Email marketing has become an incredibly effective way to stay in touch with your followers and offer them valuable information. If they’ve signed up for your newsletter, they obviously already value what you have to offer and they are interested in learning more from you. This is the perfect opportunity to show them that you are indeed an expert. Thank goodness we’ve come a long way since the days of the Pony Express and now getting mail to your readers is much simpler, more dynamic and far more cost effective, too. Email marketing should be an extension of your blog to some effect (online marketing with your blog was discussed in the previous Branding Pen post), if you have one – and I hope you do! It’s important that the content you’re providing to the readers that have opted in to your list NOT always be available on your blog at the same time. Your subscribers want to feel that they’re getting the special stuff that you’ve reserved for them. This isn’t to say you can’t re-purpose that material and turn it into a blog post at some point, but you’ll want to save that for a later time when the article might need some revision and updating anyway. As with everything we do for our content marketing strategy, it’s about providing value, staying in touch, and connecting with our followers so that when they need something that we offer, they think of us first. Why use an Email Marketing Service Provider (EMSP) instead of my regular email account? There are several reasons to use an EMSP instead of just your email program like Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo. The first and most obvious reason, is it’s just more professional. You’ve gone through all this work to establish your brand, define your audience, you’ve invested in a logo and a website, you’re posting on social media… don’t blow it now and have your emails appear unprofessional and not well thought out. Using an EMSP allows you to create beautiful HTML emails that use your visual branding so your readers will recognize that it’s coming from you. Sending a regular ol’ email just doesn’t have the same effect and you risk your emails not being read, which is a huge waste of your time. And here are a few more reasons that you might not be aware of: EMSPs provide you with opt-in forms. You know those handy forms where you can fill in your name and email address? You can get those from your EMSP and place it on your website or blog. When someone signs up, their name goes right into the database you’ve established with your EMSP. This will go a long way to growing your list, since collecting names is sometimes our biggest challenge. You can only send so many at once. Most email providers, whether you have a local provider, or you use a service like Gmail or Yahoo, will only allow you to send and receive a certain number of emails per day. These are called relays. The number is different for each provider, but they obviously don’t want zillions of emails clogging up their servers, when there are millions of users potentially sending and receiving emails. Depending on the size of your list, you could spend days sending emails in batches, which is an unnecessary waste of your time. You can track your statistics. EMSPs allow you to track who is opening your email, if they’re clicking through to your website from the links you’ve placed in your email and much, much more. This can be valuable information in creating your future emails, because it gives you more insight into what your readers want. If they’re  not opening your emails, clearly you need to rethink some things. Your database of names is more easily maintained. All EMSPs keep track of your database for you. You can easily import names, export your list, and add new names individually. Also, if you send an email that bounces and is undeliverable, the service will automatically remove this email from your list. High deliverability. With an EMSP, your email has less chance of being marked as SPAM and hiding out in someone’s junk mail folder forever. Most EMSPs are whitelisted, or approved by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) as a legitimate, CAN SPAM compliant (yes there are laws you must follow when sending out emails), permission based email delivery service. EMSPs also offer easy methods to authenticate your email, which will prove to ISPs that you are who you say you are, a legitimate non spammer sending emails to those who want to receive the information. Getting Started You may be asking yourself how to even get started with email marketing. It’s not as complicated as you might think and it’s pretty affordable, even free, in some cases. There are many services you can use for your email marketing. They all offer unique features to their service, so it’s important to check them out and decide which will work best for you, depending on what you need, which interface you like best, and your budget. And you’re  not locked into any contract with any of them, so if you find one doesn’t work for you so well, you can export your list of names and take it down the road to another service. They all offer pre-made, semi-customizable templates that you can use, and you can create a completely custom template that matches your visual branding if you have some coding skills. (Your web designer should also be able to help you with this.) Most offer a plugin that you can use with WordPress and other web/blogging platforms so you can easily add your opt-in form to your website. Additionally, most are all mobile friendly as well. Many also offer surveys, event registration and image hosting (this can be important because without image hosting you’ll need to upload your images elsewhere on the internet and then provide the URL for