Email Marketing

Email Marketing: Subtle but Still Effective

Written by Ashwin Satyanarayana for Gaebler Ventures

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods ever conceived so far. It pursues relentlessly and is non-intrusive. It is cheap compared to conventional marketing and it brings results. Here are some easy ways to deploy Email marketing for your business.

The world of advertising is over-crowded, noisy and pushy.

We are bombarded with thousands of messages each day and a majority of them are hoarse calls made by desperate marketers to get heard or seen. Conventional ways of marketing might still be working for a lot of reasons - sheer media pull than anything else -- but the Internet has enabled lean machinery for marketing through email marketing. Here's why email marketing is the way to go.

It is permission based marketing: One of the greatest secrets that most marketers don't seem to grasp quickly enough is that customers don't buy because you want them to buy; they do so when they are ready to. Something in them must give; they should feel the compelling need to get a product or avail a service. No matter how much you shout to get yourself heard, customers will only hear you if they choose to. In that case, permission based marketing - like email marketing - is the most effective.

Email marketing can help nurture customers until they buy: Let's just say that you are interested in buying a car. You didn't decide anything yet and you will need more information before you buy. If I had a business that sells new cars, I would tend to publish timely, engaging and informative articles or whitepapers for my potential clients. However, they need to exchange their email address to have access to all that information. They read and they are impressed. I now know that.

  • They have been looking for information about my products and services and I am glad to offer them some well-written, timely advice.
  • They are extremely interested and are likely to buy sooner or later.
  • I can provide more information for my customers and perhaps even make them buy. I develop my own little database of highly-targeted customers, always eager to know what I have to publish.
  • I can keep sending those emails continuously for years to nurture them, build their trust in my products and services, provide them with more information to help them decide, etc.
  • Facilitate their buying process by providing links back to website; give them special discounts not found on the website or through your usual sales channels.

Email marketing is the best tool for brand recall: If you have a data base of 1000 customers and you send out your emails to each one of them, some are bound to click open and read while some won't. Email marketing tools or programs always allow you to measure this effectively. Further, those who don't open your emails still look at the incoming mail and your company name. So, if all the 1000 emails have been delivered, we are looking at 1000 pairs of eyes on your name each time your emails go out and even unconsciously registered in your recipients mind. How much money will you need to get that kind of dedicated exposure to your name? What is brand recall of this call worth?

Email marketing can be quantified and it allows you to test campaigns: The effectiveness of all your email campaigns can be measured when you take to email marketing. How many emails you sent out and how many really got opened? Out of those read, how many took the bait and performed the call-to-action? Was this campaign better than the last one? Which one of these five campaigns succeeded the most? Email marketing allows you to use metrics to your advantage, improve your campaigns, and finally test until you figure out a winning campaign.

Ash has an undergraduate degree in engineering and an MBA from Ohio University. Today he is a corporate trainer, business coach and a freelance writer.

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