Having a high quality email contact list, that automatically sends out emails is key to making email marketing work. One big thing that I had to learn the hard way was, consumer eye appeal, if the person(s) that you sent the email to is looking for a certain product and you send an email about a service that is no relation, then they won't be attracted to that. Second, the platform that you use for the email that you are going to use for an email marketing campaign for instance, needs to catch the email contacts eye, they need to be interested in what you are pitching, if there is no interest, there is no success.
The last thing that I again, had to learn the hard way about email marketing is, make sure you send the email to contacts that are of interest or group them by the category of what you are sending. If you send a mass email to all of your contacts, you are most likely going to get a lot of emails back, complaining about spamming or "stop emailing me," even though, those weren't your intentions. So start small with about 50 contacts and group them into categories by color, words, numbers, anyway that is easiest for you, and have an eye appealing platform with colors, pictures and big wording that easily describes what you are trying to get out to the general public.