email marketing (Photo credit: opportplanet)
Email Marketing is one of the most effective modern marketing tools for businesses. Generally, all emails sent to prospective customers or current clients can be termed as ?email marketing?. However, email marketing in the context of business is meant to promote brand awareness, build customer loyalty and generate trust in the company or business. This is done through distributing ads, requesting forms of interaction as well as to solicit sales or donations.
To undertake email marketing, the first and most important aspect is the email list (distribution list) or database. Lists can be gathered or culled from various databases or Internet sources and current company customers or visitors? lists. There are also service companies that rent out email addresses for email marketing campaigns and other purposes.
Email marketing can be categorized into different types of emails:
- Transactional emails are usually sent based on a customer?s relationship with the company. This category includes inquiries about products, purchase orders, order confirmation and email acknowledgments. This type of email can be effective in cross-selling or up-selling products and services.
- Direct emails are generally sent to promote the company or product, to announce special offers, to invite people to store promotions or events and send brochures or catalogues.
- Email newsletters are sent out to an email list of customers and/or regular subscribers. ?The newsletter can contain news about the company and company events as well as special offers, new products launching and store promotions.
- Joint-advertising is when you attach advertisements to other people?s or companies? emails. This is commonly referred to as joint-advertising and both companies usually reciprocate the favour.
Email marketing can be an effective tool in the enhancement of merchant-customer relationships, encouragement of customer loyalty (repeat business) and in attracting new customers. Email messages can also be sent to cold lists, counting on the law of averages, which means that out of hundreds or thousands of emails sent, there should be a number of new customers that will be acquired.
There are software vendors that offer email support for newsletters and transactional e-mails, where promotional messages are embedded into the body of the email. Some software vendors also offer email marketing services and customer referral programs, including sending of personalized email messages for specific and targeted markets.
Email marketing services have, in recent times, replaced direct mailers, more commonly referred to as direct mail. Print marketing campaigns take a lot of time and money to create and most of them end up untouched in mailboxes or thrown in trashcans. Email campaigns, combined with marketing using social media, can be much more effective business strategies. With email marketing software, senders can see how many are opening the emails they sent, and the links viewers are clicking on, as well as the number of subscribers that forward the emails to friends and associates.
An email marketing service provider can also include social networking buttons like ?Tweet?, ?Like? and others to make sharing and forwarding messages easier. Another advantage is the ability to get instant results by viewing reports for the number of emails that bounced and the number of people that unsubscribed from the service, open rates and even click-thrus. This is efficient way of determining if a marketing campaign is effective. Surveys can also be devised through an email marketing service, providing the means to gather quick feedback from customers.
Since the Internet makes communication fast, easy, more effective and convenient, more businesses, whether small or large, have been taking advantage of connecting with customers and prospective clients through this medium. There are email marketing products like iContact, Constant Contact, Benchmark Email and HostPapa Connect, which make an email campaign simple, customized and easy to use. Contact lists can easily be uploaded into the database so that emails can be sent in bulk.
The products are usually flexible, so that users can customize the design of their marketing messages, including the logo and images to reflect the company?s personality. Where before, physical errors in a copy can result in costly reprinting, email marketing services provide the means to edit text and adjust images in the email before it is sent or even after some of them have already gone out without incurring extra costs.
An email service makes creating an email marketing campaign easy, even for a novice user without programming skills. Integrated wizards and help sections guide users to create the type of email that they need; announcement, newsletters or surveys. These email marketing tools also come with inbuilt online tests to determine the probability of the message getting caught in the spam folder by scoring the email on content.
Email marketing software allows for generating reports, statistics and graphs to learn if a particular campaign is working or not. Knowing how the email campaign is performing will help in making corrections and revising content for a more effective marketing campaign. Most email marketing tools are also integrated with Google Analytics that gives access to data beyond just email.
Because email marketing is delivered in real time, a direct mailing campaign is now an almost archaic method to use in marketing. The whole world is going online with purchasers and sellers following the crowd. Business and the way it is conducted have been reinvented by the Internet and email marketing.
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