The term email marketing conjures images of spam and flashing banner ads, but it doesn't need to be that way. You can create attractive email marketing material that is NOT spam, benefits your clients and promotes your organisation all at the same time!
Traditional business email
It used to be that bulk emails you received from businesses could be classified into two categories:
- Newsletters
Great for the client because of lots of relevant information, but doesn't usually convert into sales for the business. - Sales & marketing
Often perceived negatively by the recipient because the focus is on what the organisation wants from the recipient.
A better way
The most effective way to market using email is to give intrinsic value to your clients through the information you provide, while adding one or two sales pitches into the mix. People don't mind some sales information if they are getting overall value out of your email.
Presentation is important
Presenting your email attractively may well get a better response than a text-based email. It also portrays your corporate image or transmits other messages you may want to associate with the information you're presenting.
How to go about it
You start by collecting the email addresses of your clients. Perhaps you have these already, in your customer records or your email program's contact list. You need to collect all these addresses in a consolidated list, preferably with additional information such as first and last name, address, customer type, etc. This will allow you to personalise and target your emails.
Then you need to design and compose your first email and test that it will display correctly in most common email systems. Once you're happy, you can send it to your recipients. It will be helpful for marketing purposes if you can get statistics telling you how many of your recipients opened your emails, how many clicked on which links, etc. It will also be helpful if you can automate the processing of the inevitable bounces that occur if a recipient changes email addresses, has a full inbox, etc. There may be quite a lot of bounces for large mailing lists. Finally, a system to automatically manage subscriptions is useful, and one to manage unsubscriptions is required by law.
NewsMark, our newsletter & email marketing tool, helps you do all this and more.
In summary
Email marketing helps you:
- Keep you in the forefront of your clients' minds
- Keep your clients informed about information relevant to their needs, your latest news, products, etc.
- Help you promote regular features, special offers, etc.
- Further promotes your corporate image
If you're not using email marketing right now, you're wasting a valuable commodity.
More information
Contact us if you'd like to know more.
