Obviously, email marketing is a tool any smart internet marketer cannot afford to neglect. Unfortunately, many marketers have continued to ignore the basic email marketing ‘best practices’.
These include:
- The use of email triggers and re-marketing
- Testing (of landing pages, reputation statements etc.)
- Basic segmentation/ Audience targeting (based on geography or demography)
- Regular list cleansing & deliverability checking
- Integration of social media and email marketing
- Customer relationship management
Email Marketing Strategy: What You Should Know
As of today, email marketing has evolved beyond mainly sending of messages to prospects or customers. The powers of email marketing can now convert prospects, ensure repeated sales to a customer, and expand your range of services to your customers.
Moreover, the use of new technologies has made email marketing more sophisticated and effective. Organizations and individuals can now be tracked based on their interests, preferences and purchase history to get greater results.
The problem today is, though ‘transactional emails’ already exist to handle the more complex aspect of email marketing, many organizations still lag behind in proper email marketing. Email marketing is a medium for building an ecosystem where prospects are identified, engaged, and the appropriate pitch is used to convert them into buyers.
As reported on Econsultancy, Linus Gregoriadis (UK Research Director at Econsultancy) said that email marketing has become slightly more difficult. However, its dividends pay off. Moreover, handling the little basics will add huge results to your marketing campaigns. Additionally, you may need to change your email marketing software. Having good software will help reduce much of the complex processes that affect your campaigns.”
Email Marketing Strategy: Is it Really Necessary in Your Case?
Let’s consider two situations where email marketing is really necessary…
1. If you already have a customer base, email marketing is a cost-effective way of unlocking your income potential from this pool of loyal customers. Oftentimes, you can implement email marketing at a fraction of traditional costs of advertising.
2. New organizations or older ones in need of brand awareness or driving sales should also focus on email marketing along with search engine optimization and pay per click advertising.
To properly test your email campaigns, you should test,
- Subject lines
- Landing pages
- Frequency of emails
- Time/day of week and
- Name/address of the sender
Sometimes, you may need to test prospects reactions. Testing will go a long way to improve the deliverability of your emails.
In addition to improving your deliverability, you should also check your sender reputation and relevance of email to the recipients. Remember, a little improvement in your email campaign strategy will result in long-term benefits.
Though email marketing has received less focus in the past year, organizations and agencies have found email marketing to be very indispensable in their online marketing mix. Econsultancy reported the state of email marketing in an article, Email marketers need to get back to basics: study.
They said,
Email continues to be a vital component of the marketing mix and the vast majority of companies (72%) rate email as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ in terms of ROI.
As we discussed in Social Networking Vs. Blogging & Email Marketing Vs. SMS, the importance of email marketing cannot be downplayed. The Return on Investment (ROI), and its minimal implementation cost are strong factors every smart internet marketer should consider.
Finally, you need to properly engage your email audience and also integrate your emails with your social media strategies. Begin by setting a goal for yourself or organization and consistently monitor the results.
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