If you’re online you’ve probably experienced it—direct mail campaigns via your email inbox! You too can use this technology to reach prospective clients or nurture existing ones. At a recent Effective Email Marketing conference in the U.S., Geoffrey Ramsey, partner and resident statsmaster for a company called eMarketer suggested that the best opportunity for marketers is email. In fact, he went so far as to say that the results from email marketing – where you send an email message to a list of prospects’ email addresses—are an average of 23 times higher than banner ads (online ads you see at the top of a Web site that promote other businesses); with an 11.5% click through rate from email versus a .5% rate with banner ads. (A click through rate is the percentage of people that receive the email and use its links to visit other promotional pages or Web sites.) Looking at these figures brings back memories of the marketing success many businesses had when Fax machines first arrived. Businesses began mass fax outs of promotional material to reach individuals. Interestingly, that strategy worked for several years as people usually responded to faxes with more urgency than other means of contact. These days email has taken that position. Most people who are online can’t go without checking their email daily or at least every few days. It has a sense of urgency and importance to it because it is used in so many ways —personal contact, business contact and so on. Geoff believes there are several reasons for the success of marketing campaigns via email: 1. It's ubiquitous. It’s now so common, most of your customers will be online or at the very least aware of email. 2. It can drive traffic to your site. 3. It's the ultimate PR medium to bring news and information onto your prospective customer’s desktop. 4. It gets a response. 5. It's targetable and customisable —you decide who it goes to, when and why. 6. It's measurable —you know exactly how many go out versus how many responses you receive. Remember “what you can measure, you can manage.” 7. It can drive sales. 8. It’s very effective for customer service and relationship building. It’s also a great way to nurture and stay in touch with existing clients. You can email them special reports, news, information, hints and tips—anything that adds value to help build loyalty to your business and keep them thinking of you. There’s just one word of warning with email marketing: Like any communication with your clients, you don’t want to send emails too often. Base your emails around your customers’ buying patterns. A good rule of thumb is no more than twice monthly.
Content by: Made Simple Group
Join our community today
