Even with the rise in the use of Social Media among the masses, and thus your target market, email is still a very viable way of marketing to your prospects and strengthening your customer relationships.  News letters are much more effective at keeping your audience up to date on what you are doing in your business, or provide just enough valuable information to your readers that they are enticed enough to go to your business website to find out more information and take an action.

One automation process tip is to create an HTML page of your email, and send out an announcement to your social networks with a link pointing to the HTML page of your email.  This is tactic is great because it lets your extended social network, many of whom are probably not currently on your mailing list, get a chance to preview your email quality and then decide of they want to be on your mailing list or not.  When you are using the right email service, the HTML page is automatically created for you and a notice is sent out to your social networks with a link going back to the HTML page.  This takes a lot of manual steps out of your online marketing strategy, which makes it easier to implement and reduces implementation errors.

Another powerful tip for automating your email process combines the power of blogging and email marketing.  If you keep a regular blogging strategy, you can automate much of the email marketing process.  You can set up your email service to automatically send out to your mailing list the latest post of your blog.  The more sophisticated programs will allow you to set up how often you send out an email, that way, if you blog on a daily basis, you aren’t sending out too many emails to your mailing list.  From experience, I wouldn’t send out mail more than 2 times per week, so if your company blogs daily, then the email that gets sent out will send out all of the new entries since the previous email was sent out.

This email marketing automation tactic is very powerful because it only requires one action to implement your email marketing.  When these two methods are combined, your business has a leg up on the competition in internet marketing, because the one action of adding a blog entry, will in effect, send out an email to your mailing list, and send out an update post to your major social networks.

There are many ways to automate and streamline your online marketing process and using the right email marketing tools is the key to your business’ online success.