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?

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.