People prefer to start their business with the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector. As they say, big things start small. SMEs do their marketing primarily by word-of-mouth. Some go beyond that and go to print (like ones in Globe’s Masigasig magazine) and TV. While some few others have discovered the power of the Internet in marketing their businesses, only a handful have chosen or even tried e-mail marketing. But do SMEs and e-mail marketing match?

A lot of SME entrepreneurs doubt the capability of e-mail marketing. Some are afraid they might be wasting their time. But I guess not. According to a Yahoo-Nielsen study in Urban Philippines, 28% of Filipinos use the internet and 63% of those check their e-mail regularly. That’s still quite a number. Connect that to e-mail marketing, is it effective? Partly. Because e-mail marketing does not rely on that alone. There are several tips to a successful e-mail marketing campaign.

For SMEs to start their e-mail marketing campaign, there are 2 paths to take:

1. Start from scratch and build up your e-mail marketing list your own;
2. or acquire consumer mailing lists from reliable list brokers

Building your own marketing list can be tough but can be quite worth the experience. Ask the e-mail addresses of your friends, relatives, colleagues. Ask a favor and let them forward your e-mail campaign to the people they know, and so on. Make your e-mail campaign viral and interesting. Your investment? Time, effort and creativity.

The second item is the easy path but entails a cost. You can approach a list broker and just purchase a mailing list. In this way, gathering of e-mail addresses won’t eat up much of your time. If you think e-mail marketing is part of your investment, then go for it.

In summary, starting your own e-mail marketing mailing list requires time and effort. Procuring the mailing list from a third-party broker requires budget on the other hand. Choosing how to start you e-mail marketing campaign depends on what suits your business and what suits you. The most important thing is that your e-mail marketing campaign must be effective in execution. There are a lot of tips in how to be effective in e-mail marketing but it won’t be discussed here.

Now that you know how to start an e-mail marketing campaign for your SME, you can plan for its execution.

Source of Yahoo-Nielsen statistics: http://www.technobiography.com/stats-facts/study-on-urban-philippines-internet-users-by-yahoo-nielsen/; Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jason_coates/