Email Marketing Strategy and Tips for Successful Campaigns
Email Marketing: No Longer the Next Great Thing - It's a Staple!
Whenever I talk with companies about their websites and how they promote business, eventually the use of email comes up. The use of email to promote business generally falls into one of three categories.
- We have a list of our customers but aren’t sure what to do with it.
- We don’t have a list of our customers.
- We’re thinking of buying a list.
Statistically, email marketing generates a payback of about 40 to 1, so is it worth it? You betcha!
What’s best for your company depends on what you want to accomplish, but there are some rules of thumb that are helpful.
First, buying or renting a list is GUARANTEED to make money…for the company that provides the list to you. Beyond that it’s risky. How many emails do you receive daily that you have no idea how they got your address? Some immediately go into the “junk” folder while others have to be are scanned for the subject line or perhaps opened to determine its value. Personally, I’m not a big fan of opening emails from companies I’ve never heard of or done business with!.
Email marketing strategy
Most people are more receptive to emails from companies they know or have already worked with. Sending emails to customers generally provides the safest route to follow and should generate the best ROI.
If you have lots of customers but don’t have their email addresses, ask them for it. If a customer walks into your business or calls for information, ask for their email address. If your business has an existing customer phone number list, assign an employee the task of calling all of the customers and getting their emails, this way it’s less intrusive for the consumer but also makes your company look less like a telemarketer.
Once you have a list, work on a strategy. Customers will “opt-out” of your email list if you are contacting them with no purpose or if there is no benefit for them to receive your email. What should you provide that will benefit someone that receives your email?.
- A new product or service
- Coupons
- Advertise upcoming sales
- If it’s time for a consumer to refill something
- Any special company or product information
All of these are excellent reasons to contact you customers.
Looking beyond just your current customers, ask visitors to your website to give you their email address. Encourage giving email addresses through active participation in social media like LinkedIn or Facebook and any other network where your prospective customers visit.
Finally, consider how you send out your emails. Certainly you can try to manage your email marketing with Outlook or whatever email application you use, but consider using a paid service like Constant Contact. Yes, it will probably cost you something but consider the advantages.
Paid services should allow you to track the results of each mailing:
- How many sent
- How many delivered
- How many opened
- How many resulted it a visit to your website
- How many bounced
Measuring at this level lets you begin the process of refining your email marketing campaigns to make each mailing more successful than the previous.
Just remember, email marketing can effectively build customer loyalty by offering insider specials as well as product and service information. Databases also represent a terrific resource to conduct research, start conversations and elicit feedback. Email marketing is a key piece in internet marketing and has even more potential when combined with viral marketing consulting and social media consulting.
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| Successful Email Marketing Strategy |
Social Media
There's an adage which says, "If you have to tell people that you’re funny, then you’re probably not."
The same is true with your brand. If you have to tell people your brand is authentic, then it probably isn’t. But if someone says something about you (say, an influential online brand advocate or blogger), you then have the basis for converting the hearts and minds of not only prospects, but those who are brand skeptics or agnostics as well.
Social media is a global platform that connects millions of people.
For hundreds of years, this type of one-to-one marketing was called word-of-mouth advertising. It worked a hundred years ago and it works now.
Through social media marketing, you’re given a global platform that connects millions of people. It allows them to find out for themselves what other consumers, like them, think. You see brand-advocates’ passion for your brand and gain an understanding of why the brand-advocate feels that way. Lastly, consumers use social media to see testimonials about how you’d be able to help them or their organization.
Approach
There’s no denying that working with social media takes time; both to develop content, and to respond to what’s happening in cyberspace. Our social business consulting staff works carefully with you to determine your expectations, requirements, comfort level and time commitment to social media.
Next, we’ll help you prioritize your target audiences and their level of participation on various social media platforms or viral marketing outlets. By agreeing on the right targets, the best social media venues on which to reach them, and the time commitment you’re able to make, we will customize a plan that determines not only your levels of success but how much hands-on assistance you’ll need in order to attain the highest ROI according to key performance indicators.
At Spartan Internet, we’re able to take on as much of your social media workload as you’re comfortable with. One service we strongly recommend for clients using social media is our Monthly Acceleration Program (MAP). Armed with monthly performance feedback and insights, you’ll have the information needed to maximize your investment in social media.
The truth is that if you’re not engaged in social media then you’re squandering one of the best business acceleration strategies you have available to you. And if you’re uncomfortable with these newer media strategies, Spartan Internet is the perfect partner to begin working hand-in-hand with immediately.
