In order to be able to hold the attention span of your audience, you need to be aware of what will capture and hold their attention. In other words, you need to understand THEM. Understanding your audience gives you the necessary information you need to better serve your potential customers. With email marketing, finding these variables is easy. Email marketing solutions are able to track "Open Rates" and "Clicks". What this means for you is that you can determine, through each email you send out, which client has opened their email, and who has clicked on the links within your email marketing campaign. By tracking these variables you can determine things like: Do your customers open their email more often at night or during the day? Which links do they click on? Do they forward their emails to their friends? This lets you know a little bit more about the people who you contact. It will also set up criteria for your next email campaign. If your customers are overwhelmingly opening emails during the day, the likelihood is that they have chosen to read emails at work. If your clients are opening their emails at night, chances are they are reading their emails at home.

You can use that information to segment your list off into two groups: those that open their emails at work, and those that open their emails at home, sending out two different campaigns now at two different times. Within those, you now have two differing marketing strategies: one to express attitudes of business, or an 'at work' mentality; and another for family or the home. The tone has changed. One simple statistic has helped you create bull's-eye targeted campaigns.

If you move beyond that statistic in to "clicks" you'll find that the results will change your campaign even further. Did more of your customers click on the weekend get away to Montreal, or the weeklong trip to Tahiti? This statistic can have an effect on the layout of your campaign, or even encourage you to segment your audience again. Maybe 75% of the clicks were for Tahiti, meaning your next campaign should focus there. Maybe fifty percent of your contacts clicked on each. You can take the original contact list and now branch them off into two different categories. With email marketing, these statistic help you to define the characteristics of your customer in order to better target your communications to your customers' specific needs.

Once you have studied the information that your email marketing solution has been designed to track, you can now take the proactive approach and determine your future campaigns. And there are no limits. With every new campaign, you gain a better understanding of your audience. With print and media ads, your results are obscured. Email marketing solutions provide hard evidence of where your customer's mentality is at.

By understanding your audience, you can create an effective marketing campaign that will directly influence the number of customers viewing your communications message. You will see this through real time tracking that email marketing solutions provide. Robert Burko is the President of Elite Email (http://www.eliteemail.com), the complete email marketing software package used by small, medium and large organizations around the world. You can deploy a comprehensive email marketing solution for your business with a no risk free trial. Start harnessing the power of email marketing today!