Email marketing has become important in today’s business world. Its undeniable benefits continue to gain adepts in every level of commerce, industry and service.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the advertisement of a product, service, or brand through electronic mail. Email marketing can be used to improve the relationship between a business and its customers or to gain new customers. In order to gain the email addresses of potential customers, businesses must either pay a fee to an email broker, use a subscription service, or rely on referrals from existing customers. Many companies, of course, use a combination of these methods.
What is Bulk Email Marketing?
Bulk email marketing refers to a form of marketing that involves sending the same, or nearly identical, message to multiple email recipients. This type of campaign requires special software that takes each individual email address from a pre-existing list, and distributes a single message to each one. The number of recipients can range from hundreds to thousands, depending on campaign objectives.
Email marketing is easy to setup, affordable, vigorous and highly effective and targeted. Email is faster, by far less expensive and more compelling than the standard marketing tools, such as direct mail or print advertising. Email marketing is available to all. It is direct, it demands less time and resources and the results are instantly manifested.
It is well known now in the business world that selling to existing customers is several times less expensive than getting a new one, and that profitability us hinged upon loyal customers and repeat business.
Human beings have not changed much at their core, despite all the new resources that pile up to make our daily lives and businesses more productive, effective, fun and relaxed. When we find a good merchant or a good service provider that offer what we need, we like to establish and carry a personal relationship with them. And when we are satisfied with the performance of a product or service and we do have a good relationship with the merchant, we keep going back to that particular source every time we have the need to. We also refer our acquaintances to their care and call them my butcher, my lawyer, my child’s day care, my accountant, my doctor…
So, at the end of the day, creating and sustaining good business is nothing but creating and sustaining good relationships. And good relationships are nourished via frequent, positive communication.
Email is the best tool available for this in our busy times.
Studies show that it takes several contacts –six to seven, on average– before you actually turn a prospect into a customer, and that the more personal the contact, the better. But standard business communication tools –direct mail, telemarketing and print, radio and television advertisements– are not only expensive and time-consuming, but also often perceived by the public as invasive nuisances.
Who doesn’t dread going to the mailbox on ‘junk-mail day’? Or picking up the phone when the caller ID shows a 1-800 number or ‘unknown caller’? Or even picking up the newspaper from the doorstep on Sundays, for heaven’s sake? How long did it take for you to figure out –and fume over– the fact that the young, perky voice on the other end of the line talking to you so casually was some satellite dish company’s computer?
If doing good business is mostly about earning the good will of the public in the first place, standard marketing communication doesn’t do business a much lasting service in today’s world.
Let try to remember how small business dealt with their customers in the past, we will easily grasp the value of permission-based email marketing. In the past, small business owners would build relationships with their customers in the neighborhood through personal interaction. In the course of this interaction, they learned their customer’s names, their birth dates and anniversaries, their place of origin, the names of their spouses and children, their individual preferences and interests. They would remember this information and bring it up opportunely, always keeping in touch with their customers –appropriately called ‘patrons’ then– in an intimate, familial way.
The greater mobility, the more busy lifestyles of our time and new technologies have rendered a more expanded and impersonal world. The way we do business, the way we communicate and the way we socialize may have changed, but our core need to be individualized, to be recognized in the crowd, to be valued for ourselves, remains the same.
It is in this world that permission-based email marketing can provide you with a larger, more loyal, more intimate circle of patrons –and do so in a faster, more direct and less expensive way than is possible with more traditional and impersonal marketing tools.
Permission-based email marketing is affordable, renders a response rate up to five times greater than standard marketing and has a positive impact on the receivers’ perception of a company. A fraction of a cent per email takes a tight marketing budget a long ways into attaining your goals of winning new customers, boosting customer loyalty and fostering repeat business. But even if you favor a mix of flyers, print ads, newsletter sponsorship and Web banners in your strategy to obtain new business and retain customers, throwing the fast, affordable, direct and highly effective permission-based email marketing into that mix will only maximize the power of your investment.
