What Is Email Marketing Software?

One of the benefits of using computers is that for practically any task

, there is (or will be) a piece of software designed to handle it. Email marketing software is, in a nutshell, just another one of these computer applications - one which handles email marketing.

More specifically though, it turns email from an individual to individual means of communication to a way that marketers can reach a large audience. At its heart, email marketing software allows users to send bulk email messages to target audiences. Typically these messages are regular newsletters or promotional messages (such as voucher codes or similar) to a list of subscribers who have, at some point, given their permission to receive mail from the marketer - they've "opted in" in other words.

Like any type of tool though it can also be used for less open, less honest purposes. Email marketing software is also the type of application that is, in some way, responsible for the hundreds upon thousands of unsolicited email messages - 'spam' - that fills up inboxes around the world. Many of these can be from phishing scams, contain malware such as viral attachments or computer worms, many more are just extremely irritating attempts to sell you dubious products like "prescription drugs" online.

Still, software is just a tool and there will always be someone who misuses any sort of tool. For the most part, email marketing is used as permission marketing, linking businesses from multinational brands to high street retailers to their consumers and giving a direct means of communicating with the audience en mass.

Typically, email marketing applications consist of a database and an interface. The database stores contact information, statistics on campaign performance and an archive of messages. The interface provides the user with all the tools to actually run the campaign - to send the messages, to enter contacts into the database (or import them from other data lists) and to generate reports for ROI (return on investment) for different campaigns.

Often the interface provides a simple means of automating many of these processes, such as linking form data from a web page to the database so that users can subscribe and unsubscribe from the mailing list without taking up any user time. Other form data from online pages can also be used to personalise the messages to some degree, presenting the recipients with different offers or different information depending on their stored details; effectively making a standardised template a little bit more individual.

Even with the growth of instant messaging and social networking, email is still the principal form of communication in the online world. As an internet activity, it outranks nearly all others - from shopping, downloading music or reading blogs, people still spend more time using their email.

In short, it's a cost-effective means of marketing to a huge audience and email marketing software makes it one of the easiest ways of building brand engagement with the customer.

by: Michael Brandom

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