Sending emails for marketing presents some challenges and opportunities for the small business.  The first concern is a mailing list.  If you are fortunate to have a list developed already then you ahead of the game.  Let's start with no list and use some of the ideas for building an existing list.

Where do email addresses come from?

Email addresses and the person behind it are not anonymous and have real interests so build a list that is qualified. Your email list is a precious thing that needs to be nurtured and developed.  Start with a simple email sign up form on your website to start your list.  There must be 15 different ways to capture addresses but the simplest and most effective is using a email service like MailChimp, Blue Hornet, and Constant Contact to name a few.  these services provide list management, subscribe and unsubscribe along with the aforementioned email sign up form (script that can be copied and inserted into your website).  Not only that they provide a easy way of building a email template with formatting and without formatting. That is plain text or HTML.  These services also provide email opening rates and click through with special tracking URLs.

There are a lot of technical reasons why a business should use a email marketing service vs. sending bulk email from their own domain.

• Spam blacklists
• Single ISP send point
• email marketing software
• Subscription management
• User friendly GUI and templates