But the main advantage of email marketing is not cost. Email is simply the most effective way to stay in touch with most of your customers. If you’re like many businesses, the 2009 recession forced you to hunker down and focus on driving business and sales from those most likely to buy—people you already have a relationship with—and that’s what email marketing is all about.

Email marketing is powerful, but it’s also a challenge because the inbox is a hostile environment. Whether your email is noteworthy or not-worthy depends on your ability to stick to the fundamentals of authentic relationship building with your customers. That’s what this book is about—how to use email to build long-lasting customer relationships.

Over the years, we at Constant Contact have made it our mission to collect, create, refine, and share email marketing best practices with our customers. We’re proud to now share these with you in this book—strategies that have contributed to the success of hundreds of thousands of businesses around the globe. On a daily basis we interact with thousands of business owners and non-profits just like you on the phone, online via webinars, and in person at live seminars held throughout the United States. These interactions provide us with regular feedback and fascinating lessons on the rapidly evolving world of email marketing.

Here are some examples of small businesses and non-profits who have discovered a broad range of benefits of email marketing:

I know the email strategies in this book work because I have personally taught them to thousands of small business owners and watched the results. Constant Contact’s success is directly attributable to the fact that we have helped so many of them grow their organizations. In addition, I used these same email strategies to help build Constant Contact from an unknown technology startup into an industry-leading public company. When I arrived in 2001, we had 10 customers and roughly $100 a month in revenue. Now, we are the largest provider of email marketing services for small- to medium-sized businesses, with 300,000 customers in 120 countries and 500+ employees. I hope you’ll find a path to greater business success in the pages that follow.

Since this book is for busy leaders who don’t have a lot of time, I’ve decided to use Chapter 1 to summarize all the email marketing success fundamentals contained in this book, so you can quickly decide which of your own email practices need immediate attention.

The rest of the book will help you build a comprehensive email marketing strategy for your business.