What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct response marketing, and is primarily used for keeping in contact with existing and potential customers. It’s used for:

• Enhancing relationship of existing or potential customers, building customer loyalty,
• Potential acquisition of customers from potentials,
• Throw an ad out to the world
• Educate someone about anything (hopefully, your product or service!)

Viral marketing in action.

Advantages of email marketing.

• Low cost, specific to ‘opt-in’ customers
• You can track its success (click-throughs, openings, bounces, subscribes, unsubscribes, etc.)
• Response time is immediate (if you’re creative about it)
• Brings customer back to website (or anything you want noticed for that matter)
• You can pull in existing email technology functionality (auto-responders, filtering, etc.)
• Boosts repeat business
• Email is THE established form or medium of electronic communication (though that is changing)
• By entering in a list of choices, you can start to segmentation (discover specific needs of customer)

Perhaps the last one is the most important, because it begins to discover who your client is. In a way, email marketing can, by its nature, be a type of ’survey’ of your existing interested potential customers, just by tracking click-throughs. As always, market sizing and segmentation is critical for business success.

Disadvantages of email marketing.

• It can be considered spam by people - you combat that with a clear message and opt-in principles
• It can be considered spam by email programs - where the customer never sees the email, perhaps for many or any future sendings – so following proper email marketing principles is critical for your success.

What email marketing is used for.

• Helps you get noticed: Don’t let your target forget about you. If potential customers ‘opt-in’ for your newsletter, you will continually remind them that you exist, and have something they want. Consistent (rather than insistent) email marketing will deliver the right message, regularly, and that means visibility.
• Helps you drive traffic: Real traffic from ‘warm’ customers. A form of direct response marketing, bypass the ’spam’ issue by allowing interested parties to ‘opt-in’ for marketing messages.
• Helps you stay in touch: The newsletter is still very useful. Also very targeted to the most used information exchange medium out there; email. A great ‘keep in touch’ strategy uses both RSS and email marketing to make sure your information is read and products are known. Viral marketing can also be engaged here.
• Helps you generate sales / leads: Run specials. You can run special incentives within your email marketing campaigns, which drives qualified traffic to your website, directly to the product or service, and can track the effectiveness of the campaign. You can also create multiple campaigns within the same incentive program, and see which sub-campaign ‘pulls’ better (more sales).
• Helps you build referrals: Direct and targeted. Email marketing goes straight to the potential customer, with (hopefully) specific information directed at their interests. Of course, writing great content helps this process along, and people might just ‘forward’ those emails to others for viewing. Making it easy for them to forward these emails is important.

Final thoughts.

Though email marketing is starting to be overshadowed by social media marketing, it still is the most widely understood and used form of staying in touch with customers, both existing and potential.