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Email marketing is one of the easiest, most convenient ways to market your company and your products. Email marketing has an innate and powerful ability to communicate one-to-one with your customers. It can also level the playing field; a small company with minimal budget can get great results from email just as easily as a large company with a huge budget. That being said how can the average home business or small business compete effectively utilizing email?
Many Internet marketing insiders will tell you that the "real money is in the list." What they mean is simply customers respond at a higher rate to email from a known entity than they do from an outside source. After all they did opt-in to your list why wouldn't they be interested in what you have to say? Opt-in email marketing is, what many consider, the cornerstone of successful web based businesses today. In fact it still remains the number one method of marketing products. The importance of all of this is you must begin to build your own list. You may say that it's easier said than done. Not true anymore. There are many effective services that can help you cost effectively and legitimately build your own opt-in list. One such company is AWeber which was one of the pioneers of auto-response email and still one of the top autoresponders today. See our review of AWeber below.
If you have done any email marketing on the Internet you have heard about the CAN SPAM ACT of 2003. If you haven't click on the highlighted link and read it straight from the FTC. In a nutshell, there is only one type of commercial solicitation email and that is OPT-IN or another term Permission based email. You as a consumer must give the mailer the permission to send mail to you, hence the term opt-in, which means you must opt to receive mail from that individual or company. As a marketer, failing to get the permission or opt-in from the individual would be illegal and subject to some very serious fines from the Federal Government.
The purpose of this HBR Guide on email marketing is to provide you with the appropriate tools and information to utilize legitimate ways in which to develop and implement an email marketing program. There are many services that claim to be CAN SPAM compliant, opt-in emailers. Your best bet is to develop and build your own list. There are even some highly respected free services that can get you started immediately building your own opt-in list as well as an autoresponder system.
Email is not dead and in fact it's thriving. Unfortunately there are still many unscrupulous marketers, mostly operating outside of the US, SPAMing and Phishing. It unfortunately makes it hard on the legitimate online businesses. | 
