Email - today's preferred business communication tool - provides you a simple, powerful, affordable way to develop, manage and maintain relationships as well as sell products and services. Let's briefly examine how permission-based email marketing positively affects:

* Brand Awareness

* Market Intelligence

* Web Traffic

* Prospect Leads

* Loyalty

Build Brand Awareness. Email builds brand awareness by promoting the name, the look, feel and image of your company. Users now prefer HTML email to text email. HTML email gives you the ability to include logos and other corporate images to reinforce your existing brand.

Increase Market Intelligence. Permission-based email allows you easily to survey your current customer base to solicit feedback on your website, customer service, products and services. With this baseline survey in hand, you can gauge how attitudes and awareness are changing over time. And with the capabilities of professional email programs, you can segment the results to see differences between established and more recent customers. Results such as these help you tweak and tune marketing and public relations efforts.

Drive Website Traffic. Your website can be one of your primary tools for customer acquisition and retention. People must visit the site in order for you to capture them as clients or up-sell them on other services. Email marketing programs can bring new visitors to the site and established customers back again.

Generate Leads. An email newsletter containing worthwhile content, or a promotional offer with a high-perceived value can be used as incentives to convince prospects to provide their email addresses. Once you have their addresses, you can initiate dialogue that results in acquiring and retaining the right kinds of customers. Profitable customers.

Build Loyalty. In our opinion, building loyalty is the most important feature of an email program. Permission-based communication allows you to build customer loyalty, and customer loyalty kicks off a series of positive events including:

* market share increases because acquisition costs are amortized, allowing you to realize the lifetime value of a customer

* Some studies show that it costs six times more to acquire a customer as to retain one

* The Harvard Business Review reports that cutting customer defections by just five percent can result in profitability increases of as much as 35 percent

* sustainable growth continues because you have a solid base of customers who will refer others

* attract better employees who in turn deliver better value to customers

You no longer have a good reason for not using permission-based email marketing to unleash the power of customer relationships.

Harry Hoover is managing principal of Hoover ink PR, http://www.hoover-ink.com. He has 26 years of experience in crafting and delivering bottom line messages that ensure success for serious businesses like Brent Dees Financial Planning, Duke Energy, Levolor, North Carolina Tourism, Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems, VELUX and Verbatim.