Viral Marketing
In this age of sharing and collaboration, spreading your message has never been more important.
Organizations take a proactive role in ensuring their brand, products and services stories are being communicated over the internet. Based on the quality and value of the information, it in turn, is passed on by others; be they loyal customers, online community forums, influential subject-matter bloggers and the like. This is viral marketing.
Take a proactive role in ensuring your brand, products and services stories are being communicated over the internet.
When managed properly, viral marketing has the potential to expand an organization’s messaging exponentially. The better synced your efforts the greater the impact. By combining viral marketing with organic search engine optimization, your search engine rankings will improve and your traffic will incrementally increase.
Over the past 14 years, Spartan Internet has developed and refined its viral marketing practices for a number of organizations. While there are a number of strategies available, they are always customized by client to ensure long term effectiveness. The key is working closely to understand each client’s goals, internal capacities and willingness to use us as an extension of their staff.
Examples of key viral marketing strategies we employ include:
- Blogging
- Article and white paper submissions
- Online press releases
- Forum participation
If you have aspirations for fame (and perhaps fortune) through the internet, there’s no better way to achieve this than viral marketing. Let us help you understand what it will take to accelerate your organization’s presence online, and move from good to great.
Email Marketing
Email marketing has returned as a must-have strategy for any successful online marketing initiative.
While is it no longer the "next big thing" as
it was in the late 1990s, it still generates a payback of 40 to 1. We think you'll agree that email marketing is still a valuable tool for your online initiatives.
Email marketing generates a payback of 40 to 1.
Email marketing can effectively build customer loyalty by offering insider specials as well as product and service information. This database also represents a terrific resource to conduct research, start conversations and elicit feedback. Email marketing is a key piece in internet marketing and has even more potential when combined with viral marketing consulting and social media consulting.
Email campaigns can also be customized by audience segment and, when combined with behavioral data, have the potential to become a marketing productivity power-house.
Approach
Spartan Internet’s preferred method of email marketing is through a third-party system called Constant Contact. Undoubtedly the most powerful email marketing system available today, our team will help get you up and running through the use of:
- Custom-designed HTML templates that translate the look and feel of your brand into tried and tested emails
- Generation of your initial email list from an aggregation of different sources within your organization
- Development of email capture forms to help grow your email list
- Implementation of email campaign schedules based on key seasonal and sales opportunities.
From then on, you can easily assess your performance metrics within Constant Contact. Such metrics include Open Rates, Click-Through-Rates and Bounce-Rates for each email sent. Coupling this data with advanced techniques such as follow-up lists and segmentation-based targeted campaigns has proven to be an unstoppable way to utilize the power of email marketing.
Four Tips For a Successful Email Marketing Strategy
So you’ve been playing around with various online marketing techniques, from paid search marketing, SEO, and even social media marketing. In doing so, you’ve realized that using digital media outlets to distribute information is key to stay on top of the game in today’s highly competitive eCommerce marketplace. Now, more than ever, one form of online marketing has proven vital to a successful online business: email marketing. In this blog post, I’ll reveal a few basic hints for an effective email marketing strategy to help keep you one step ahead of competitors.
1. Build Relationships
Building long-lasting relationships with online shoppers is vital to any email marketing strategy. To successfully translate your brand or company image to customers, steady communication paired with information relevant to your audience is ideal. Really get to know customers — understand needs and wants, and how they view your business.
read more: Ways To Use Social Media For Marketing
2. Content Matters
Development and distribution of high
quality, informative content is extremely important for cultivating customer loyalty. If email recipients are intrigued and entertained by what your company is saying, they will be more likely to click through to your website, or even share the information socially with friends. The key to topnotch content is fresh and accurate information, while steering clear of too.
many gimmicky tactics.
3. Sharability
With each email message distributed, encouraging recipients to interact with your brand or company is essential. Include an easy path to your official website and social media pages,but be careful not to overwhelm customers with too many social media callouts. When offering incentives, be sure to address the significance of sharing the information with others.
4. Message Distribution
Continuous communication with customers is important for prolonging the company/customer relationship; but how much is too much? Only include information applicable to the core message of the email that is likely to generate sales, increase traffic or gain brand recognition. Be sure not to wear out your welcome in customer’s email inboxes by sending out messages too frequently. On the flipside, do not send messages so infrequently that you become a stranger in your customer’s inbox.
There you have it, 4 great tips to help improve your email marketing strategy and boost customer reach.
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