Getting Started with Email Marketing: Part 1
In this series, we will provide an overview on email marketing, offer tips to help make your e-mail marketing campaigns more successful, review the tools necessary for effective email marketing and expose email marketing mistakes to avoid.
Part 1: Email Marketing Overview
One of the most effective ways to reach a large audience, even on a shoestring budget, is via e-mail. There are close to 1 billion Internet users in the world today. According to recent research, almost 80 percent of them use the Internet to send and receive e-mail regularly. As a result, many marketers consider e-mail to be an essential tool for communicating with their customers and prospects. It is used to promote products and services, provide support, generate traffic to websites and improve customer service. Some believe that email marketing is a science - others think of it as an art. Either way, it is the most widely used platform for online marketing today. Why? Because it works!
Many people don't realize, however, that successful email marketing requires skill and patience. It's not as easy as sending quick e-mails out to a list of people. Traditional and newly developed marketing tactics are required to persuade e-mail recipients to respond to an e-mail message. Because e-mail is such a popular platform for online communication, most people's e-mail inboxes are full each day. Because of this heavy volume of e-mail, it's not easy to catch the attention of your intended recipient. It's even more difficult to turn that attention into action. So, let's take a look at the different parts of an e-mail that e-marketers concentrate on to grab attention and inspire action.
There are four basic elements of email marketing that marketers focus on in their campaigns. They are the list, the message, delivery and measurement. Each element has many factors to consider.
The List
Before implementing an email marketing campaign, marketers must have a list of people to send their message to. Building this list takes time, as current legislation requires that commercial e-mail is sent only to recipients who request to receive it from the sender. This requirement for permission means that marketers must first implement a strategy to encourage people to request information from them. Often, this is done through the use of newsletter sign-ups, website incentives and partnerships with other sites that drive similar
market traffic. Obviously, the content of your website will dictate if visitors will be persuaded to ask you to contact them with more information. Relevance of content is the most important factor in persuading people to subscribe to your e-mail offerings. Because organically building an in-house e-mail list takes time, some marketers rent existing lists from list providers who have procured contact details from people requesting information relevant to their business. It is important to only rent lists from reputable providers who can ensure that permission was given by their contacts to share their information. Obviously, renting an existing list is much more expensive; but it is also a much faster way to build a large list. The more targeted your list is to your market, the more effective it will be.
This is why securing contacts who find your information interesting or relevant is so important. Obviously, marketers want as many details as possible from each person on their list. To personalize e-mails to a large list, it is important to have, at a minimum, each person's first and last name and e-mail address. But marketers also find birthdates, addresses, phone numbers, company details, favorite color, etc. very important. Deciding how much information to ask isn't easy. If you request too much information, people might be reluctant to subscribe. If you don't ask, you won't know. Itis a delicate balance between making it easy for people to register and getting as much information as you can. Some marketers start with the basics, and attempt to gather additional information later with incentives. Subscriber information is stored in a database of some kind and eventually imported into the e-mail application used to send group messages.
