Email marketing is best to increase traffic and generate sales (if you are selling some physical items). The first thing you need to do is to collect database. Have RSS Feed at your site and let visitors sign-up themselves to receive your updates. It is not advice to buy database as those email addresses might not interest with your content/products/services. They will treat you spam and your effort of sending them the email will be wasted.
Email-marketing is simply marketing a commercial message via electronic mail. The electronic mail (e-mail) is sent to prospective customers calling for business requests, asking for sales and getting ads. It is carried through different types of mails which include direct mails, email newsletters and transactional mails. This e-mails help build business relationship, get new customers and encourage the old customers to purchase something as fast as they can.
You are absolutely right. But if you deciided to launch an email marketing campaign you must be accurate in order not to turn it in spam.
Yes email marketing is mostly important part of web site marketing and its works like very simple...Start collecting email IDs.After that send related promotional information to subscribers. But avoid to sending spam emails.