Email marketing

When searching for new avenues to grow a business, companies want to reach potential customers in as many ways as possible. And while social media is getting much of the attention now, it is important to remember that most people are still willing to get a daily message from a brand by email.

Jeanne S. Jennings, in her book ‘The Email Marketing Kit’, summarizes key benefits of email marketing [pages 3-5, 2].

· Email is cost-effective. While there are costs involved in email marketing, such as copywriting and design, production and delivery costs are significantly cheaper than that of direct mail.

· Email builds relationships. While email may not be the only method that helps connect with audience, it is the least intrusive—enabling the recipient to respond at their leisure. Also a well thought-out email plan can facilitate customer loyalty.

· Email is a ‘push technology.’ Just like telemarketing, door-to-door, and direct mailing, email marketing pushes company’s message to prospective and existing customers, rather than relying on customers to seek for appropriate products themselves.

· Email provides timely results. The time between distribution and delivery of an email marketing campaign can be measured in minutes rather than days.

· Email accommodates hyperlinks. With just a little click of the mouse, a customer can go from reading a marketing message, to purchasing at online checkout.

· Email provides detailed feedback. A marketer can measure how many of emails were successfully delivered and opened, how many times attached links were clicked on and, most importantly, how many sales were made.

There are a number of different approaches a marketer can implement to engage audience, and each type of email communication will aim completely different objectives.

An educational style of message usually takes the form of newsletters, keeping customers aware of important updates or novelties to business. First and foremost, it has to avoid looking like a sales push. Instead of this companies should encourage readers to look into proposed products.

Direct sales message s are the most widespread and undesired by readers. They can include offers on a single product, or catalogue-style emails with a range of offers. Businesses often shy away from running email campaigns in their marketing programs, as they are concerned they might be seen as spammers.Despite this danger, such emails are necessary, because they can build first relationships with future customers.

Housekeeping messages are emails such as subscription, confirmation messages, welcome emails or ones used to thank a subscriber for taking the time to sign up. These are often generated automatically by the system to send an email, but can be customized to concrete audiences for greater impact.

After choosing the type of email, a marketer should compose it properly. All emails are made up of three key components: the sender’s details (name and email address), the subject line, and the message body.

There are two parts to the ‘From’ field: the address and sender’s name, and it is important to consider both fields individually. The personal touch of a real person’s name in the ‘From’ field increases chances of the email being opened and read. Unfortunately, spammers have started to adopt this tactic too, so people are wary of opening emails from strangers. That means the best time to use a real name in the ‘From’ field is when the recipient is likely to know the name of the person who’s sending it.

An email subject line needs to indicate the type of message, so a direct offer will differ from a response to a transaction, or a system-generated message. The essence is that the subject should communicate the main benefit of proposed offer in the fewest possible words.

In the message body a good rule of thumb is to place all critical information in the first 20 characters with the subject no longer than 60 characters—this puts the most important information first, and ensures that the subject line is less likely to be cut off by a small screen. The text should start out with an offer or a call to action (such as buy, download, or find out) to grab the reader’s attention. When discussing a product, a sender should focus first on how it benefits the reader, instead of just listing the features. Limited quantities, expiration dates, or other urgency factors reinforce the idea that the reader should look at the offer right away, in other case they will miss out. The end of body text should contain a signature, and once again a strong call to action in order to direct a reader.

The old adage to measure twice and cut once can be easily applied to email campaigns—once a marketer pressed the ‘Send’ button, it is too late to fix any mistakes. Before sending a message, he has to be sure everything is checked twice.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13