EMarketing, the practise of sending targeted marketing material via electronic mail or messaging, has become one of the most popular and successful marketing tools in use today.
With an ever increasing amount of the world’s population using the internet in their everyday lives, using attractive email communications is a fantastic way to build and develop customer relationships and generate new partnerships.
We have all at some stage opened our inbox and found a newsletter or advertising e-mail waiting for us offering us great deals on the latest products or informing us that the latest and best in the world product release is just around the corner. Most of the world’s leading companies have employed eMarketing tools and techniques and used them as a way to build and retain good solid customer relationships generate new customers and increase overall sales.
A regular newsletter or a discount or prize offer style campaign informing customers of all your latest news and offers using eMarketing is a proven way to increase your sales and customer base. A well targeted campaign can easily return a greater degree of success than traditional marketing forms. Visual forms of eMarketing campaigns have been shown to return a higher level of success in attracting and maintaining customers.
Due to anti spam laws you are required by law to only send sales material to customers that have agreed to receive it and make it easy for users to unsubscribe from your service. Getting visitors to sign up from your site is often done by offering the opportunity to sign up for a regular newsletter or enter a competition or receive a product discount. Gaining potential customers in this way through your company website enables you to grow your client base already aware that these new customers have an interest in your products.
There are many eMarketing services available today. Some of the more popular services include GetResponse, iContact, Constant Contact, Benchmark Email, Mailchimp, Vertical Response, and Pinpoint on Demand offer an ever increasing amount of campaign creation tools and implementation options. Most offer some, if not most, of the following basic options that you would require for your campaign:
1. E-Mail Creation
Probably the most important part of a campaign is the look and feel of your e-mail. Most companies will offer large amounts of templates, 100 plus is a rough industry benchmark, for you to choose from, the more flexible the better. The more space on offer for images, an important part of your messages, and the ability to add your own HTML code are also good points to look out for in a program.
2. Contact Management
At some point you are going to have to get your contacts imported into the service software so that you can start to send out your mails.Companies offer a variety of ways to get your contacts into the software.
- Through Excel, TXT or CSV files.
- Via an email service such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or through Outlook.
- Cut and paste directly into the system.
- Integration to your CRM system
3. Deliverability
There isn’t much point in spending valuable time in creating your messages if they fail to get to the recipient. A carefully crafted e-mail will help you avoid the problem of your messages being labelled as spam. Most of the services available included some sort of spam checker that will pick up on words or phrases likely to cause problems.
4. Reporting
The amount of reporting tools available varies from service to service. When comparing email marketing services look to see if it allows integration to a program such as Google Analytics. This service generates stats about your traffic from your email campaign.
It is also a good option if your service allows you to create an A/B test campaign, allowing you to test key features of your campaign in order to improve your eMarketing strategy and measure response to different messages and approaches, before rolling it out to all your customers
There are a standard set of reports available though from most services.
- Opens
- Bounces
- Click Rates
- Forwards
- Open Dates
- Unsubscribes
5. Support
Customer support is vital when running your campaigns so always look out for good support options, preferably the ability to actually speak to someone rather than an e-mail or internet based support solution.
6. Price
Most eMarketing services come at a charge per month based on how many contacts the software contains, at a set price per month by the amount of messages sent or just a standalone charge.
Prices can cost anything from €8 per month for 500 contacts right up to €130 per month depending on the amount of contacts stored or messages sent.
Other solutions are provided by companies such as SuperOffice CRM who’s own CRM suite of tools comes with the ability to run eMarketing campaigns from within their existing CRM software.
Click Here for More Information about eMarketing from SuperOffice CRM
This type of solution comes with all of the usual functionality of eMarketing but it also has the benefits of not having to transfer large contact databases into the software from an outside data source, it’s already there ready to use. This solution makes creating and running a targeted eMarketing campaign that much easier. It is also has the ability to send large volumes of SMS eMarketing messages.
A good eMarketing program makes it easy to setup email lists and create and send marketing information, newsletters, sales offers and other bulk emails and track the outcome to get the right results from your sales campaigns.
The eMarketing approach is a highly cost-effective way of sending large amounts of communications out to customers and prospective clients, maintaining customer relationships and increasing your sales presence.
Whatever solution your company decide to adopt, used well, eMarketing is an incredibly powerful marketing tool not to be ignored.
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Steve Bryson
Software Consultant
