E-Mail Marketing for Businesses

E-mail marketing can be a stout boon to businesses – yet many businesses don’t use or understand it. Here is an overview of the pros and cons of e-mail marketing, and how to begin using it in your business.

E-mail marketing is essentially a replacement for the traditional mailing list, where you would send out a product list, brochure, or leaflet containing special offers to existing or potential customers on a regular basis. The usual aim is to generate more sales, enhance the reputation of your businesses or to sustain your business (as opposed to your competitors) foremost in your customer’s minds.

There are pros and cons to e-mail marketing; before committing time and money you need to be clear what they are.

Advantages:

Assuming you have an internet connection already, it’s free to e-mail ten, a hundred or a thousand people. Compare this to the cost of printing and posting a thousand letters.

Once you’re extinct to the process, it really doesn’t take that long to send out an email to a thousand customers. No more stuffing envelopes for hours.

It’s snappily. Most people check their e-mail daily, so you can reach them before more traditional methods of communication.

The media customary can be more exciting than a brochure. You can include links to videos (demonstrate your product maybe), audio, presentations, latest industry news. There are loads of options here.

Easy referrals – to pass your email on to a friend the recipient needs merely to press the forward button.

Surely one of the greatest advantages must be the way a well presented email communication can give your company the appearance of a powerful larger, professional organisation. There is often the opportunity to outmanoeuvre your larger competitors.

Disadvantages:

There is a learning curve, including learning how to use technology more effectively. It’s not difficult though – if you can run a business you can certainly do this.

Some financial investment in e-mail templates and CRM (Customer relationship management) software is required to become fully efficient.

Time and effort is required to secure e-mail addresses that you can exercise.

Now for a brief overview of setting up an email marketing campaign.

Firstly, and most importantly, create a concept. Don’t just plan to send an e-mail every so often with whatever your business is promoting at that time. This is the quickest diagram to bore your customers and derive them unsubscribing from future communications.

You need to decide once thing fair at the beginning – What is the purpose of you e-mailing your customers, over the next year or so?

This may be:

Cross sell new products to existing customers

Increase the reputation of your business, by providing useful and relevant information on your industry

Shift stock at positive times of the year with sales or special offers

Promote the launch of a new product

And so on.

Decide when you intend to e-mail, well in advance. Don’t over email people. E-mail only when you have something interesting or famous to say, which brings us to the next item.

It must be interesting and relevant - from the customer’s point of view. You may be launching a fresh product, or have reached your 5^th year trading, but unless there’s a real benefit in it for the customer, something that will genuinely help them, they won’t be interested. Your e-mail will be deleted and so may any more you send out.

The next stage is to store e-mail addresses ready for use. You can do this in Outlook (create a distribution list), Excel spreadsheet (useful for holding more information) or CRM software. CRM software is the best long term option, but does require some financial outlay.

After this, consider the design of the email. You can type up a standard e-mail and add a couple of links, or you can download an e-mail template to make your emails more attractive. If you have a website designer, often they can create a template for you. Typing ‘email template’ into Google will bring up a list of websites where you can obtain templates.

Now it’s time to consider the content. Some good rules here are:

Engage the customer’s interest. Make it interesting and relevant to them. Make it worth their time to read.

Keep it concise. Don’t ramble.

Don’t overwhelm them. Two or three good pieces of information can sometimes be better than ten.

Include a call to action. What do they need to do next? Give them a number to call or website to visit, and make it clear why they should do so. (If you can’t think of a good reason they should act on your email, should you really be sending it? )

Finally, ask someone else to proof read for spelling and grammatical errors.

Once your email has been sent, make sure you monitor what response it gets. Did one article interest people more? Is there an offer that worked well? Learn what worked and what didn’t so that your next email is even better.

Now you have an overview of email marketing, you can start planning your campaign. I shall be writing further articles, each one covering the above sections in more depth.

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