What is Email Marketing
With the advance of technology, the means of communication have increased. One such method of communication is the Electronic Mail, or the E-Mail, a fast and easy way for people to keep in touch with each other. In a commercial dynamic, e-mails are an effective tool for marketing; they are a direct way to promote a message to a group of people in one go. For businesses, e-mail marketing can be used to send ads, solicit new business or sales, and increase online brand awareness in order to build loyalty and trust; it is a clean and green way to encourage the development of an existing or potential relationship between a business and its clients. The types of email marketing include: email newsletters sent to a specific list of subscribers, transactional emails triggered to confirm a purchase carried out by the customer, and direct email to simply communicate a promotional idea.
Benefits of Email Marketing
As an online marketing tactic, email marketing holds many advantages. With recession and budget constraints to consider, marketers look for opportunities that will generate the highest return on investment, and email marketing is one such successful tactic. Traditional marketing mediums such as billboards and TVCs make a significant dent in a company’s resources, whereas email marketing costs only a fraction of all this, and can be carried out by just one person, without being very labor-intensive. Marketing through email occurs instantly, the moment you click the ‘send’ button, your message and promo is delivered to your potential customers, eradicating the worry of whether or not you are reaching your customers. Emails are a dynamic form of communication; depending on what message you want to perpetuate, emails can be modified to create a unique user experience to reach a global market in an affordable way. Furthermore, because emails are interactive, a business has the added bonus of knowing that if a customer likes what they see in their inbox, they will likely forward it to friends, thus increasing a firm’s market without any effort. Email marketing not only enables you to target customers on the basis of their interests and online behavioral pattern, but it is also and excellent way of gathering customer feedback to ensure that your business is meeting the needs of its clients.
Email Marketing is a great opportunity to reach out to millions of people in a matter of seconds
- Flexible: No other social channel provides the kind of flexibility that email does. It can manage everything from relationships to transactions.
- Personalization: Email has the power of personalization. Done correctly, it’s the exact opposite of mass media.
- Measurable: Email marketing is measurable. You don’t have to ask people to tell you they heard the ad on such and such a channel just to find out if the advertising is working.
- Performance: It’s consistently one of the best marketing performers compared to other channels.
- Relationships: It builds trust and brand loyalty with customers. Tell good stories, give good value and the result is a list of engaged and qualified leads.
- Targeted: Analytics and segmentation allow you to market to your customers based on their behaviour rather than guessing.
- Interactive: It is a direct and interactive one-to-one communication channel which also allows your customers to provide you with actionable feedback.
- Midas Touch: The ROI remains consistently strong with the DMA estimating in 2011 that for every one dollar spent, $40.56 is returned.
- Connected: It effectively connects all online channels and drives direct traffic to your landing pages, blog or even other social channels such as Facebook.
- Creative Freedom: Email marketing doesn’t constrain your creativity as do more traditional channels. You are not limited to 60 seconds or so many words as you are in broadcast or print.
- Higher Conversions: You have more power and more control over testing your marketing campaigns with email. If you have the right testing and segmenting tools you can leverage that to further increase your marketing effectiveness and your conversions.
- Immediate: It’s a “now” marketing channel. You can quickly address issues or react and leverage current events for more relevance.
- Stickiness: It turns a “one-and-done” visitor into repeat business.