Marketing software is sometimes viewed as a luxury, not a necessity. While you can certainly accomplish marketing without marketing software, marketing software lessens the time and effort required for marketing and your marketing efforts will generally be much more effective. There are various types of marketing software, and numerous producers of marketing software. Finding the right combination of marketing software for you is the challenge.

The first step in preparing an effective marketing campaign is to devise a solid marketing plan. When writing a marketing plan, there are several things to consider. The main points are defining your target market and identifying the characteristics of that market, analyzing your competition, formulating your unique selling proposition using a competitive advantage, reviewing options for marketing mediums, preparing your marketing budget, and setting milestones for your marketing campaign. Marketing software, such as Marketing Plan Pro by Palo Alto, will help you work through the details of these steps to create a useful and powerful marketing plan.

If you intend to engage in email marketing via newsletters, autoresponders, announcements, or mass email campaigns, you will find that email marketing software is crucial. Of course, there are online email marketing services such as gotcorp.com that provide self-serve email marketing tools like Campaigner. Using such tools for email marketing is an option, but there are ongoing costs involved. If you choose to use email marketing software instead, programs like Email Marketing Director and Campaign Enterprise 9 by Arial are very good.

Good email marketing software enables you to personalize messages and to manage your mailing lists through a database. A time saving feature to look for in email marketing software is the ability of the software to automatically process unsubscribe requests. Most email marketing software packages have built-in templates you can use to produce email newsletters, announcements and marketing messages. Support for embedded images and compatibility with web editing software programs may be of some importance.

If you are really serious about email marketing, it is best to get started with advanced email marketing software from the beginning. Advanced email marketing software has features that will enable you to personalize and track your email messages. With tracking capabilities and built-in reporting functions, you can determine the effectiveness of your email messages as well as who is and who is not opening and responding to the messages.

These advanced email marketing software programs generally use SQL, Oracle, or Access database technology. High quality email marketing software also has automated features for managing email lists. These automated, time-saving features usually include handling unsubscribe requests and removing bounced or rejected email addresses from the email lists.

Customized marketing software suites may be something to consider as well. With customized marketing software, you can often integrate marketing into your sales and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Some features that are common to customized marketing software include the ability to capture leads, to forecast sales, to manage contacts, and to analyze data that is collected through the integrated system. Project management capabilities can even be merged with customized marketing software.

So, the big question is, "Do I really need marketing software?" Like I said before, many people view marketing software as a luxury. However, marketing software makes the job of internet marketing much easier, especially if it has automated features. There are options to using marketing software. Online marketing services are one of those options; however, unlike using marketing software, marketing services generally have ongoing fees that are charged monthly or per campaign. Using marketing software you can devise and manage your own internet marketing campaign which is a cost-effective solution to marketing online.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope, fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing advice you're getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing, or a website owner who wants to make more money from your website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your internet business at http://BiznessTips.com