E-marketing 101 - Why Choose Email Marketing?

Every business owner worth their salt knows that business is about results. Email marketing, the practice of sending emails to customers to promote your goods and services, was built on this model. With top companies offering robust reporting data, using it to track the success of campaigns and your ROI is the obvious thing to do.

The key to this kind of marketing is its flexibility. Every type of business can benefit from it. Even a tiny nonprofit organization can harness email marketing to solicit donations or promote special events. Broken down in simple language, email can be used to do the following:

1) Promote goods and services

Do you have something to sell or promote? Email marketing gives you the opportunity to showcase your goods and services for an extremely affordable price. Why advertise on the radio or buy television ad space for thousands of dollars when you can pay just pennies to send every email?

2) Track your results in real time

The very best email marketing services feature reporting suites to view how well your campaigns are doing, from emails opened to most popular links. As an added bonus, these reports are updated in real time and available for viewing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is a significant advantage over print campaigns, where it can take weeks or months to quantify results.

3) Send your campaigns to hundreds, thousands or millions of recipients

Set your goals high because the technology enables you to reach customers all over the world, almost instantaneously. Besides having this ability, you can tailor your campaigns to certain people in different locations, making your HTML emails or newsletters truly targeted.

4) Send multimedia HTML messages with pictures, links, even videos

No other format is more flexible or interactive than email marketing. Unlike a television or radio ad made for a blanket broadcast, email marketing lets you lead customers to customized landing pages, promote certain goods based on customer interest, or even personalize your emails by calling customers by name. With the broad capabilities to send moving pictures or images, email marketing is the only truly interactive promotional medium at the moment.

5) Test your campaigns for success

Before you send out an email campaign to all your customers, you can create different subject lines and copy and test everything out before you send. It makes perfect sense to see what works first by having a small trial run, even if it means sending your email to a small, elite group of customers and asking them to give you their honest opinion. If you can, set up small focus group of recipients who can give you great feedback on what works in your email campaigns and what doesn’t. Once you’ve figured out the best copy, headline and subject line, feel free to send bulk email to your permission-based customers. When you do your homework, email marketing will increase sales, improve your relationships with your customers, and raise your status as a business.

Gary San is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email (http://www.benchmarkemail.com), a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service.

Tags: , ,

Related Posts

Comments

Leave a Reply




Close
E-mail It