Marketing your business with email isn't just for the big companies. Everyone with a business should be using email to market your products and/or services—or you risk leaving a lot of revenue on the table.

It's easier than you think to get started. Focus on optimizing these three components of email marketing to get the most return for your efforts. Set these up properly, and you'll have a good foundation for email marketing success.

Your Newsletter Signup

You will want to have an information-packed free item that you give away in order to get subscribers to your newsletter. (Very few people will sign up just for a newsletter these days. We all have too many emails already!) Put an opt-in form on some of the most popular pages of your website for this free item, but be sure to tell your subscribers they will be getting your newsletter as well.

Your subject line is the single most important sentence in all your emails. A slightly better subject line is going to make a bigger impact than a much better email. The more people who you get to open your email, the more click-throughs you're going to get and the more sales you'll get.

So how do you write attention-grabbing subject lines for your marketing emails? Here are 6 success tips.

Use Personalization

Use their name in the subject. Some marketers think this is tacky, or that people get used to it or start to tune it out after a time.

They don't.

This has been split tested time and again and again by marketers across many industries. Using a person's name in the subject line gets a higher open rate than the same subject line without their name. Almost always.

Email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of online marketing. It's one of the few marketing methods that gets you up close and personal with your audience on an individual basis.

Some business owners feel they should give up on email marketing, but nothing could be further than the truth. The money is still in the list and that's not changing anytime soon. But, there are some tricks to making it work for your business.

Know Who Your Audience Is

Study your target audience so that you can know who your individual audience is. For instance, maybe your target audience are women with children who are starting their own business and are starting out with a mid-size budget. If you know this information, you can know a lot of things about your audience, such as the types of products or services they need as well as how much they can afford to pay for them.

Whether you use your email list for sending a newsletter, promotional emails or simply to stay in touch with the people that have expressed interest in your business, it's essential for you to measure and track the following key elements to know how your list is performing for you.

Sent mail – means the number of emails that actually went through your email service provider system. The number is not always the same as the size of your list because that list may contain some email addresses that are no longer valid.

Delivered mail – is the number of emails that were sent and not rejected by the recipient. This rejection can occur at the receiving server which means your email may never land in the intended inbox and never be seen, even in a junk or trash folder.

Using subject lines the right way can greatly improve the number of people who actually open and read your emails. Unless your subscribers open the email, they can't read and act upon the goodies inside, right?

What do your subject lines say to your readers? Are they drab and make your subscribers head for the delete button? Or do they POP and make them want to read further?

If you're struggling to get your emails opened, there's no better time than now to give your prospects what they signed up for. Keep reading for actionable steps you can utilize to craft email subject lines that get noticed and have your readers begging for more.

Tip #1: Maintain Relevance

Make certain your subject line is appropriate for the subject of your list. A reader who signs up for your list expecting one thing, but receiving something completely out of line with what they signed up to receive will not be in the buying mood.

Email marketing often involves a tightrope walk between selling and connection. If you sell too much, you’ll lose your customer's interest and burn out your list. Focus too much on connection and not on selling and you won't generate enough revenue.

What's the Right Balance?

Generally the right amount is somewhere between 10% and 20% selling, with between 80% to 90% of your content being focused on quality, solving the customer's problems and making a connection.

80% to 90% content is enough to get your customers in the habit of opening your emails. They'll know that by and large, emails from you will be of a high quality.

Having 80%+ of your content be connection-based also does one other thing: it essentially buys you the right to sell to them.

Email marketing is a hot button topic online today. “The money is in the list” is a popular phrase that every online business owner has heard.

This is true. However, a lot of people wrongly focus on getting the biggest list possible, instead of a focused list.

Having a targeted list is critical. A list of 100,000 people that never buy from you does you no good. On the other hand, if you have a list of 400 hyper-responsive prospects, who are ready to buy, then you're on the right path.

So it's not about the size of the list, it’s about the quality. A lot of business owners expend a huge amount of energy building a huge list, only to make no sales from it.

So how do you get a targeted list? This isn’t as hard as you might think. Here are three strategies to do this:

Focus on the Target

If you are targeting the wrong people, you will not have a focused list. You want to only go after those in your target market which results in sales.

You have probably heard about the importance of setting up an email marketing campaign. Most of your potential customers will need to hear about your product several times before they will consider making a purchase. Email marketing allows you to stay in contact with potential customers by emailing them helpful information on a regular basis. When they hear from you regularly, over time they will be more likely to buy from you.

Email marketing can also help you turn your current customers into repeat customers. It is always easier to sell to someone who has already purchased from you. Email marketing can help you stay in touch with your current customers and let them know about new products and new information.

Autoresponders play a vital role in an effective email marketing campaign. An autoresponder is a program that allows you to send out emails automatically. It can store several prewritten emails and deliver them to people who sign up for your list in a sequential fashion. An autoresponder is a tool you can use to tell them about your product over and over again.

There are so many marketing tools to choose from that it can be difficult to know which will work best for your business. However, a weekly email newsletter is an effective and easy marketing tool for any business owner.

Here are a few ways a weekly email newsletter can benefit your business and increase your revenues.

Sending out an email newsletter is inexpensive.

There are no printing or mailing costs associated with contacting prospects via email. You will need to use a newsletter management program to send out your newsletter, but you can look for one within your price range. Newsletter management programs allow subscribers to manage their own subscriptions, so you don't need to pay anyone for that service. Some even offer templates for you to use so you won't need to hire a designer either.