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Benefits of Email Marketing : Beyond the Basics

Article by Janet Taylor

Email marketing is one of today’s more efficient and accessible ways of advertising. In terms of global reach, it remains the most cost-effective marketing strategy at your disposal. Some companies have phased out their more traditional marketing approaches such as Yellow pages, billboards, and cold calls in order to experience an ‘instant gratification’ effect from their marketing efforts. Even the smallest of businesses have turned to email marketing to help boost sales and revenue.

Email Marketing is Not Spam!

First off, when I refer to email marketing, I am not referring to spam. A proper email-marketing campaign is targeted to people who want to hear about your products or services; typically, customers, prospective customers, or members, if you work in an association. Email marketing is part of a marketing and communications function and should only be executed if you have the permission of your contacts of subscribers.

If you do not have a properly developed list of contacts of people who have agreed to hear from you, and you go down the route of blasting out unsolicited emails, well, you’ve effectively let the world know that you don’t want any friends. If however you want to learn more about the right way to execute email marketing campaigns, then read on.

Getting Started

A good starting point is to get hold of an email software application that has the capability to distribute mass emails to a specified contact list, store demographic data, and track results of your campaigns. I’m partial to InSite Messages because it does everything you’d expect an email campaign system to do plus, it generates instant reports on pertinent information such as send rates or link-through rates and ties all your campaign data back into contact information and message history.

InSite Messages was a heaven-sent application whenever I had to begin a marketing campaign for survey participation. We also used it to help bring in registrants for our spring and fall conventions, product releases, publication sales and weekly newsletters to our members. The only thing to remember about blast emails is to be mindful about sending meaningful information and not inundating your customers’ inbox with emails containing unnecessary information.

Some Benefits

• Won’t clog up your email server.
• Cost-effective and sometimes even FREE.
• Outbound emails can be scheduled and sent automatically.
• Comes with templates for professional look and feel.
• Automated contact lists and subscription links.
• Manage content or insert feeds as content.
• Easy to read, up-to-the-minute reports.

Beyond the Basics

Beyond basic email marketing communications, many news services are now using email campaign management software to send news and bulletins to subscribers. A good email campaign management system will allow you to insert RSS feeds directly into the page that will be emailed to subscription lists. All you have to do is indicate what feeds you want included on your page. You can then schedule when the message or bulletin will be sent, and the feeds will be emailed on a single page to your subscribers.

Of course this works well if you have a list of subscribers. If you are using a tool like InSite Messages, you can manage contacts and subscribers and assign contacts to any number of lists. Once your contacts are in the system, you can easily set up unsubscribe links in the body of your messages. If a contact no longer wants to receive emails from you, they can simply click the unsubscribe button and the email campaign software will drop them from future mailings.

Below, I have outlined a quick summary of a few ways businesses and organizations are using email campaign software to communicate and market to their stakeholders.

Customer Newsletters & Bulletins: Enewsletters and bulletins are a great way to connect with customers on new programs, products, services and to communicate other important information about your organization.

Employee Newsletters & Bulletins: Internal communications is an important and often overlooked function. Email blasts to employees on new programs, initiatives, products and services can be a very effective way to communicate what is going on in your organization.

Email Marketing Campaigns: Email marketing campaigns are a great way to market new programs, products, services and communicate other important information to your customers.

News Services and Announcements: Email event notifications and announcements are also important to communicate to your customers and prospects.

Press & Media Releases: Public Relations companies have really picked up on email campaign software to streamline the design and distribution of professional press releases. With a click of a button media contacts can be notified immediately.

Whichever direction you decide to take your email marketing, you are sure to keep your customers in the loop and up-to-date on what is going on in your organization. And at the very least it proves you are alive and well and flowing with the ever-changing tides of technology.

Benefits and Advantages of Email Marketing

Article by Ananth Prasath

Email marketing is a very cost-effective method for a business to market its products or services to a broad audience. If you can plan an effective email campaign with a quality business email list then you can get great results from it.
An important advantage of business email marketing is that it allows you to reach a large audience with minimal effort. It is relatively cheap to launch a business to business email marketing campaign when compared to other marketing methods. Often, you will already have your own email list that you have compiled from your own client base. If you don’t have your own list, then there are reputable business email list brokers that can sell you a list of business email addresses. The quality of these email lists can vary considerably, so be certain to find out where the list has come from and how recently it has been updated.
The cost to broadcast emails is also very low compared to traditional mailshots. Often, each email will cost less than a penny per email if sent in high enough volumes. Therefore, the cost is very low to broadcast an email marketing campaign.
Email campaigns can also be easily tracked. A large amount of very useful data can be tracked by the email marketer, such as open rates, click rates and bounce rates. This information can be used to refine your campaigns. As an example, you can change the subject line of the email and track which version gets the highest open rates.
If you can afford it, then it is a wise idea to hire the services of a professional business email marketing company to design and broadcast your email campaigns. If you are aiming to optimize your response rates from your email campaign and increase your sales, then a specialist business to business (B2B) email marketing company should help you to increase your return on investment and generate better results.
If you are still unsure, then here are the top 10 reasons, why you should invest in email marketing in India right away.

1. Global reach: No matter where you are or whom you need to reach, targeted emails pave the way. Borders are no obstacles in email marketing.

2. Lower cost: Costs incurred in designing, executing, testing, sending and receiving an email is up to 78% less for a run of 5000 over paper-based direct mail version. When you add e-mail to your marketing mix, you spend less time, money and resources than with traditional marketing vehicles like direct mail or print advertising.

3. Interactive: You can innovatively initiate campaigns using graphics, videos, music, quiz, game or whatever that will be of interest to your prospect, to grab his attention and interest immediately.

4. Highly personalized: Email enables you to personalize and greet every person you target. This helps in creating a special bond with the prospects.

5. Round the clock marketing: With an email the audience can understand your offering even when you are out of office.

6. Measurable results: Special tools are available that accurately measure click-through rate, conversion rate, how a person one arrived at your website, and more, to enable you to assess the success of different email campaigns.

7. Targeted marketing: Since prepackaged and custom-built lists are available, you could reach only those who might require your services, solutions or products without bothering those who do not. You can select each one of your targets based on geography, age, income, spends, and many other parameters.

8. Opt-in or unsubscribe options: Emails contain opt-in and opt-out options which help you to shortlist your prospects and reach only the ones genuinely interested in your offerings.

9. Faster response: Time to receive responses through e-mail is one to three days, where you will get maximum responses on day one itself, while a direct mail campaign would take minimum 7 to 12 days to generate any responses. Further, responding to a direct mail is more cumbersome, while a person can respond to an email immediately.

10. Simplest: Executing an email campaign is simple and you can do it sitting at home without any extensive resources.

Online marketing is a high response and opportunistic medium for communicating with customers, and if executed right, has the power to bring huge benefits to your business. Go ahead, initiate an extremely targeted e-marketing and see your profits grow. Many of your competitors are doing it already!

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