Email Marketing: Email is tricky business, but the payoffs can be huge if you do it right

I have ten years experience initiating and managing Email Marketing campaigns. I have managed daily, weekly and monthly campaigns using customer lists and rented lists.

Email marketing is an effective way to accomplish one of two things: You can use it to increase user participation and registration on your web sites and develop sales leads. Or you can use it to annoy the users you have and drive away any prospects you might get. If you annoy them enough, you'll get on a spam list.

At a national technology resources web site, I used email initiatives to increased highly qualified user registrations from 500,000 to 1.5 million in just a four month period. Because these registrations were actual products, sold as sales leads to technology companies, this significant growth also added to the company's revenues.

Using vetted house lists, I have consistently developed email marketing with open rates between 30% and 70%, with respective conversion rates ranging from 3% to 9%. I've run online/email campaigns that have achieved a conversion-to-sales rate of 50%!