E-mail Marketing Guide
Email marketing is critical to the success of your business. It doesn't matter if your business is online or off, marketing by email will save you money, drive traffic to your website, build customer loyalty, increase brand awareness, create sales, and increase your profits. Let us start with the definition of email marketing.
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What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating messages to an audience. In general, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Marketing by email is using email as the method of retaining customers, acquiring new customers, and driving sales. However, the term e-mail marketing is usually used to refer to:
- Sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
- Sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something immediately.
- Adding advertisements in emails sent by other companies to their customers.
It is a highly effective method of promoting your business.
Advantages and benefits of Email marketing:
- Email Is Popular
Email is consistently rated as the most popular and most used application on the internet. Indeed, some people only use email and do not browse the internet at all! Email is the preferred primary means of business communication (ahead of telephone and postal mail).
- 42% of business users check their business email while on holiday.
- 53% of business users check their email six or more times during the working day.
- 34% of internet users check their email continuously throughout the day.
- 96% of internet users' main reason for being online is email.
- Save Time and Money.
It is instant, as opposed to a mailed advertisement, an email arrives in a few seconds or minutes.
No printing, no postage, no mail house charges. Relatively low cost. The return on investment of opt-in email is very great.
- An exact Return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") 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.
- It lets the advertiser "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to a website that waits for customers to come in.
- It is easy to track. An advertiser can track users via web bugs, bounce messages, un-subscribes, read-receipts, click-throughs, etc. These can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, correlate sales with marketing.
- Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically
- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them
- Over half of Internet users check or send email on a typical day.[3]
- Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger other messages to be automatically delivered.
- Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger other events such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category.
- Green - email marketing is paper-free.
- Increased Sales It's not unusual for email campaigns to get 5%-15% response rates. The response rate of opt-in email is 50 times greater than banner ads and 5 times greater than direct mail.
- Instant Results Minutes after sending out your email campaign you can start seeing responses and orders. And you can time your campaigns to arrive on the best day of the week or month for maximum response. Instead of waiting weeks for responses and test results, you'll have them in hours. 80% of responses to an email campaign will occur within 3 days (traditional direct mail takes weeks).
- Measurable Results Email campaigns are fully trackable, with up to the minute statistics. You can easily test which message generates the best response and alter your campaign accordingly.
- Quick To Create You could knock out an email in an hour or two as opposed to weeks in the "offline" world. In addition, you can even make money from your newsletter itself by selling ad space or by using a paid subscription model. See "Making Money From Your Newsletter" later.
- Personalisation and Targeting Email allows your message to be personalised. Instead of "Dear Customer" you can address the recipient as "Dear Rachel" and send offers targeted to their preferences.
