Hongkiat.com: Email Marketing: Tips to Do it Well

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Email Marketing: Tips to Do it Well Posted: 09 Jun 2011 04:43 AM PDT Nowadays, with Internet spreading its wings all over the globe, more and more people are switching from physical mediums of business promotion to online marketing. Email marketing is one of the best means of promoting your products and services online. It is also one of the oldest sources of business-to-business marketing used by virtually everyone. (Image source: Shutterstock) A well planned effective email marketing campaign can help your business products and services gain maximum visibility and recognition, not only locally but all over the world. With this direct marketing procedure you start getting quick response once your email reaches your targeted customers. the Importance In today’s world of cut-throat business competition, companies and enterprises are making use of only the most effective means of business promotion, and email marketing is one of these mediums. Businesses find email marketing beneficial because of its ability to be highly adaptable to today’s constantly changing business world. (Image source: Shutterstock) Other factor that adds to the inevitable importance of email marketing is its aspect of being highly inexpensive and affordable. It can also easily be built into existing marketing systems of any organization seeking promotion at international level. Moreover, online marketing can make business promotion more efficiently, short, and real time in terms of delivering something to your clients and customers. Benefits of Email Marketing Rightly executed email marketing can compliment all other marketing initiatives and reap you many benefits, some of which are as follows: Cost-Effectiveness No matter how inexpensive the conventional mediums of marketing and business promotion can get, they can never be compared to the cost-effectiveness of email marketing. Marketing collateral, like press advertisements, brochures, flyers and posters require a significant financial outlay. On the other hand, email marketing is live, constantly changing and is easy to implement, along with being inexpensive. Global Approach A good advantage of email marketing comes with the globalism of the Internet. No matter where you are or whom you need to reach, email marketing paves the way to a global approach of business promotion. Borders are no obstacles in email marketing. A Personalized Medium Email marketing is a personalized medium of advertising and business promotion. It enables you to create a special bond with the prospects. Unlike other mediums of marketing and promotions, email marketing can be segmented in terms of its target audience, meaning that you can split people off into smaller, more focused lists. This too gives a more personalized approach to your marketing messages. Gauge Results Any marketing campaign needs to be gauged in terms of its results and feedback from the target market. With email marketing as a tool of business promotion, you can easily carry out litmus tests on your target audience regarding different campaigns. (Image source: Shutterstock) You can accurately measure click-through rate, conversion rate, how a person arrived at your website, and more, through readily available tools on the Internet, and assess the success of different email campaigns. Quicker Response Time Another advantage of email marketing over the conventional means of business promotion is that it has a quicker response time. The average response time of email marketing is one to three days at max and you get the most responses on the first day itself, while a direct mail campaign would take minimum two weeks to generate any responses. Ease of Use Email marketing comes with an ease of use for both the sender and the receiver. Executing an email marketing campaign is simple and anyone can do it without any extensive resources. 6 Tips to Do it Well For every effective marketing campaign, doing it right matters a lot. Following are certain tips which will help you execute better and more effective email marketing campaigns. 1. Pre-determine Your Campaign’s Objectives Before executing any campaign, its objectives and targets need to be pre-determined in order to get the maximum out of it. A general email marketing campaign can have two basic objectives i.e. to strengthen customer loyalty and ongoing relationships and to drive direct response of the customers. Whichever of these two are your campaign objectives, it is important that you plan it out and then set it for execution. 2. Avoid Spamming No matter how easy, affordable and responsive it gets, the biggest hurdle in the way of a successful email marketing campaign is the spam filters. When more and more people started misusing email marketing, email service providers all over the world introduced spam filters, which were a great setback for this mode of business promotion. Therefore, when the successful marketing practitioners realized that people’s dislike to spam destroyed the customer loyalty they worked so hard to address the problem with best practices that revolved around the aspect of ‘permission’. (Image source: Shutterstock) Permission is best and the only authentic way to avoid spamming in the process of email marketing. This may sound a tedious process to you, however, in actual getting permission is not much difficult. Offer something useful to your customers (a coupon or special discounts, a research related to your product or perhaps an informational newsletter) in return as if the person agrees on receive your messages and, often, to provide valuable personal information. Never underestimate the power of "free" and use the same in taking customer’s permission for email marketing. When you will give them something free, build the relationship and then recommend products or services, they are likely to buy from you and will stay loyal to your brand. 3. Opt-in Option An opt-in option is a perfect way of taking permission and carrying out an effective email marketing campaign. Adding an opt-in form to your email marketing message is the best practice in terms of marketing ethics and effectiveness. (Image source: Shutterstock) Considering the importance of an opt-in option, larger organizations even go for a ‘double opt-in’ option i.e. after the receiver of their marketing message firstly enters his/her email address to subscribe to their list, they send them a confirmation email which contains a special link back to their email marketing campaign, which verifies that this visitor did indeed sign up to their mailing list. This way they easily avoid spamming and their customers develop a sense of respect for them. 4. Creating the Message Once you plan out your campaign objectives and also get permissions of your customers, the next step is to create the actual message that needs to be sent out. There are some points to be remembered while creating your email marketing message: The subject line is the most essential element of email message content. The subject line should always make sense and should standout. Create the content of your message absolutely clear and easily readable. Go for the ‘inverted pyramid model of message construction i.e. start from ‘most important’ information to ‘less important’ one Web readers have very less time and are always in a hurry so keep your message short, to-the-point and ensure its relevance. There are certain essential elements of an email message content i.e. the ‘to’ line and ‘from’ line, the subject line, the offer, the format, the body copy, the message category, message personalization and targeting. Like the subject line, signature has a crucial importance in an email message. Always include a signature at the bottom of your emails, as it is a good way to attract more traffic to your website. This signature should include your personal details, your company details, and an opt-out link. 5. Testing the Message Before sending out the actual campaign in execution, it is better to test its different aspects with trial and error method. Try out different fonts for both content and links, re-positioning images such as logos and buttons and experiment with different emailing patterns (including the greeting and sign off). Send three different patterns of your email, compare their click-thru stats and see which one works best. This way you will be sending the right mix of content and images that will attract more visitors, and ultimately more sales. 6. Develop and Maintain the Email List As mentioned earlier, in order for your email marketing campaign to be successful, it is important to be focused in every aspect of execution. Similar is the case with email list. You need to develop a proper and well-searched email list for your campaign (probably of the people who are interested or have opted-in for your marketing initiatives). (Image source: Shutterstock) Also, email list is not a one-time thing. It needs to be trimmed and maintained according to the circumstances. Longer lists should be broken down into smaller segments, targeting the consumer and personalizing the message. Also, after every three months, shed off the people in your list who do not rear or respond to your messages. Conclusion Email marketing is a fully grown and well-used tactic for business promotion via emails. It is cost-effective, easily executed and gives a good impact to your campaigns. Email marketing does not replace your other marketing activities but compliments them extremely well. A well run and good email marketing campaign can grow your customer pool and add to customer’s loyalty. Hearing from your brand repeatedly, with good content reminds readers of your business’ value, especially if they take your advice and find it works for them. Although email marketing comes with lower risks and higher profitability, however, this can only be achieved through proper planning and execution tuning into higher success rates for your business.

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