When free email accounts made their debut, it was a hard sell. “I’ve already got email. Why do I want another? I’m already paying my ISP for this service.” Clever marketers, with varying motives, sought to diss the free accounts and many web sites, message boards and forums refused to sign you up if you gave a free email address. Not enough control or proper oversight was the purported reason. This created an unfavorable image of free email service in the public mind, having acquired the earmarks of a second-class sort of email account.

Today, some ISPs, realizing the popularity of free email accounts, the cost involved in maintaining email for their customers and the current competition among ISPs offering a connection for less, are now countering these disadvantages by offering a connection only at a slightly reduced price. This marketing trend is on the rise.

Many of the big-name search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, along with hundreds of thousands of others, offer free email accounts with plenty of bells and whistles which satisfy the most discriminating of web surfers.

Some people use free email accounts as their sole vehicle for receiving all of their email. While some websites are still resisting, demanding an ISP-provided email address for registration on their site, these are becoming the exception.

For those who enjoy subscribing to newsletters or the occasional download, both of which require an email address, a free email account offers advantages. While reserving your ISP-provided email for communicating with family and friends, the free email provides protection from spam that is sometimes generated through a newsletter subscription. Even when the website producing the newsletter promises never to share, sell etcetera, if you opt in for additional information from other sites, you run the risk of getting spam from the outside sites.

A few years ago, while researching all things stock market, I ended up with thousands of emails from sites I’d never visited. The result? I had to completely shut down my email address to get rid of these unwanted communications and start all over again. What a mess!

Free email services that I use now put everything not on my contact list into a spam folder and simply delete them after a month. Problem solved.

If you want to research the features and benefits of free email accounts, there are free guides available for the reading. You may well find them so convenient, you can save a few bucks on your ISP connection. Why not?

8 Suggested Items to Include in Your Email Marketing Checklist

Goal List
List down the specific goals you wish to achieve with your email. Once you’re done creating your email, use the checklist to verify whether all goals have been accomplished or not.

Outline and Format
It never hurts to have a draft and outline to work with. The details in your outline must then be included in your checklist. Reviewing them will allow you to determine if all key points have been properly addressed by your email. Secondly, make sure that your preferred format is included in your email marketing checklist. In most cases, your email marketing format would usually include but isn’t limited to subject header, introductory paragraph, body, conclusions, closing paragraph, call to action, and miscellaneous details.

Email Address Validation
There’s no point sending out an email if there’s no one to read it. Hence, take out your opt-in list and consider sending a confirmation email to verify whether all email addresses in your list are still active.

Testing Procedures
Try to think of the various tests your email must be subjected to for quality control.

Monitoring Results
Include in your checklist a periodic assessment period for your emails. Compute the conversion rate, click-through rate, referral rate, and any other applicable statistics for your email marketing campaign.

Previous Mistakes and Concerns
Include in your checklist a list of things you did wrong or overlooked in the past email. This will prevent history from repeating itself with your current email. Next, if there are any issues or concerns which you had promised your customers to address on your next email, include them in your checklist as well. It will remind you to address them as promised when you are in the process of formulating your latest email.

Email Versions
Some of your customers may prefer a text-only email while others may prefer graphic-heavy emails. If you are creating more than one version of your email, all versions with the appropriate reminders should also be included in your checklist.

Link Checking
Finally, remember to double-check all links pasted in your email to ascertain that they are clickable and that they do redirect your readers to the appropriate and functioning pages.

Make sure you have your email marketing checklist with you all the time. Remember to use this for monitoring and evaluating every email you send.

This is the reason why email marketing still is the most effective way of promoting and selling a product. This also explains why a lot of internet sites desperately find ways for visitors to sign up to their site and give their email addresses to them for subscription. Now, you don’t have to wonder why people keep asking for an email address even if all you really wanted to do was to leave a very short comment on a blog entry.

Emails are very effective marketing tools. However, they only work if they are used the right way. First off, you need to have a big list of active emails where you’ll send your marketing materials. And no, it doesn’t just have to be a list of uncategorized email addresses. It has to be a targeted email address list. Targeted email addresses mean that the people owning the email address you’ll send your campaigns to are the type of people who are going to benefit from your product the most.

Squeezing an email address out of your prospect is not easy. Getting their permission for you to send marketing campaigns to them is another thing. If you are not too familiar in creating an opt-in page, it is best that you partner with another who is an expert in this field. This is one good email service to use. You can also partner with another site with a lot of traffic. Every time a customer clicks on the box that is related to your business or product, then you get their email address for promotional purposes.

Constructing the sales letter itself is quite a task. You need to make an email that is not only interesting but action oriented as well. Every promotional email is only given a maximum reading time of 5 seconds. So you have to capture your reader’s interest within 5 seconds or less. If your sales letter is not effective, then it will be deleted forever.

If you don’t have any talents in writing and copywriting, it is best that you hire an expert sales writer. This is another email service you might want to get for a long-term basis. Having a good writer on call will allow you to make as many new email advertisements as you might need.