Email Marketing – Why do it? And How?

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness.

What is Email Marketing?

You have heard of email marketing repeatedly on the internet, at conferences, and during marketing strategy meetings. They say email marketing enriches business communications, targets specific key markets, and is both cost-effective and environmentally friendly. But what exactly is email marketing and how does it work? How is an email more effective than a radio spot or television advertisement and why should a business spend the time to maintain an email list?

Email marketing occurs when a company sends a commercial message to a group of people by use of electronic email. Most commonly through advertisements, requests for business, or sales or donation any email communication is considered email marketing if it helps to build customer loyalty, trust in a product or company or brand recognition. Email marketing is an efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting your business.

With email marketing, you can easily and quickly reach target markets without the need for large quantities of print space, television or radio time or high production costs. Thanks to effective email marketing software, you can maintain an email list that has been segmented based on several factors including the length of time addresses have been on the list, customers’ likes and dislikes, spending habits and other important criteria. Emails are then created and sent out to specifically target members of your email list, providing them with a personalized email detailing information that they are interested in or have requested. This helps to promote trust and loyalty to a company while also increasing sales.

With the help of email marketing software, email marketing is an effective way to not only reach your target markets but also to stay connected with your purchasing base. Through efficient use of email marketing, you can retain current clients while also targeting new markets. You can easily monitor how effective a marketing campaign is, and see that your return on investment is substantially higher than with other, more traditional, marketing campaigns. Let the internet help guide your customers to you again and again with an effective email marketing campaign.

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Email MARKETING has several key advantages over traditional mail marketing, including the following:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most EFFECTIVE ONLINE MARKETING tactic.

• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.

• Over half of all Internet users check or send email on a typical day.

• Email allows MARKETERS to reach out to consumers with
  personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.

• Transactional emails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.

The disadvantages of EMAIL MARKETING surround the rejection/spam rate of the emails by the consumers’ email program, negatively affecting the delivery rate of the emails. This has somewhat been eliminated with the idea of “Opt-in” emailing, where the consumer consents to receiving the emails and therefore eliminates the idea of receiving unsolicited emails – Ideally maintaining emails that are relevant and appropriate to each individual recipient.

Email Marketing – Why do it? And How?

Well here are a few thoughts on the matter:

Why?

• Cost – Email marketing is CHEAP, there are no two ways about it. Whether you do it yourself, or through an email MARKETING AGENCY, marketing to hundreds of consumers via email is going to cost you tiddlywinks compared to other channels of advertising.

• Success - Emails can be targeted specifically to the ideal consumer. With this concept in mind, along with email cost-effectiveness, it’s no wonder that email marketing’s ROI often blows other DIRECT MARKETING strategies out of the water, The trick is that you have to get it right!

• Measurability and Flexibility – With the analytics available today it’s easy to track responses to your emails exactly, in order to work out what parts of your campaign are working and what parts aren’t. With this knowledge, you can then react instantly to modify your campaign strategy if need be.

How?

The success factors of email marketing, using:

• Creative – This refers to the overall design of the email (layout/images/ color). Specifically, it is a good idea to ask each customer whether they would like the email in text or HTML as there is often a great preference for one over the other.

• Relevance – Targeting, targeting, and more targeting. Make your emails relevant and personalized to each recipient if you want that RESPONSE RATE to rise.

• Incentive - Recipients look at emails and think “WIIFM?”, i.e. “What’s in it for me??”. There’s no such thing as a free lunch right? Well... Offer the recipient a “free lunch” for participating and they will be more likely to respond.
  

• Timing – Don’t send out an email that recipients will receive overnight, let it pop up in their inbox during their working day. This also expands to selecting certain days, months and even years. Remember – You can test and measure what timing works best for which email.

• Integration – Companies can not just rely on one method of MARKETING, nor can they rely on several methods of differentiated MARKETING. Instead, best marketing practices utilize INTEGRATED MARKETING communication (IMC) where all aspects of their promotion work together to create a whole. EMAIL MARKETING must be included here, therefore your emails must carry the same image and message as your entire operations. Even the timing of the campaign must work in with other aspects of your marketing mix.

• Copy – When considering the copywriting for your email you must consider all aspects of the language, from the subject line through to your mail signature. With emails, not all links should be saved for the last sentence, pop them in early to grab that impulsive customer!

• Attributes – Here talks about the email header, with attributes including the subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt and format. Once again, testing your campaigns can rule out the attributes that customers consider spam and highlighting the attributes that will work best for your business.

• Landing Page – Want those emails to turn into sales conversions? Don’t just hyperlink your customers to your home page; show them exactly where you want them to go and make it quick and easy to complete any forms!

So yes... Email marketing is a vital component in many industries, especially for creating those important customer-firm relationships. Learn to use it well and it will definitely bump up your company’s success.

Just try not to send out another email that goes straight through to my spam folder. And, if the email does manage to make it through to my inbox – Make it worthwhile to read!