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If you want to get serious about marketing your online business, you will have to build an email strategy. And as your business grows, the demands of keeping up with your email strategy may overwhelm you. That's when you should investigate both email marketing software and services. What's the difference?

Email Marketing Software

Good email marketing software can relieve you of all the grunt work involved in keeping your emailing lists up to date. It will manage your subscriptions and deletions, keep your customers' profiles current, and even use an autoresponder to send out a thank you following each order.

It will even handle your orders and payment. Having email marketing software can make you feel like you've got a topnotch executive secretary keeping track of all those details so you can focus on improving your website and building your traffic.

Email Marketing Services

Using email marketing services is a great way to make sure your email campaigns don't receive the kiss of death which comes from being identified as spam. They'll send all you mailings with unsubscribe options, and honor all removal requests within the required ten days.

Being found to have sent spam can get you fined, but it will also get your mailings blacklisted and effectively kill your business!

Email marketing services will also let you either send mailings to your customer base or to your opt in subscribers who may not yet be customers. They can even assist you in creating an opt in list, one of the most powerful marketing tools.

Two of the better email marketing services are http://Aweber.com and http://getresponse.com. They're great for their unlimited autoresponders, letting you send as many followup messages as you like.

That's essential because most of your visitors won't place an order on their first visit, and by following up, you'll familiarize them with your product or service and build your credibility.

The Pros and Cons of Email Marketing Software and Services

Email marketing software requires you to buy it for a rather hefty sum, and make sure you have both the bandwidth and hardware to support it. That can also be expensive.

Then you'll have to install it or pay to have someone install it on your email servers, and you or your staff will have to learn how to use and troubleshoot it. You'll also have to stay current on email regulations, and not send any mailings which trigger disfavor with the major ISPs.

But you won't have to pay ongoing fees, and you'll control exactly how the software handles your email campaigns.

Aweber.com, http://getresponse.com, or another email marketing service will remove the hassle of managing your mass mailings and provide the experience you need to avoid being blacklisted and to build the best possible email promotional campaigns.

The most sophisticated services will even do a test emailing to help you fine tune your approach before doing a mass mailing, and you will get great targeting and personalization features to boot.

Although you'll have to pay ongoing monthly fees which vary according to the size of your mailing lists, the opinion here is that the competition between email marketing software and service goes in favor of the experience of the email marketing services.