One of the advantages of email marketing is that it is expeditious. As soon as you have time-sensitive information to communicate to your client list, for example, or the minute you are ready to launch a particular campaign, you can wrap it up in an email message and immediately send it out directly to everyone on your list. And you will be able to see results right away –because with permission-based email marketing your patrons are actually looking forward to your messages.
Email can be used to distribute newsletters, create brand awareness, promote preferred customer specials, advertise sales, announce new services and/or products, send/birthday/anniversary/holiday greetings, invite to events, educate your customers, and more… really fast. And what is best: it allows for that instant, consistent, one-on-one, two-way communication that will certainly benefit your business
With email marketing, you can easily assess the number of emails sent, the number of emails opened and who opened them; the number of unsubscribers; the number of bounce-backs (both hard and soft), and the click through rates (including which links were more effective and who clicked through).
This information is invaluable to gauge the overall effectiveness of your campaigns and to design and launch future campaigns that are highly effective and targeted to very specific individuals and/or groups of individuals.
One of the disadvantages to email marketing is something called spam. Spam is the word for both a tinned meat and email that is sent out to a huge number of people with little discretion. Spam is the email marketing version of carpet bombing. In fact, most email services include spam filters that weed out such emails from the general inboxes of their customers.
However, there is still concern in regards to SPAM (unsolicited commercial email) filters that are in use by ISPs (Internet Service Providers). These tools are being developed and used to protect the privacy and security of recipients from unlawful ‘marketers’ and other Internet crooks. The filters, however, are yet imperfect and sometimes weed out perfectly legitimate, permission-based messages (‘false positives’), which are then not delivered to the recipient, are usually ‘bounced’ back to the sender or simply deleted by the ISP –and can render a perfectly legitimate sender ‘blacklisted’.
Different Types of Email Marketing Campaign?
An email marketing campaign is one of the oldest forms of Internet marketing. While more advanced methods have come along, it can still be very effective provided the right approach and tools are utilized. There are many different types of email marketing campaigns that be launched by those who want to use the electronic mail system to reach their audience.
An opt-in email marketing campaign involves distributing mail to a list of subscribers that have agreed to receive it from a particular company. Though mainly leveraged by ecommerce stores, it can prove beneficial to almost any online business. With opt-in email marketing, a business can keep its customers up to date on the latest products or services, as well as special offers and discounts. Several marketers attest that the most difficult aspect of such a campaign is composing a quality list of subscribers.
Bulk email also represents a type of email marketing campaign commonly used to promote online businesses. Often facilitated through an email blast service or specialize software, bulk email typically involves simultaneously sending messages to a large mailing list of subscribers. This is generally an affordable way to reach a vast number of potential customers, but there are some notable disadvantages. There is a very fine line between a legitimate bulk email campaign and spam. Identifying this, and staying on the right side of it, is what usually enables marketers to achieve positive results.
Newsletter marketing is often viewed as one of the most effective of all email marketing campaigns. This is primarily because someone who subscribed for a newsletter is more likely to read it, whereas a message distributed through another type of email marketing may get deleted without the recipient even opening it. Newsletters offer the ability to combine various techniques into a single package, allowing a business to drive its marketing message home, whether it involves promoting products and services, or simply keeping customers updated on the latest company news.
An email marketing campaign can make a great first step for the business that wishes to encourage dialogue with its audience, or deliver a message to the market. All campaigns, however, must obtain the maximum email delivery and high open rates, which basically means that the intended recipients are both receiving and reading the mail. Many successful email marketers agree that this best way to ensure a successful campaign.
In conclusion, one of the great things of the Internet is that whether we are big or small, whether we have a huge marketing budget or a very tight one, what will determine our success is our ability to reach out to our existing and potential customers; our ability to establish and nurture a trusting and close relationship with them; our ability to single out our individual customers from the crowd; our ability to pinpoint and satisfy their most particular needs and wants; and the quality of the products and services we provide.
