Before I tell you my story let me present you with the services we offer here at Glenn Website Design for your email campaign management and design of an email newsletter.
We use our partner, Mailchimp to send out emails based on your targeted email list. We can provide you with complete management of your email campaign included with analytics of the results. You will be provided with how many emails were opened, how many clicks, and other statistics.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is one form of direct marketing that uses email to communicate. The main goals of email marketing are building and maintaining customer relationships and sales. The unquestionable advantage of this form of communication is the possibility of high personalization of the message. You can divide your customers into several groups, and thus send a message with precisely selected content for them. More and more email marketing tools also allow personalization at the level of adding the recipient’s name to the beginning of the message. In this way, the client will feel as if the email was prepared especially for him and would be more eager to read its content.
Learning about email marketing
I am not going to lie to you, I am writing this article only because it is the last thing I would write about. Well probably not the last, but I am lazy for brainstorming today and I have a huge list of topics most already discussed and the one on email keeps yelling, “write your email for marketing story”.
So, my first experience with email for marketing did not go so well. This was way back in 2001 when I was still getting my feet wet on how to do internet marketing. I often received these emails as SPAM, back then they grew like weeds. This one email I received had in the BCC all of the recipients, hundreds of other people who got the same SPAM. I thought I would be smart and put in my own little advertisement for marketing furniture and hit reply to all. The next day my internet service was shut off.
Internet Service provider
I called the internet service provider and asked him what was wrong. He sounded desperate. That is when he told me that my little stunt had shut down their entire operation. He said someone was hitting them with a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. That is when he mentioned something about a lawsuit. I quickly ended my discussion of getting my service back. Never again have I sent out an email marketing campaign for my own business.
Email marketing and spam
An important lesson I learned from this experience was that in email marketing is that the customer has to agree to receive communications from us. If we do not have such consent, our correspondence will be treated as spam. According to most country laws, spam is primarily an unsolicited advertising message and unsolicited commercial offers. In the USA email SPAM is illegal and can have serious, federal penalties. You also want to be sure the service you use to send the email is virus-free or you could be charged with cybercrimes.
Statistics for email marketing
According to Hubspot, there is $42 for every $1 spent ROI on email marketing. I am not going to discuss all of their statistics which are very thorough. You can take a look for yourself if you are interested. Email Marketing Stats Keep in mind that all statistics are built around their own set of tests. Reading their presentation of statistics I am sold if that was all it took. But I know that these statistics are based on successful email marketing users. I could take another segment of internet users and get an entirely different set of results. There are several key elements to a successful email marketing campaign.
#1 Targeted group of interested recipients
#2 Well written email marketing subject lines
#3 Best written content
#4 Landing page designed to make the sell
Best email subject line
The art of marketing is the ability to hit the recipient with the right message. For this, the email marketing subject lines have to show purpose, the client’s interests, and their needs being met. The email subject line must capture the target’s attention, or like most of the emails I receive, as they come in, I hit DELETE.
Advantages of email marketing include:
- low costs,
- speed of transmission,
- scalability (it is used by small companies with a handful of customers, as well as corporations with millions of users)
- ability to measure effectiveness – you know when and how many messages were sent, how many of them were opened, what attracted the most interest to the recipients, and whether they generated sales.
Apps for email marketing
The distribution of such a message is not easy. Most often, companies decide to send a mass message in the hope that it will reach the target group of their choice. The problem, however, is the lack of measurement of the effectiveness of such advertising and the large financial outlays. A good alternative, in this case, will be email marketing platforms, which will allow you to send the right message to the right group of recipients at a low cost. Using these services you are able to screen responses, receive analytics of the email performance, and control who receives your emails. Most of these services provide in-depth training courses and templates to help you get started.
- Sendinblue
- Mailchimp
- ConvertKit
- Hubspot
- MailerLite
- Klaviyo
- AWeber
- ActiveCampaign
- GetResponse
- Constant Contact
- Campaign Monitor
Email marketing – the most common purpose of use
Email marketing is most often used for informational, promotional, and sales purposes. In addition, email marketing is more and more often used for research, by including a survey or a link to a survey in the email content, which will allow you to collect information about the customer’s needs or level of satisfaction.
How to get a database of addresses?
The simplest and cheapest solution is to collect email addresses yourself by offering the option of subscribing to the newsletter on your website. When you sell online, you can put a box in the order form with the consent to receive a mailing with offers, which the customer will select, if interested. If you do not have your own database of e-mail addresses, you can buy one from an external company. Buying a valuable base is not cheap. Users of such a database have voluntarily agreed to be included in it, and moreover, they represent the company’s target group. Many magazines can help you find the right email targeted group.
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