I often talk about how emailing marketing is THE most lucrative and important part of your website. Before you try to get Facebook “Likes” or Twitter “followers” you should focus on developing your list above all else.

As you begin to develop your list, though, it can begin to get cluttered like anything else. This would be fine, except a clean email list will save you a lot of money.

This article will uncover the dirty secret that email marketing software companies don’t want you to know and teach you a lesson in mailing list maintenance which will save you a lot of money while keeping your email list as trim as possible.

It’s no secret that premium email software providers charge more money for the more subscribers whom you have on your list. The more subscribers you have, the more money it costs to upkeep your list.

What IS a bit of a nasty secret is that people who don’t even RECEIVE your emails count as subscribers according to email marketing software companies. Confused?

Say that someone subscribes to your mailing list. They opt in and receive a handful of emails from you. They decide that they don’t want to be on your mailing list anymore and unsubscribe. This happens all the time, and you would assume that that person would be taken off of your mailing list.

Believe it or not, they STAY right there and are counted as another subscriber even though they’re clearly not receiving your content. So if your total number of subscribers PLUS unsubscribers together equal enough to put you into the next payment tier with your email software company, you’ll be paying in that next tier for people who aren’t currently receiving your emails.

Email marketing is a practice that has been around for about twenty years, but its one of the most effective marketing methods that exists today for business. Over the twenty year period, many technological advancements have taken place making email marketing more effective than ever. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do email marketing, so let’s discuss exactly how to do email marketing the right way for your business.

Brand awareness – Brand awareness allows current subscribers to know about new products or services of your business. The message uses the voice and tone that is consistent with your website and consistent with the culture of your business. For instance, every message from Starbucks stays consistent with their brand, and that’s what you want to do too.

Sales promotions – Sales promotion messages provide subscribers with up to date information about your sales, promotion or offers. Best practices today include having online coupons in the message or directing the subscribers to their Facebook page to redeem the special offer. Not only are they selling products or services, but they are increasing their subscriber base on all the various media channels.

Engagement – Email messages with engagement provide useful, relevant content about your business. For instance, maybe a message goes out to the subscribers about a charity event the business is participating in. Or another message might be an informational message about how the business is responding to industry changes or big events.

Email marketing is a direct marketing tool which uses email as a means of communicating a marketing message. It became very popular in the early 1990′s as the Internet picked up steam and went mainstream. In fact, if you are anything like me, you probably have quite a few email addresses for personal and business use. Email is just an ‘accepted everyday part of life’ and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Well, for business owners, email marketing is absolutely critical.

Email is still the largest social network and it dwarfs social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you think about it, all those forwards of emails are people sharing content. The great thing is that technology has allowed email marketing to become highly sophisticated with tracking abilities that show who opened, clicked, interacted with the email and what actions they took after receiving the email. Having this kind of data available at your fingertips allows you to track and measure the success of your email marketing efforts.

Looking at email marketing in today’s world, several studies indicate business’s top priorities in 2011 are email and social marketing. There’s also been quite a few advancements to email. Social sharing tools are creating a renaissance for sharing opportunities via email meaning there’s the functionality to share the message on Facebook and Twitter, instead of the normal ‘forward to a friend’ functionality.

Email marketing is the largest social network out there today and still the ‘bread and butter’ for a lot of business in terms of online marketing. There’s really limitless options on how to use email messages effectively, but the trick is measuring the results and making calculated changes based on those results. There are nine metrics businesses should use monitor the success of their email marketing campaigns.

Deliverability – This metric gives you the percentage of emails delivered to the subscribers’ email accounts. You will see this number identified as ‘bounce rate’. The higher the bounce rate, the worse your account looks to the email providers meaning your account can be flagged as not being legit.

Opens – This is the number of opens your email message had, and it’s in pure numbers, not percentages.

Open rate – This metric takes the total number of opens and divides it by the total number of emails sent giving you a percentage. So if you sent out 1000 emails and 200 were opened, your open rate would be 20%. After enough emails have been sent out, you can look to see which ones had the highest open rate which allows you to analyze the message to see what elements are causing people to open the message.

Clicks – This is where you really start seeing how effective your content was. This metric measures how many people clicked on a link inside the email message. If you did your job, the clicks will be high.

Click through rate – This is the ratio of clicks to the number of opened emails. So if you had 200 opens and 50 people clicked on an internal link, then you have a click through rate (CTR) of 25%. Once again, after a certain amount of emails, compare CTR’s to see which messages are causing people to take action.

Segmentation will enable you to send emails that are relevant to your receivers needs and desires. Along with sending relevant emails there will also be a chance to bring the volume of emails that are sent down drastically due to the identification and elimination of irrelevant mailings.

Depending on your business or site segments could easily be based off of the categories on you have on there. If you have access to analytics these would be great to look at. People tell exactly how to segment them but you just have to listen. You can segment people not only based on demographics (age, sex, location….) But you should always take their purchasing and behaviors into consideration. If a user is coming onto your page, and then clicking and viewing a certain page or entering something in the search box you want to know these things.

With this information you can find out more about who you are sending emails to. This enables you to know what vital information like preferences, interests, needs, budget and more. For example if a viewer came onto your page and while there they searched for blue pens, looked a couple of blue pens, and looked at different models of blue pens what does this mean? Well it means that they are interested in blue pens. It would make no sense to then mail them something out about green markers when they were interested in particularly blue pens.