Email Marketing

Email marketing is quickly becoming the most powerful tool that marketers have seen since the inception of the television. With today’s email marketing tools you can easily communicate with your all of your target audiences on a custom, one-to-one level and track their response every step of the way. In addition to the analytic capabilities email marketing provides many other unique features, such as interactivity, the ability to drive ecommerce and web based sales plus the ability to provide additional information on-demand through links to web pages or video. Now when was the last time an ad or a piece of mail offered all of those options? By the way, did I mention it costs pennies on the dollar compared to all other marketing tools.

By tracking your recipient’s actions, you can easily develop sub lists that will provide you an opportunity to market to your targets based on their likes and interests. A good example is a campaign we ran for a sporting goods company. We would send general sporting goods emails to their entire customer list. We would then go back and track the results. Everyone who clicked on a link to fishing products would go in a specific list for fishing. The same strategy was used for tennis, football, etc. Now when a new tennis racket was introduced, you guessed it, we would email our tennis list. And guess what? They bought it.

But what about spam?
Oh yeah, spam. Email is only spam when it is not wanted. Opt-in is the big catch phrase. If you noticed in the example above I wrote “customer list.” We are not talking about spam. We are talking targeted customer communications. Staying in touch with your customers is an important process for good customer retention, but traditional methods can be expensive and provide little to no clues as to your customers’ response. Good email marketing is often welcomed by your customers.

But what is good email marketing?
Good email marketing must provide a value not only to you, but to your customers as well. There are a number of ways to provide value in email marketing. One of my favorites is a coupon or “email only” offer or discount. These sure add value and are very easy to compile an ROI model from. Another great value from email marketing is information. That’s right information! The problem is that it takes a little work to provide any worthwhile information. You must provide insights, news, humor, or a combination of all three. This requires research, creativity, and thoughtfulness. Nobody wants to read an email that just promotes your agenda. In reality, that is much more like spam that email marketing.

Here is a list of our recommended Top Email Marketing companies.