Effective Email Marketing: The Heart Of Internet Marketing

How A Good Email System Can Drive Your Internet Marketing Effort

Email marketing is a major driving force for online business success. The ease with which a powerful marketing campaign can be packaged and delivered through the email medium remains one of its biggest strengths. With this, it has continued to gain in relevance, in spite of all odds (spam filters and all) and remains, for many organisations, a critical communication channel. The reality is that email can move in a speedy yet subtle manner, seeming innocuous and yet delivering rather effectively. Think of a medium that can easily conceal its mission and still do justice to it. How often do you get those conversational or generously educative mails, which you're grateful for, even though it is still delivering on the sender's marketing objective. Email works to build followership and loyalty, creating a base of warm, qualified prospects. This effectiveness is one reason your business has a lot to gain from developing and implementing an email marketing.

For Excellent Results, You Need Email Management
Email is subscriber-based, creating a list-management challenge. It thrives on mass numbers. While mass delivery is assured, there are house-keeping requirements of contact-gathering, list handling, opt-in and opt-out management, autoresponding, newsletter management, archiving, compliance testing etc. Because of the huge volumes involved, it is virtually impossible to get a good grip on this process, handling it manually. That is why various email management systems have been developed for planning, targeting and implementing high-volume direct marketing campaigns in an automated package.

What A Good Email Management Programme Can Do
Expect all or most of the following functions from a good email management system:

• Contact Information Capture: List-building requires the capture of contact information, usually through web-based forms. An email management system will run this capture and build a data base of prospects.
  
• Manage the opt-in/opt-out process. To respect prospects' privacy, build confidence and integrity and comply with the rules, an opt-in/opt-out process must be in place and work effectively. A good system will manage this process to meet the objectives.
  
• Customer/Prospects Profiling And Segmentation: To run targeted campaigns that will enhance the return on investment, profiling and data base segmentation are key.
  
• Targeted Campaigns: Using the profiled subscriber base, targeted marketing communication can be delivered to selected list groups or all, as necessary, for effectiveness.
  
• Autoresponse: Delivering programmed responses that build customer relationship through timeliness and regularity.
  
• Data Base Management: Dealing with other contact data issues like bounces to ensure up-to-date information.
  
• Statistical Information: This is vital to evaluation of campaigns and designing of future ones.
  
• Archiving of Campaigns: These can be re-used at future dates.
  
• High Volume Mail Delivery: Scalability to cope with delivery need.
  
• High degree of personalisation of communications: Effortless personalisation to build rapport and achieve read-though of messages.

Which Programme To Use
There are various vendors offering email management programmes, usually remotely hosted, many of which can meet your needs. You basically need to shop around, comparing prices, the service bundle and customer support. Some of the known names include GetResponse, SubscriberMail, Vertical Response and Aweber. Whichever provider you choose to go with, what is important is to understand the package and ensure you use it to full benefit.

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