Email marketing, in the simplest form, is an email sent to customers, prospects, or to the general public. More specifically, email marketing is a form of promotional material that could include discounts or coupons, or emails encouraging the brand loyalty of your company by your current customers. Along with promotion, a very common form of email marketing is online newsletters, “how to” guides, or a list of tips on a specific topic (the latter two are commonly referred to as ‘white papers’). Email marketing can also include advertising from another company in support of your promotion. With all of this said, the main goal of email marketing is to grow your client list, to expand your reader loyalty, and ultimately to make sales.
For those of you still having a bit of trouble figuring out what email marketing is, think of it as direct mail or magazine advertisements sent directly through the internet to an email inbox. However, unlike direct mail and magazines, you must get permission from those you wish to email. After permission, which might be the hardest step of the entire process, email marketing transforms into an extremely effective and inexpensive way of reaching out to your current and prospective customers. It allows you to quickly offer incentives to customers without the wait and cost of direct mail or magazine inserts, which can take weeks to create and print, and additional time to actually reach the customer. With the continued rise of internet usage and the decline of print marketing, email marketing campaigns are currently one of the best ways to contact customers.
Suppose a sale you are having is being extended for a day, or an event time is being changed, emailing your customers is an immediate solution to these issues, and allows you to inform your customers quickly and painlessly. Email marketing is suggested to be sent to only those interested, which means again that permission is required, as you don’t want to be considered a spammer and be fined and potentially blocked from sending future emails. For your benefit, place those customers interested in newsletters or white papers in a one group, those interested in upcoming events in another, and so forth. Separating your customers into groups allows you to personalize email messages specific to their demographic.
Up Next: Email Marketing – Getting Started
By Bridgid Shea, Marketing Coordinator for The Computer Company, Inc.
