If you’ve got an offline business, don’t underestimate the powers of email marketing. You can definitely use it to your advantage. It will give your business the mileage that it needs, regardless if you own a website or not.

To remind your customers that your business is always there to answer their needs, these are the five email marketing tips that you should follow:

1. Inform your past, present, and future customers about store specials through email.
What’s the best form of announcement of a sale or store event other than through a special invitation arriving at your customer’s inbox? Not only would you give your customers first-hand information about the upcoming special at your store. You will also allow them to prepare for the event that you have especially prepared for them. A big sale and a good package deal offered for a limited time are good enough reasons to send emails to your customers.

2. Send your customers holiday greetings through email.
You don’t have to email your customers just because you want to invite them to your store to buy something. Sending them a little Thank You note for their purchase, a Christmas card, or a Birthday card are enough to show them that you truly care for them as an individual and not just for the profits that you make from them.

3. Create informative materials or newsletters for your customers.
People are getting tired of the junk and the marketing materials they receive in their mail. If you are truly dedicated to superior customer service to your clients, you won’t add up to the clutter they are getting everyday in their emails. Instead, you make sure that you send them news, features, and items that they can be truly interested in. A regular newsletter would allow you to keep in touch with your customers for a long period of time. Try to get their permission for this.

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.