With millions of emails being sent everyday around the world, there are great rewards for a successful email marketer. With the rise of social media, it was predicted that the use of emails would decline in favour of chat messaging on sites like Facebook and Twitter. This may be true for social communication for businesses email is still one of the main ways to communicate and also market their products or services.

With the inherent rise of spam emails, people have become a lot more wary about opening up emails from senders that they do not recognize and will instantly delete them, therefore making it difficult for any email marketing campaign to generate new sales or potential customers. There are however some guidelines that can help you write a successful email and achieve your end goals.

Make use of your existing customers. To start with, concentrate on keeping your regular customers happy. Gather a list of their emails and create an email campaign that focuses on them. Use a personal sender ID so they can identify either your name or the company’s name, not an unfriendly ‘customer services’ or ‘support’ and use the company name or logo in each email.

Provide useful, practical information that is beneficial to the client without selling your product. Going straight in with ‘buy my product’ is an instant turnoff, and the main aim of this campaign is to build up trust and the relationship with people who have already bought from you.

Ensure the format is clear and simple to read, no flashing lights or fancy fonts that are hard to read. Finally send the email at the same time every time. i.e. same time every Wednesday or the same date every month. The trick is to keep everything clean, simple and consistent. This may be quite time consuming for people who have already bought from you, but with brand loyalty comes referrals. And these type of enquiries have a higher conversion rate.

Once your existing clients are taken care of, you can look to broaden your client base with a second email campaign targeting potential new customers. The principals are the same as the first, with regards to keeping the formats clean and simple, repeat timings, friendly user ID and most importantly worthy, informative content.

There are a number of ways to obtains email lists, either by purchasing them from or outsourcing the actual campaign to marketing companies. The key is to ensure that the list of potential recipients is relevant to your sales demographic. Sending a thousand emails to 18-25 year old females is not valuable if trying to sell lawnmowers.

If you follow these guidelines for your email marketing campaign then success should only be matter of time. Remember persistence and quality information are key.

Harry Jarvis has worked in small businesses (starting with the family business) since he was a schoolboy. He is now a professional blogger, marketer and owner of his own business. Harry blogs on various issues effecting businesses including providing expert advice on email marketing.