If quality email marketing is something that you believe in and are passionate about, you may want to make it a central focus of your career. You may also have noticed that email marketing is thriving in a troubled economy or that it is becoming more effective over time.

If you want to go into business for yourself, then take a look at this article: How To Start An Email Marketing Service. But, as you likely already know, entrepreneurship is hard, and owning a business puts you in a position to manage a lot of operational aspects that you may not be fond of or even very capable in. And, since most new businesses fail in their first year, and few people have the startup capital to support themselves during the two year period that typically precedes profitability, you may find that a job in email marketing is a more attractive option for your individual career path.

What You’ll Need

1. Some knowledge and/or training in general marketing.

Make no mistake, email marketing is marketing, and so you’re going to need to know a few things about assessing your target demographics and analyzing the return on investment for your efforts. Email marketing happens to make ROI calculations unusually easy, as far as marketing goes, but it is still math and still something you’ll need to know something about if you’re going to land (and keep) a job as an email marketing specialist. You’ll also need specialized knowledge of advertising, sales, and marketing psychology to be an effective email marketer.

A good way to move into the marketing field is the same way you would expand into any other field: leverage your existing experience within your current field, and gradually expand your responsibilities such that you gain knowledge and qualification within the course of doing your job. In time, you will become qualified to hold a position exclusively dedicated to your personal interests and goals.

College education can also be extremely helpful in developing this type of specialized skill set. If you express an interest in expanding your marketing knowledge in a way that will benefit your present employer, they may agree to pay for some or all of your classes. Even if you do not go for a full degree in marketing, advertising, or psychology, you can still take a selection of courses that will help you on your way by bolstering your resume and expanding your abilities.

2. Basic technical ability and familiarity with available email marketing software and its usage

Email marketing has to do not only with user interaction, but systems interaction as well. You will need to be familiar with a variety of technical issues, such as server optimization, types of email servers, spam filters, and negotiating services with web hosts and ISPs.

You will also need to be proficient in using email marketing software, not only to compose and send messages, but also to track statistics, split test different techniques or compositions, and dividing lists for purposes of market segmentation.

Because online marketing is one of the few industries experiencing growth and prosperity in the present economy, a growing number of entrepreneurs and online service providers are aiming to expand into providing email marketing services. This is an outstanding business opportunity, particularly for businesses who already offer internet- or marketing-related services to their clients. In this article we will briefly review the steps you need to take to succeed as an email marketing service provider.

Your business plan

The first step, of course, is to determine who your target market is and exactly what you will be offering them. There a full sections of library devoted to the topic of how to write a business plan, but the basic are simple:

• Market Analysis
  • Who will your customers be and what are their needs?
  • What is your competition like? What opportunitities exist and what barriers exist to realizing those opportunities? How do your particular strengths and weakness affect your chances of success?
• Product Development
  • In this case you know you intend to provide email marketing service. What does that include? Will you be building up your clients’ email lists for them? Writing advertising copy? Or will you simply be providing access to a web-based email marketing system that you will maintain?
  • You will also want to evaluate your costs, including man-hours, and develop a pricing scheme based on consideration of these figures, how much profit you need to justify your efforts, and what price you think your market will bear for the services you’re offering.
• Sales & Marketing
  • How do you intend to go about promoting your new service? Do you have an existing customer or subscriber base that you can leverage to get the service going?
  • Ordering & fulfillment logistics

Things You’ll Need

• Hardware
  • No matter what type of email marketing service you’ll be running, you will need to invest in a solid server & ISP or a hosting package that is capable of accommodating your projected usage volume.
• Software
  • You will need to buy bulk email marketing software with a sufficient number of user licenses to accommodate your projected initial needs (the order page is here).
• Wetware
  • You will need to effectively market your service. If you have an existing client base and are offering the service to them as a way to add value or expand upon your existing services, then you definitely have a huge advantage here. Otherwise, you will have trouble competing with major service providers like ConstantContact and AWeber unless you find a specific niche or untapped client base. As with any other type of business planning, this is where your ability to exercise some serious ingenuity comes in.

This poor economy has left entire business sectors on shaky ground. Many have feared that marketing would be among them. However, it appears that what is actually taking place in the marketing industry is something of a refocusing on what works and what is cost effective. Our regular readers will already know that this certainly includes email marketing, among certain other forms of internet-based advertising.

A new study by Round2 gives us a better idea of the way that things are shaking out. While there is plenty of bad news for tradition print and television advertisers, there is just as much good news for the online marketing business.

The study’s main weakness was that it only provided simple yes/no information about the respondents’ spending intentions, rather than real numerical data. So we can only see what percentage of companies are spending more or less on any particular advertising medium, not how much those companies are spending.

However, the study results still provide an interesting and potentially useful glimpse into the marketing industry’s reaction to the economic downturn.

As you can see, traditional print advertising seems to be the hardest hit medium, with 46.6% of respondents reporting that they will decrease spending in this area. Even direct mail marketing is suffering a loss of support. However, email marketing sits easily on top of the new medium in terms of expanding adoption.

This is likely because email is a medium that companies are familiar and comfortable with, and that has been shown to be highly effective and efficient. Email marketing is something that can be done entirely in-house with very little up-front investment, and that allows for very detailed response tracking through the use of an integrated software package like ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Software.