Email Campaigning is one of the most powerful tool available to businesses of all types and sizes to aggressively engage with existing & prospect customers. No matter how you define success, you can achieve outstanding results with email campaigning while investing only a small amount of time and an even smaller amount of money.
Why Email Campaigning?
Experts and small businesses agree: “54% of small businesses surveyed rated e-mail as the top online promotion to drive site visitors and customers to their web sites and storefronts.”
Benefits
Businesses engage in email campaigning because it works.
- 72% of respondents to an eConsultancy survey in early 2011 described email's ROI as excellent or good.
- According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email campaigning was expected to generate an ROI of $42.08 for every dollar spent on it in 2010. As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs.
- The ForeSee Results 2010 report on the effectiveness of social media found that promotional emails were the second biggest influence on retail website visits. The biggest influence was familiarity with the brand.
- A MerchantCircle survey of over 8,000 local business owners in the US found email Campaigning cited by 35.8% as a Top 3 most effective Campaigning or advertising method. Only social network profiles and search engine marketing scored higher.
- In Datran Media's 2010 Annual Campaigning & Media Survey, 39.4% of industry executives said the advertising channel that performed strongest for them was email. This was the top result.
- The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that email and e-newsletter campaigning are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO .
Key advantages
- Biggest influence for Brand familiarity & visibility
- Driving visitors to website, facebook and blog
- Proactive communication channel with existing subscribers, event visitors and contacts
- The call to action is clear: “Click here to take advantage of this offer”, or “to learn more about our product”, or to “attend this event”, or “new product arrives/arrived”.
- Critical tool to strengthen relationships
- Encourage trust and cement loyalty
- Get more referrals, more easily
- Track who reads and responds
Let's not get carried away
Just like a garden only bears fruit if managed properly, so it is with email campaigning. We know it can work, but you have to get the basics right. The basics of building a list of people who want to hear from you, crafting a message, and ensuring the emails get through to those on that list.
It's not that simple, unfortunately. Quite apart from the complexities of designing and delivering email messages to the right people, getting them to actually read and respond to your message, and measuring and analyzing the results, there is the issue of permission.
What's "permission"?
Responsible email campaign is based on the idea of permission. This is a complex issue. Essentially, you need an email address owner's permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don't have this permission, then the recipients of your mail may well regard your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email. Therefore its must to add an “unsubscribe” link in each mailer, as its gives enough trust to the recipient that your are professional and respect his choice of not willing to receive promotional emails anymore.
So coming to the conclusion, then how to manage a killer list, what tools to use and how to increase the effectiveness of your “email blast” ?
