Email marketing is playing a very vital role in providing more deals, more business. Learn Fishing for Business With Email marketing.
Email marketing allows businesses to communicate directly with potential customers. It’s all about building a relationship between the business, prospects and existing customers to boost sales and, eventually, the bottom line. However, not all email marketing is effective. It is essential to find the right tone and strategy for your messaging to achieve optimum results.
Businesses that use email marketing develop more effective (and more lucrative) relationships with their customer base. Creating and cultivating a list takes time, but with great standalone content, offers and discounts, email offers a chance of making a direct connection.
Achieving the connection between business and customer is what email marketing is all about. By providing value for the prospect in the content your email marketing delivers, existing customers are encouraged to return while new leads can be ‘warmed up’ for sale. But not all email marketing works – pitch it wrong and you can easily damage your reputation.
Over-emailing is perhaps the biggest faux pas. There’s nothing more annoying from a user’s perspective than being bombarded with marketing emails – no matter how well-written. Less is more when it comes to communicating with the list. Marketers should be looking to keep their contact list warm and regular, without coming close to abusing their email targets.
Those that do get the frequency right can still mess up on the messaging. Overt sales language should be avoided unless you are specifically pushing a particular promotion. The most effective campaigns always dilute sales messages with otherwise engaging and interesting content.
According to Andrew Paul of Business2Community, the biggest challenge for email marketers is to “stop advertising and start listening”. He says that businesses need to get and keep the permission of their list contacts if emails are to stand a chance of making a difference.
With spam filters chopping down roughly 15% of all emails sent, the challenge of being heard is a big one for any email marketer. Emails that speak to the needs and desires of customers will always be more interesting, and more effective at converting into sales as a result. If your messaging is too promotional, your emails won’t even get opened.
An increasing number of businesses are venturing into email marketing for the first time. Services like Yodle and others are helping businesses embrace the potential of a more effective web presence, and this is slowly helping to shape how businesses handle email promotions.
For those coming into the email loop for the first time, there is a responsibility to ensure emails are handled strategically in the best interests of the business. Bad email marketing can kill off even long-standing customer relationships. Selling too much is bad form, and sending one too many emails can start to erode the success of your messaging.
As a platform, email marketing is probably amongst the most effective, but also one of the easiest to misuse. Those fishing for prospects through email marketing need to use high-quality content-bait to get the conversation going and start developing the sales relationship.
