What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing has revolutionised web marketing and in simple terms means promoting your products and services through electronic communication.
Email Marketing is one of the most powerful web marketing tool that delivers instant value by driving response and cultivating ongoing customer relationships.
Email marketing delivers the highest Return On Investment (ROI) of any form of direct marketing activity and at a relatively low cost and has a very high response rate.
Email is used to build your community online, provide your potential clients with listing information, sell products and services, drive website traffic, provide customer service, reinforce company or brand awareness, encourage repeat custom and customer loyalty.
Your business needs to have an effective Email Marketing Strategy to grow not only your existing customer base but also to expand your client base significantly. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success.
Why is Email Marketing So Important For Your Business?
If you are not using email marketing to promote your business then the following reasons should give you enough signs of the massive opportunity you have missed so far.
1. Increases customer loyalty and retention
Regular and effective email communication with customers increases trust and loyalty ensures that your current customers keep buying from you time and again.
2. It can be used to launch new products and/or services
Email marketing can be used as very low cost and effective way to launch new product or a service by warming up your prospects and facilitating the sale. It can also used in conjunction with print media or offline marketing.
3. Other people can promote you at no expense to either you or them
Email marketing can be used very effectively to reach out to prospects using joint venture partners or strategic alliance partners and utilising their database. Any emails forwarded by your own customers to their friends or colleagues will lead to your product or service promotion at no cost.
4. Increase traffic to your website instantly
Following on from reason no. 3, having hyperlink within such email communication can lead to increased traffic to your website instantly. This also allows you to segment your market and have different web pages targeting different customer segments with different products and services.
5. Instant response
When you send an email marketing campaign out to your customers and there is a call to action contained in the message such as visiting a website or buying a product, you can almost immediately see or track the response and test and refine the offer as required.
6. It can increase brand recognition
Regular communication with your customers and prospects increases brand awareness and especially when you are using email marketing in conjunction with joint venture partners or simply building relationship with the website visitors.
7. Easy to set up
Email marketing is extremely easy to set up when using auto responder service providers. You could be up and running in a matter of hours and please never ever use an email program like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail for e-mail marketing. This will kill your marketing efforts.
8. It can be 100% automated
By using Auto responders and e-mail marketing providers you can fully automate your email marketing campaigns. Using an auto responder service, you can send communication about newsletters, new products or services to your customers, prospects etc at a predefined time and date.
9. You can track, measure and test
Email marketing service providers provide sophisticated measuring and tracking tools which give you real time information to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. No other marketing technique gives you such an instant and reliable traceability. This data then can be used to refine your marketing communication to test and re-test and establish what works the best to generate more sales, build prospect list etc.
10. Low set-up cost
Now this is the best bit ! The cost of email marketing set-up is very low (depending on the service provider you chose. In fact in some cases you can even set-up it for free and start reaping the rewards of the power of email marketing.
What Are the Benefits Of Email Marketing To your Business?
Over and above the reasons mentioned above, email marketing directly results in: