E-mail marketing - key benefits and best practices
E-mail marketing, sometimes perhaps justifiably termed 'SPAM', certainly has some advantages for marketers and can be used to reach an extremely wide audience, but is it effective or is it just a nuisance destined for your junk mail box?
Here are the reasons marketers support e-mail marketing and a few pointers on how ensuring your marketing campaign can incorporate a quality e-mail marketing element without becoming a nuisance.
1. Reduced Time & Effort
When compared to the time and effort required to create physical postal mailings, whether they are flyers or brochures, which need to be designed, edited, printed and distributed, not to mention the time taken for the material to actually arrive through your client's letter box, or if you consider the effort and time required in setting up a tele sales campaign, writing the script, waiting for agents to make the calls and trying to convert those into sales, e-mail marketing has a lot of appeal for its reduced time, effort and of course cost.
With email marketing, you can turn a marketing communications piece out in a couple of hours, and by sing recurring email templates, all you'll need to do is to approve the copy for the email and any changes to graphics, use easy database list queries like those available in the Comm100 system to decide whom to send to, and then just hit send. What would take possibly weeks of work in traditional off-line marketing can be accomplished in just a few hours and by a single employee.
2. Real-Time Messages
With a marketing email being compossed in just a few hours, you can literally send messages on the day to help reduce stock or promote a limited time special as needed. You can even send unique real-time messages to customers that arrive on their birthdays or anniversaries. With email marketing, short time frames are used to your advantage.
3. Personalize Messages
Unlike print mail campaigns, or even TV or radio campaigns which need to be executed in advance to a mostly generic format to suit everybody, email marketing presents many dynamic opportunities. Not only can you send personalized emails with your user's name or login name, but many email marketing solutions offer the ability to feed in personalized information such as sales or purchase history. Also, because creating separate email sends is significantly less challenging than creating separate postal mail, print mail or advertising campaigns, you can segment your customer list into smaller lists and send very personalized messages. For example, by selecting just customers from New York City and then write your email marketing copy to speak directly about New York City.
4. Segment User and Customer Database Information
As noted above, because you can segment your database of customers or users with email, you can send extremely targeted marketing campaigns that will result in increased sales conversions simply because they are so specific. For example, if you sell flowers, you can find everybody in your database who ever bought daffodils and then send them an email in April when the first daffodil shipments come in. You're then using your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of the customers who are most likely to respond to it, and that's what good marketing is all about.
5. More Frequent Communications
Because email takes less time to create and send than other marketing and advertising channels do, you can communicate with your customers more frequently. For example, instead of only being able to send them a flyer or catalogue once a month or once a quarter, you can easily send weekly offers or more frequently than that if their email activity supports making that decision. You may want to note, however, that it's one of the typical email marketing best practices to not send customer emails more than once a week. However, gone are the days when you were lucky to get a message in front of your customers once a month. Via email marketing, you can communicate with customers weekly or even daily!
6. Test Marketing Messages
Good marketing always means being able to test things! With email marketing, it becomes incredibly easy to see what graphics, headlines, offers and even colors your users and customers will respond to. It's incredibly simple to send one version of an email to one part of your list and a second version of an email to a different part of your email list. Then, through the very precise tracking tools that email marketing offers, you can figure out which marketing message worked better to convert sales or user actions.
7. Information Spreading
For a customer to forward an email with an enticing or useful offer or piece of information only takes seconds and many users will do it. That means that your marketing effort has not only a wider reach but also a networked reach with people who, by forwarding the email, are now acting as your brand advocates.
8. Reduce Overhead Costs
Email marketing can be done at a very low overhead cost as you don't need a huge team of employees, designers, or marketing analysts and you also don't need to pay for printing, postal mailing costs, phone lines, or advertising rates. In fact, there are services, such as Comm100 Email Marketing, that allow you to host your email marketing using professionally-designed templates that you can then just alter to your own needs.
9. Ability to Track Sales and User Engagement
E-mail marketing platforms can provide tracking information on how many people opened an email, which specific link within the email was clicked, how many people moved an email to spam or unsubscribed and whether email even made it into your recipient's inbox. Combine that with a business's ability to track sales back to a source and you can identify customer engagement and response through an entire cycle with detailed metrics.
10. Environmentally friendly
It may seem like a minor thing, but we're all trying to be more environmentally friendly these days, so the more you use email marketing, the more you'll help save the planet by reducing the number of trees killed for print marketing pieces.
Conclusions
Generally speaking, e-mail marketing is a good way to compliment your marketing strategy and provides plenty of ways to extract metrics which can help you define the most effective regime and also help to avoid annoying your prospects with non-relevant marketing mails.
