has just made a purchase, then a simple and sincere thank you is very appropriate. Customers do like to know that they are appreciated, especially when they open their wallets.

Email marketing can be a very effective tool to inform customers of future events, or attract new customers by increasing awareness about what your site offers.

Success in email marketing does not come from thoughtlessly blasting out email ads without working to build your own customer base. The basis of successful email marketing is to build existing in-house customer lists, augmenting them by outreach through outside mailing lists.

Your own email list allows you to develop a long-term relationship with your online audience -- to communicate with and market to them over and over.

Generally email marketing can be implemented with these 3 objectives in mind:

(1) Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again

(2) Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance customer relationship

(3) Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people

Of course, it seems easy to collect hundreds of thousands of email addresses and send everybody an email about your website. Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple. Essentially, you require permission of email recipient to send them info about your site otherwise it may be regarded as "spam" which is unsolicited bulk email.

In marketing industry, spam is definitely a four letter word and something that should be avoided at all costs. If you are accused of spamming, there could be direct consequences such as damage to your reputation, your website may be shut down and your email accounts closed.

In conjunction with this, there is a strong argument from successful marketers that long-term email campaigns only work consistently when they are based on permission in first place. There are plenty of acceptable ways to market your website by email, don't be tempted to take shortcuts because chances are it could be your downfall.

It's important to stress that anyone considering email marketing must read up on subject of permission and spam. If you don't understand importance of permission and risks of ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.

Don't panic, though. It's actually relatively easy to ensure that address lists you use or build yourself are permission-based.

Below are 3 possible ways to do that:

(1) New Content Notification

You've probably seen sites that offer to notify you whenever they have new information, products, or content.

To tell you truth, this is probably least effective kind of opt-in list, simply because most people won't sign-up. Instead, they'll bookmark your site thinking they'll just come back from time to time - but don't count it!