E-mail Marketing – Tips and More

The world is changing around the clock and the Internet had proven to be the fastest and cheapest way to communicate on a local, national and global level.

While direct marketing had proven to be a focused, trackable and measurable way to connect with consumers, e-mail marketing brought the advantage of being less expensive while providing an instantaneous message delivery to prospects and clients. Straight-forward and affordable, e-mail marketing is a tool allowing businesses to contact customers directly and with a purpose.

While helping businesses build a relationship with their customers, e-mail marketing concentrates the company’s efforts on keeping in touch with clients and continuously reminding them of their services and products. While providing a relatively lower cost for global reach, messages through e-mail marketing can be interactive through the use of graphics, music and/or whatever is necessary to engage the recipient and capture prospects’ attention. Adding a personalized touch to the e-mail message would help create a special connection with the clients.

E-mail marketing can take different forms including newsletters, announcements and promotions. And while newsletters are periodical containing news and information, promotional emails are occasionally used to increase sales. Depending on the business, one or all of these could be beneficial.

Through e-mail marketing, businesses can announce special offers encouraging recipients to take action by making a purchase or signing-up for a service. In addition, businesses can aim at developing a long-term relationship with their readers by adding value and including content informing and benefiting the recipient. Have a purpose in mind before developing the e-mail marketing piece and define the target before sending it out.

When planning to send out an e-mail message, take scheduling into consideration. Blast emailing on a Friday evening, for example, might not be a good idea. Recipients might not check their email over the weekend and those who do and become intrigued by a call-to-action will unlikely be able to reach a business over the weekend. Businesses usually get one chance to reach prospects and get them to respond. Make the best out of it!

While it is cheaper and instantaneous to send an e-mail message to thousands of clients and prospects, getting the recipient to read and respond to the message is a challenge by itself. Furthermore, keep in mind that e-mail marketing is permission based otherwise the recipient of the email may consider the message a spam – and categorizing a message as a spam is a major setback with major circumstances of negatively affecting a company’s reputation and image.