Email marketing is an effective way to earn good money even when you are not in an office desk, or behind a big investment company. The only thing you need to remember, is to do everything right.

The best weapon in the open source email marketing industry is OpenEMM, the free, open-source version of Agnita’s commercial email marketing platform. It features a pack of CRM and list management tools, open tracking, event-driven email capabilities, click tracking, split testing and grouping, bounce processing, and a full featured editor. This will give you all the email marketing features you would need from a commercial pack that would cost you thousands of dollars, just for free.

However, with all its features, it’s not that easy to use. Administration and installation of an OpenEMM system is not for beginner users. It requires a solid working knowledge of SMTP, and the ability to install and administrate a full-featured Windows or Linux server with the Java platform available. This precludes most shared hosting, and may even be difficult with a managed dedicated server.

The best alternative for shared or managed hosting is PHPList. This package should work in any LAMP, WIMP or WAMP server configuration, including most shared hosting. In fact, many shared hosting providers have PHPList included in Fantastico or other application installers. In this case, PHPList can be a plug-and-play solution for newsletter or one-time offer list marketing.

The disadvantage however is that bounce processing is not sophisticated, but rather relies on message parsing, which is not as reliable as VERP bounce processing. Also, click and open tracking are not central to PHPList’s capabilities. Click and open tracking will require you to enable “experimental” features, and possibly apply source code patches. List segmentation and split testing are difficult, if not impossible, and not native to PHPList’s feature set. If you have some other mechanism to track clicks, and can live without opens tracking, PHPList is a solid, free solution.

Finally, if you have a Wordpress blog, the simplest and most powerful solution might be a plugin away. Mailpress has an amazing array of features available, and as it’s a Wordpress plugin can be used in combination with any Wordpress blog. Of course, as a plugin, it offers a look and feel that Wordpress users will be comfortable with, and tight integration with Wordpress is possible, such as automatically sending blog posts via email.

To learn more about email marketing and how to get a grip of a good, solid, email marketing strategy, visit JustRealMarketing.com and discover how to make great, decent money, even when jobless.