Email marketing is one of the most effective and versatile methods for marketing your business during an economic recession. Its low cost and ease of implementation make it ideal for small and growing businesses as well as larger and more established organizations. The unique flexibility of this marketing platform also allows for a greater degree of experimentation and accountability than other options.

Maintaining a regular e-mail contact with your customers helps to builds familiarity and credibility for your business. This is particularly important in times of economic stress because people tend to be more careful about who they spend their money with. When you have an established presence in your customers’ minds, they will feel more comfortable making expenditures on your products or services because they will see you as a consistent and reliable vendor.

A great way to do this setting up an autoresponder series that provides useful, relevant information to each new subscriber over a period of weeks or months. Once you have set up such a series, it literally runs itself, allowing you to effortlessly build trust with your clients by offering them education and advice that reinforces their need to utilize your products and services. You can maximize the benefit of these and other types of mailings by targeting them to specific subgroups within your mailing lists to ensure that every piece of e-mail your clients receive from you applies directly to them.

On top of this, an active mailing list allows you the luxury of instant publicity for your sales and promotions. The messages you send out arrive directly in the inboxes of the people who you already know are most interested in what you have to offer. The benefit of this is two-fold: you will experience a much higher conversion rate with this type of message than less targeted forms of marketing, and will also realize more word-of-mouth advertising due to the increased loyalty that you will see from your mailing list subscribers.

As I have mentioned, cost is also a major advantage of e-mail marketing. By purchasing software products such as 1-2-All, you can send out unlimited mailings for nothing more than the cost of hosting. There is no need to pay per recipient or per impression as there would be with traditional direct mail or advertising programs. On a shoestring budget and in a relatively short amount of time, you can now achieve the type of reputation that would previously have required years of prohibitively expensive marketing effort.