It is also the perfect vehicle to deliver new offers, business news and product announcements and keeping your brand top-of-mind.

So what rules are there and what are the no-nos?

1. Send emails to customers who want to hear from you. Build the list from either your website or instore purchases.
2. Use a CMS Email Solution so that your subscribers and marketing is fully integrated. This will take the struggle out of building lists.
3. View the CMS tracking information to see what type of response you get from the Emails, open rates, click-throughs and who purchases from being sent an email.
4. Work out the perfect time to send your email. Later in the day customers often have less time and patience then in the morning. Test the market and consider who you are selling to. Personal products/services are more likely to be viewed early in the morning before work or later in the evening or weekends. B2B products/services are likely to be actioned during the day. Consider the best time of day for your audience to open, read and action the content in your email.
5. Don't send too many emails too frequently or your customers feel like they are being spammed and unsubscribe very quickly. Create a balance between how often you want to send emails and how often your customers would like to hear from you. There is no hard and fast rule. Some businesses email once a month, while others four times a week. Have a go and track the response.
6. Send interesting information to your customers and don't repeat the same sales pitch month in and month out. Educate your audience and make sure you give them a reason for reading your email.
7. Try to personalise the email as much as possible so that you keep a good relationship with your customer.
8. Test your email and make sure ALL the links are working before you publish it. You don't want to send people to the wrong place or miss any opportunities.
9. Make sure your subject line is compelling and attention grabbing or else it won't even be opened. This needs as much attention as what is inside the email and make sure you don't use 'Free'. 'Advertisement', '$' or '!' or it is more likely to be picked up by spam filters.
10. Get some feedback from others about your email campaigns and make sure you fix up any typos, broken links or formatting problems asap.
11. Have a purpose for the email. Make sure you include a bold call to action to entice your audience to click a link, download a file or fill out a form so that you get a predicted action from your campaign.

Start with a great looking template and then really look at what you want to advertise and how you are going to do it. Test, test and re-test and then gauge the results, make adjustments for next time and go again.