Email Marketing Enhances Advertising Campaigns
Email marketing system
According to Wikipedia, email marketing is a form of direct marketing. It falls into two broad categories: sales and information. The former, focuses selling a product or service to email recipients. Often, these are existing customers and the email is intended to interest them in new products or special offers, but sometimes email marketing is blind, i.e. blanket emails are sent to a researched list of recipients to attract them to your brand.
The latter usually consists of newsletters, which can contain sales related information, but which should really offer readers something more, such as advice, information, hot-tips, industry news, company news and, if the budget allows, vouchers or coupons.
Around the early 2000s, before online marketing went exploded and long before social marketing came about, email marketing reached untold heights. Marketers had finally found a way to reach massive amounts of people with the same message; it was quick, cheap, easy and measurable. And, because it was new, it was effective. Then, as with all new and effective tools, email marketing was exploited, and was ruined by spam.
To cap it all off, newer, cooler marketing methods came along, internet users got smarter and website owners had to find even more creative ways to capture attention.
It wasn’t too long ago that the death of email marketing was announced. It was old, archaic, cliched and tainted by Viagra suppliers. But, new research has revealed that there is life in the old dog yet. Email marketing, if done properly, is still one of the most effective methods of advertising online.
It’s trickier than it was in the old days, spam filters are more vigilant and attention spans are shorter, but with a little creativity and by following the advice of experts, it’s still possible to make a success of email marketing campaigns.
Top email marketing tips as:
1 Research email lists carefully; be selective about your target audience so that your message is delivered to people who want to hear it.
2 Let your target market make up their own minds; opt-in/opt-out alternatives are vital in any modern email marketing campaign. People are used to being in control of their online interactions, they don’t like the idea of you taking that control away from them, so you need to let them decide whether they want to stay on your mailing list or not. If you’ve done your research thoroughly, your drop-out rate shouldn’t be high.
3 Know what you want to achieve; determine your objectives before you even begin to plan your email campaign. Without set goals you’ll never be able to tell if your campaign is a success or not, and it’s likely to lose focus, meander and eventually run out of steam.
4 Don’t give up and adapt as you go; if your goal is to establish a relationship with your customer-base you need to realise that just as with offline relationships, online relationships take time. Customers will be sceptical of your motives but with a consistent, un-aggressive approach you’ll be able to win them over.
5 Don’t try to be too fancy; big pictures, bright colours and embedded movies all sound like a good idea, but you have to realise that not all of your target base have computers capable of processing high-end email designs. Keep it simple, keep it neat and save the theatrics for your website.
6 Personalise where possible; use your recipients name wherever possible, and not in a different font that obviously looks like it was a late addition, keep it all consistent with the rest of the email.
Perhaps the most important thing to know about email marketing is that it’s not very effective when used on its own. It needs to be part of an holistic online and offline marketing campaign. By merging all marketing avenues to focus on a common goal, email marketing becomes one more powerful tool in an arsenal of advertising weapons.
