Welcome to email marketing and email marketing systems. Emails are a powerful means of maintaining contact with customers, both existing and prospective. Sending meaningful emails only when required forms the core of successful email marketing. Sound email marketing practices can lead to significant rise in revenue generation and business goodwill.

Of the several email marketing software available today, a good email marketing application has the following features:

Ø      List Management – A quality email marketing product enables its users to easily create and manage lists of subscribers based on their interests, demographics, and/or customized questions. Using such an application simplifies email address management that includes taking care of new email addresses, duplicate addresses, and invalid email ids.

Ø      Business Communication – Another focal point of a good email marketing system is its ability to allow its users to prepare outstanding emails, newsletters, and other promotional material so they can communicate with their clients. You can create HTML, text, or multipart emails using your own files or the application's templates.

You can also use this feature to create sign up forms and gather information about your clients' preferences. This information can later be used to segment your customers and tailor your services as per their requirements.

Ø      Powerful Reporting – Sending permission-based business information and performing surveys is of little use if you cannot generate reports. Powerful reporting features are another trait of an email marketing system, using which you can obtain subscriber activity including successful views and click history in real-time.

An email marketing system should also be able to give you more information about returned mails, whether they were returned because of incorrect email ids, or temporary inactive status of the server.

Furthermore, the email marketing software should enable you to analyze all this data by exporting it to a data analysis tool.

Ø      Cost-effective – ­An email marketing system should not only be inexpensive to purchase but also require few people to manage it.