Here are the reasons marketers support e-mail marketing and a few pointers on how ensuring your marketing campaign can incorporate a quality e-mail marketing element without becoming a nuisance.
1. Reduced Time & Effort
When compared to the time and effort required to create physical postal mailings, whether they are flyers or brochures, which need to be designed, edited, printed and distributed, not to mention the time taken for the material to actually arrive through your client's letter box, or if you consider the effort and time required in setting up a tele sales campaign, writing the script, waiting for agents to make the calls and trying to convert those into sales, e-mail marketing has a lot of appeal for its reduced time, effort and of course cost.
With email marketing, you can turn a marketing communications piece out in a couple of hours, and by sing recurring email templates, all you'll need to do is to approve the copy for the email and any changes to graphics, use easy database list queries like those available in the Comm100 system to decide whom to send to, and then just hit send. What would take possibly weeks of work in traditional off-line marketing can be accomplished in just a few hours and by a single employee.
2. Real-Time Messages
With a marketing email being compossed in just a few hours, you can literally send messages on the day to help reduce stock or promote a limited time special as needed. You can even send unique real-time messages to customers that arrive on their birthdays or anniversaries. With email marketing, short time frames are used to your advantage.
3. Personalize Messages
Unlike print mail campaigns, or even TV or radio campaigns which need to be executed in advance to a mostly generic format to suit everybody, email marketing presents many dynamic opportunities. Not only can you send personalized emails with your user's name or login name, but many email marketing solutions offer the ability to feed in personalized information such as sales or purchase history. Also, because creating separate email sends is significantly less challenging than creating separate postal mail, print mail or advertising campaigns, you can segment your customer list into smaller lists and send very personalized messages. For example, by selecting just customers from New York City and then write your email marketing copy to speak directly about New York City.
4. Segment User and Customer Database Information
As noted above, because you can segment your database of customers or users with email, you can send extremely targeted marketing campaigns that will result in increased sales conversions simply because they are so specific. For example, if you sell flowers, you can find everybody in your database who ever bought daffodils and then send them an email in April when the first daffodil shipments come in. You're then using your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of the customers who are most likely to respond to it, and that's what good marketing is all about.
5. More Frequent Communications
Because email takes less time to create and send than other marketing and advertising channels do, you can communicate with your customers more frequently. For example, instead of only being able to send them a flyer or catalogue once a month or once a quarter, you can easily send weekly offers or more frequently than that if their email activity supports making that decision. You may want to note, however, that it's one of the typical email marketing best practices to not send customer emails more than once a week. However, gone are the days when you were lucky to get a message in front of your customers once a month. Via email marketing, you can communicate with customers weekly or even daily!
6. Test Marketing Messages
Good marketing always means being able to test things! With email marketing, it becomes incredibly easy to see what graphics, headlines, offers and even colors your users and customers will respond to. It's incredibly simple to send one version of an email to one part of your list and a second version of an email to a different part of your email list. Then, through the very precise tracking tools that email marketing offers, you can figure out which marketing message worked better to convert sales or user actions.
7. Information Spreading
For a customer to forward an email with an enticing or useful offer or piece of information only takes seconds and many users will do it. That means that your marketing effort has not only a wider reach but also a networked reach with people who, by forwarding the email, are now acting as your brand advocates.
8. Reduce Overhead Costs
Email marketing can be done at a very low overhead cost as you don't need a huge team of employees, designers, or marketing analysts and you also don't need to pay for printing, postal mailing costs, phone lines, or advertising rates. In fact, there are services, such as Comm100 Email Marketing, that allow you to host your email marketing using professionally-designed templates that you can then just alter to your own needs.
9. Ability to Track Sales and User Engagement
E-mail marketing platforms can provide tracking information on how many people opened an email, which specific link within the email was clicked, how many people moved an email to spam or unsubscribed and whether email even made it into your recipient's inbox. Combine that with a business's ability to track sales back to a source and you can identify customer engagement and response through an entire cycle with detailed metrics.
10. Environmentally friendly
It may seem like a minor thing, but we're all trying to be more environmentally friendly these days, so the more you use email marketing, the more you'll help save the planet by reducing the number of trees killed for print marketing pieces.
Conclusions
Generally speaking, e-mail marketing is a good way to compliment your marketing strategy and provides plenty of ways to extract metrics which can help you define the most effective regime and also help to avoid annoying your prospects with non-relevant marketing mails.
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sadikmd -
Thanks
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