All about utilizing electronic mail as a way of communicating. It’s a powerful method available to today’s online marketers–provided it’s done properly.
Email marketing is all about utilizing electronic mail as a means of communicating with a target audience of customers, prospects, etc. It is still probably one of the most powerful marketing methods available to today’s online marketers—provided it is done properly.
Among its many benefits is the fact that it operates on a ‘one-to-one’ basis, so it is not just about sending emails to contacts about your offers. It is more about opening a dialogue and encouraging individuals within your target audience to take whatever action you recommend.
There is surely no doubt then, that it offers marketers the most efficient and cost-effective method there is for reaching target audiences, generating leads, qualifying prospects, moving them through the sales cycle and retaining their loyalty.
Email Power
Using email is still one of the most powerful ways there is of building relationships with customers. Current customers, provided you look after them, are always your best prospects for future business, so email marketing used this way can also be a great technique for gaining repeat sales.
Similarly, email marketing may convert those who weren’t ready to purchase on first contact by cultivating an ongoing relationship whereby you can push your message to your target audience and pull them back to your website. It’s perfect therefore, for engaging, educating, and retaining your valued customers, prospects and website visitors with efficient email communications that can maximize your marketing efforts.
The true power of email is illustrated by the fact that over ninety percent of all Internet users and more than sixty percent of all Americans use email on a regular basis.
Spam
The latest statistics show that 48% of all email today is spam.
Spamming means sending unsolicited commercial email using broadcast methods to multiple recipients without first establishing a relationship with them and without first asking if they are interested in hearing from you.
Email marketing can be the best and most profitable tool for promotion, but it really must be done correctly and ethically to be acceptable. It has received very bad press lately due in large part to the numbers of unsolicited spam emails that cause problems for everyone.
We’ve all become conscious of this misuse of our inboxes, so we should understand people’s frustrations and that you’ve got to send value, or your message will be misunderstood.
Today’s ethical email marketer always operates on the understanding that the recipients of his messages have, in some way, already indicated an interest in his products or offers, or agreed in advance to receive them. That is why effective email marketing today is also sometimes referred to as permission marketing.
List Building and Maintenance
Once you have a decent sized email database you are ready to start your email campaigns but first you have to build that database (or email list, as it is more commonly known).
There are various ways of doing this but the easiest is to put up an ‘opt-in’ form prominently on as many pages as possible of your website and offer some form of incentive for people to sign up. Be sure to respond to such sign-ups though by sending an email asking for them to confirm that they do indeed want to sign up, in case someone else used their address fraudulently. When they confirm, you can enter them on your list.
There is software available that will automate the whole process for you. By supplying their email addresses, these people have given you permission, either explicit or implicit, to contact them by email. Ongoing list maintenance is essential, as is the need to ensure that every mail sent out is exciting and fresh.
If your list members start to associate your emails with uninteresting or unimportant messages, they just won’t open them, or, if they do, it may well be just to find your opt-out link.
Effective Campaigning
It shouldn’t take long to set up and implement a campaign but for it to be truly effective, it has to be managed properly and conducted in a professional manner. High quality email campaigns can deliver effective messages that drive action and enhance customer relationships.
By following some simple guidelines and practices, you can easily run effective email campaigns and ultimately enhance your own reputation too. A typical email campaign can deliver responses within forty eight hours if it hits the right target. The frequency at which you conduct your campaigns really depends on your aggressiveness and the amount of effort you put in but a good rule of thumb is not more than once a week and not less than every two months.
Be sure to keep a close eye on your efforts to make sure that you are on-plan and remember that HTML email continues to produce higher click-through rates than text-based email (when sent to those who can receive it).
Preparation and Planning
Your first concern should be your email’s subject line because its job is to get the recipient to open the email. It should also, of course, specify the subject of the email. Before you send a single email (or if you’re already using email marketing, before you send another one), you must have a plan. It should detail how often you’ll do mailouts and the form your emails will take (newsletter, blog compilations, sale copy, etc) among other things.
The content of your emails will be dictated by your plan but make sure that you do more than simply bombard your list members with offers. Come up with some original content in the form of advice, a ‘how-to’ piece or something similar.
One of the surest ways of getting people to unsubscribe is to send emails that are confusing or pointless.
Create a landing page for your email campaign, blending the page design with the message to reflect consistency and increase return on your investment. And provide real time tracking so that you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Summary
These days, most people’s first response when email marketing is mentioned is a negative one.
Reading through this article, you’ve probably realized by now, if you didn’t already know, that email marketing is a critical part of the overall online marketing puzzle. We now know how to effectively and efficiently leverage email communications to ensure lasting and profitable customer relationships, strengthen our brand value and increase our returns on investment.
So long as you do not abuse the hard-won permissions your list members have granted you, or otherwise violate accepted rules of netiquette, you will be well on your way to effective e-marketing and generating those high response rates. Email marketing increases your business and website traffic by putting you in regular contact with your target audience, your subscribers and future clients, to deliver effective messages with measurable results.
I’ve had a few people mention that successful email marketing campaigns hinge on two main factors:
- only give the reader one thing to do in the body of the email,
- compose the email (including the subject line) as if you were writing to your best friend.
This helps foster the relationship even further, and doesn’t confuse the recipient of the email at the same time. By employing best practices as outlined in this piece and elsewhere on this site, marketers can deliver email campaigns that are both efficient and effective.