Unleashing Simple Email Marketing
INTRODUCTION
E-mail marketing or Electronic Mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mails as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to: Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage Customer loyalty and repeat business; Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately; and sending e-mails over the Internet, for the purpose of informing or educating.
ADVANTAGES
- A mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.
- Compared to other media investments such as direct mail or printed newsletter e-mail is less expensive.
- An exact return on investments can be tracked (“track to basket”) and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
- The delivery time for an e-mail message is short (i.e., seconds or minutes) as compared to a mailed advertisement (i.e., one or more days).
- An advertiser is able to “push” the message to its audience, as opposed to website-based advertising, which relies on a customer to visit that website.
- E-mail messages are easy to track. An advertiser can track users via autoresponders, web bugs, bounce messages unsubscribe requests, read receipts, click through, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing.
- Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically.
- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
- Over half of internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.
- Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger (1) other messages to be delivered automatically, or (2) other events, such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category.
- E-mail marketing is paper-free (i.e., “green”).
- Tracking and response metrics enables tuning and optimisation of the E-mail marketing channel by a process of testing different variants and calculation of statistically significant results.
- E-mail is popular with digital products marketers.
DISADVANTAGES
- Many companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with existing customers, but many other companies send unsolicited bulk e-mail, also known as spam.
- The sheer volume of spam has led some users to mistake legitimate commercial e-mail for spam. This situation arises when a user receives e-mail from a mailing list to which he/she subscribes. Additional confusion arises when both legitimate and spam messages have a similar appearance, as when messages include HTML and graphics.
- One effective technique used by established email marketing companies is to require what is known as the “double opt-in” method of requiring a potential recipient to manually confirm their request for information by clicking a unique link which includes a unique identification code to confirm that the owner of the recipient email address has indeed requested the information.
E-MAIL MARKETING TOOLS
E-mail delivery
You need to have a medium to use to send emails. Depending on the size of your addressbook and the frequency, you can choose which program to use to send emails.
If you will be sending less than 500 emails per day, then a normal email account is enough. POP3 accounts have various email sending limits. They are those that limit in hourly basis (200 emails per hour) and those that limit per day (the highest being 2000 per day). Check with your web host to know your sending limits. Otherwise your account will be blocked if you exceed the limits. Free mailing platforms also have varied limits. Gmail has the highest with 500 emails, then yahoo at 200 sent in batches of 50 and hotmail at 200 per day.
If you intend to send more than 500 emails per day, it’s the time you need to solicit commercial programs.or mailing lists programs. There are various commercial and open source programs that you can use to develop an emailing platform. The most common ones are constant contact, sendblaster, phplist, mailman, pommo. weber etc. These mailing lists have a capacity to deliver even about 100,000 emails per day. However, it has to depend on the mailing server you are using. It should not have email sending limits.
Email creation
The emails to be sent needs to be formatted. There are two modes of sending emails; text or html.
Text emails are just words which are simply formatted. You cannot include images when sending with this format. The format is simple, light and easy to send. You can send these emails in large batches. They are actually like the normal emails we send hence they end up right into the inbox (not junk folder)
HTML emails are emails which are highly formatted. Sometime you will see them look like websites. They include text formatting, images and graphics and even other media like videos and music. They are smart and presentable. These emails are heavy and complicated. They take time to send and might load the server. Its recommended to send them in small batches. Since these mails are the one used by advertisers in spams, they are often filtered to the junk folder by email clients.
Address Book management
You will need to have valid email address to send the emails to. Organizations and individuals gather addresses into the addressbook from the customers, friends and family. The size of your address book determines the platform and format to use.
Small organizations can use normal emails since their addressbook are small whereas large organizations can purchase commercial solutions that don’t limit their capabilities.
Its important you have an addressbook that can be able to group of filter addresses by groups. This ensures that you can be able to send specific emails to niche groups. It enhance effective communication and targeted marketing.
EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGIES
There are several ways of doing email marketing depending on what you want relied over internet. Most organizations will use email marketing to do the following:
Customer Relationship Management
It can be used when an organization want to relay important information about a product or service to their existing customers like product enhancement, service reminders, product safety, service improvement etc.
E-Newsletters
Organizations can be sending regular newsletters to their subscribers. These newsletters will provide information within and without the organization. It could also be information about a certain service or industry. E-newsletter is refered to as a gentleman spam. Its both informative, educative and also commercial since you can slot advertisement slots in the newsletter.
Announcements and Alerts
Mailing lists are also use for announcements. Most organizations have announcements to make to their customers. To make it personal and quick, they send emails to each and every one of them. For instance, an internet service provider will send an email to its 10,000 subscribers list to tell then of a potential virus circulating in the internet.
Sales
The times of knocking on people’s doors to solicit for business are gone. People are using the internet to do cold calling. Internet is very effective because you can contact thousands of people in one hour what you could do to only one person in door to door selling. Organizations are using email marketing to generate sales leads. With effective follow-up, they eventually become business.