If you're in business, no doubt you've heard of the effectiveness of email campaigns. Staying in touch with current customers, uncovering new ones, alerts and updates are all on the agenda for a successful email strategy. But what can be done to assure that success?

First, it's important that those receiving your email really want to be on your list. Adding an option to "opt out" is imperative for your success in communicating with your customers and potential customers. This allows the recipient to make their preferences known and, the remaining contacts will be expecting your email and, perhaps, even looking forward to it.

Secondly, consistency is important. While you don't want to "spam" their inbox with multiple, duplicate emails every hour, you do want to be regular and predictable in your email launches. Choose a day and time to send that will be convenient for your contacts. With the advent of handheld devices for receiving email, 2 a.m. local time might not be your best choice. However, Monday at 7 a.m. could work.

Thirdly, make the message relevant to your audience. Even if you're just sending text, the message should be important to your contact. Product improvement? Great! Time to get a coupon to save on their next purchase? They'll probably love getting those alerts. Maybe you want to offer a referral incentive to your loyal customer base if they tell a friend about your business and it results in a new customer. Or, perhaps you're offering a limited offer and you want to make them aware of your call to action. Whatever your story is, make it relevant to the recipient.

And, lastly, where do you start? If you're a business owner with little experience in this arena of marketing, you might consider hiring a professional to help you develop campaigns and stick to a strict schedule while also building your "opt-in" database of contacts. If you're more of a "hands on" type, there are browser-based email campaign management options available that will help you with keeping track of who wants to receive your message and even offer "canned" layouts for your message. Many also offer analytics, which tell you who responded by opening or "clicking" on your email links. They also include "opt-out" buttons and require that you comply with "canned spam" regulations in all your campaigns. They keep you honest.

Whatever path you choose from here is up to you. But, for most business, email campaigns can offer an effective and relatively easy way to stay in touch with your customers and new relationships with potential customers.

Need more help? Please call or email Total Package Advertising and Marketing if you need more direction in getting your email campaigns established and off the ground.

Social Media is, in a word, exploding! So, how can you use this fertile new territory to enhance your business? The strict definition of social media, according to searchenginewatch.com is "A category of sites that are based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction."

A multitude of options like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Plaxo, Yelp, and many more make up choices available to those seeking social interaction on the internet. So, where do you start?