Email Marketing: Technology's Smart Tool For Your Business Success
Tips For Email Campaigns To Build Your Business And Drive your Sales Performance
There are many factors you need to get right for your business to thrive, but undoubtedly, an effective marketing programme is in the top notch. That's why companies invest heavily in their marketing campaigns. For many, a sizeable chunk of the annual budget goes into this effort and for big companies, this comes to quite a fortune. You only need to ask Nigerian Breweries, Guinness Nigeria, MTN, Globacom and other blue chips to know the staggering size of their marketing outlay. Smaller, cash-lean companies are often constrained to device creative, more affordable strategies for pursuing their marketing objectives. The tendency is for the big spenders, with powerful tools at their disposal, to crowd out the small players who are less heard or noticed.
Email Empowers All
Thanks to internet technology, at least one dependable leveler has emerged. Email marketing, already proving one of the most effective marketing tools in use today, is, thank goodness, a tool any business can afford. Your success with it will depend largely on your knowledge and understanding of this sleek yet punchy tool. Cost is out of the question because email is available to you for next to nothing. And yet, email is a tool which no serious business toys with at this point, at least in the developed economies.
Email Marketing Is Serious Business
Locally, most users understand email in terms of sending an occasional, usually isolated message from one person to another or even a business to the other. That's the form of email, but serious email marketing means a lot more. It's more of a coordinated, structured and consistently executed marketing campaign, comparable to the megabucks offline campaigns undertaken by companies. What you may not readily appreciate, though it remains true, is that email analytics have often shown email campaigns -cheap as they are - pulling in better sales results than some elaborate, expensive offline programmes.
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There Are Land-mines, So You Need Expert Support
Whether you run a small or big business, it's time, we think, to get serious with what the rest of the world is doing. It's time to begin to take advantage of what technology has made possible to help us get competitive. Just consider a few benefits of email:
- it cuts marketing costs sharply (cheap to package, almost free to deliver);
- it's a speedster (delivers instantaneously), raising pace of response;
- it's flexible (a programmed campaign can run almost on autopilot);
- email demands attention and is less distracted (unlike newspaper ad);
- email is interactive and can truly elicit immediate response;
- measurability of results is one of it's highpoints
- average response rate is significantly higher than direct mail.
To be successful, an email campaign needs a bit of expertise, because some technicalities are involved (you need a winning edge, you know). Perhaps good reason why you will find wisdom in either contracting out its management to an expert or getting technical support for doing it yourself. If however you'd rather walk the land-mines all by yourself, we'll still show some light to guide you:
Understand The Basics
The following concepts are key to an effective email system:
- Lists: Are the foundation of the system. You must build and maintain lists, knowing that success will depend, not only on the size, but also the quality of your list.
- Permission: Is also at the root. Email marketing is permission-based, meaning that people need to opt in to receive your mails. That's the law and practice.
- SPAM: Represents unsolicited mail and is not only against the rules but is offensive and will harm your effort.
- Deliverability: Poses a major challenge to email marketing since mails must be delivered to have impact. In the effort to block spam mail, ISPs are believed to filter off a significant volume of legitimate, permission-based emails.
- The Open Rate : Is equally critical. Delivered mails that are not opened are dead assets. Click-through and response rates will also be important to a campaign. Ultimately, it's the action that will count most.
- Testing and Measurement: Is the confirmation process. Performance metrics are a key part to judge the success of any campaign.
Quick Tips For Getting It Right
Get your email marketing campaign off to a successful start by implementing the following strategies:
1. Build a Permission-based List
Employ online and off line channels to collect contact information and get prospects to opt in. There are various specific actions you can take to achieve this, but one you mustn't miss is to provide online forms for signing up and give value to incentivise it. Similarly, offline sign-ups at various contact points should be set up. In doing this, numbers alone may not clinch - focus more on qualified prospects because of the higher likelihood of conversion. A 'double opt-in' process may help to whittle down to a warmer list.
2. Get The Creative Design To Good Quality
While getting your message out is the most critical goal which a plain text mail can achieve, consider giving attention to a creative package that conjures the brand image of your organisation. More importantly, functionality issues in layout, positioning and the proper use of space, graphics and text should be thoughtfully implemented. The goal is to achieve satisfactory open rate and actual reading of mails. In ten seconds of opening the mail, the recipient should get the drift, meaning that the top paragraph is crucial.
3. Your 'From Label' Should Evoke Confidence
The confidence is in the familiarity. After they've opted in, your incoming message should be recognised to be from the source that was subscribed to. Your 'from label' must aim to achieve this. Part of what will help is to begin to communicate immediately and going forward to sustain it.
4. Get The Subject Line Right
Needs to be brief, inviting and must, above
all, reflect the content. No dummies. You're out to build trust and deceit is antithetical to that objective.
5. Content Must Be real
This is another call to authenticity. Don't offer one thing in your subscription request and bombard the subscriber with what he never signed up for. Tailor your content to what you promised, maintain a high value profile and be subtle with pitches. Avoid sending offers that a subscriber has not opted to be receiving.
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