Email Marketing
Struggling with customer loyalty and retention? Stupid question, right? Everyone could use more return traffic to their website and there’s no better solution than targeted email marketing. We’re not talking about SPAM (definitely not). We’re talking about providing the type of value to your customers that they’re willing to opt-in for and be excited to receive. The purposes of the sending Emails for marketing are:
- Sending Emails to enhance relationship with existing or previous customers.
- Sending Emails to acquire new customers.
- Adding advertisement in Emails sent by others.
Types of Email marketing:
- Direct Email: This method contains promotional messages or some kind of special offers. You can rent a list of Email addresses from Service Company so you can reach to the particular geographic area.
- Retention Email: Instead of sending promotional Emails these kinds of Emails encourage users to take some actions for instance sign up or buy some thing. Another form is newsletters. It may carry promotional messages but develops long term impact over readers as it provides values, information, entertainment and other benefits too.
- Advertising on others Emails: Recently Gmail has adopted a new trick that it put advertisement in their regular Email users and even related to the subject discussed in that particular mail so reader opt to respond quickly to that advertisement. Another way is advertiser can pay other advertisers or newsletter senders to put their advertisement in it.
Advantages of Email marketing
In compare to other means of marketing Email marketing is most preferred as:
- Sending Email is the cheapest way of communication.
- Delivery is with in very short span.
- You can measure return on investment by help of “tracker software”.
- Well prepared mailing list provides broad range and neatly targeted audience.
- E-mail messages are easy to track. An advertiser can track users via autoresponders, web bugs, bounce messages, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, click-throughs, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing.
- Advertiser can provides Emails to their audience as per their choices of the subjects.
- An advertiser can obtain specific types of interaction with Emails that Emails 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.
- Email marketing is paperless so it is eco-friendly.
Obstacles in Email marketing
The biggest obstacle in this marketing is “permission”. Your Email marketing may be labeled as spam and thus can not deliver to the intended recipients.
Another one is laws of land. There are some different laws in different countries to consider Email marketing as spam or “abuse of net”. The CAN-SPAM act of U.S.A. is authorizing a $11,000 USD penalty per violation of spamming each individual recipient. Therefore most of the Email marketers use software which ensures compliance with the act.
The way out – Opt-in Email marketing
Yes there are ways out for this situation and one of them is permission base Email marketing. Let us take close view of the form of this method. Suppose you sell an item on online shopping cart at that time you ask the patrons to sign permission to receive any upgrades or newsletter on that product. Thus you shake hand with your customers to actively involve in Email marketing and able to rip the sweet fruits of the advance Email marketing!