Change is in the air. Every second day we are listening to something new; something big about how Social Media is getting integrated to Email Marketing. The year 2010 was highly satisfying for the most of Email Marketers and it is going to be so in near future.
Recently, I’d been through a couple of seminars and most of the marketers asked me the same question: What new shall we do in the 2011?
Well, there is no end to creativity and as an Email Marketer I seek every possibility to make my Email Campaigns more effective and fruitful. However, I’d like to add that the level of expertise and understanding the previous ideas and strategies (the one you’ve been employing over the years) are not proverbial furrow. And I always prefer bringing slight set of modifications to what I feel could be more creative and effective. New ideas should always be given a chance since whatever proven methods we’ve been using today were, at certain point of time, a newest set of ideas.
One thing I’d like to reiterate that it is the perfect time to let your Email Marketing go Social. Add as much features you can and get your emails integrated to social channels. Allow your users to share your message in their micro channels; let them voice their opinion; and most importantly, listen to what they say.
As I’ve been saying for a long time now, “don’t jammed your recipients’ inbox with frequent messages saying similar things; Instead, focus on grabbing their attention with dynamic content. Get it drafted well and add meaningful information and not just discount coupons and ‘buy my product’ ‘buy my service’ stuffs. Incorporate your email content (may be less or few words) that refreshes your recipients eyes.
The main purpose of email campaign is to make a connection with customers and gradually involve them in your business story. Doing any innovative and creative thing which takes you a step closer to your recipients should be welcomed in this New Year.
Every New Year comes with new challenges that assist email marketers explore new aspects of uplifting their business wings. As email’s role have been changing in course of time, email markers have got to modify their plans for finding and engaging new prospects, fans and followers to open new channels for furthering conversation and nurturing the relationship with the existing customers.
Email marketers feel that engaging existing as well as prospective customers in conversation alone is the most challenging task for them. In this New Year, customer retention and their involvement would be the prime focus even for a modest business success as persuading your audience to show interest in your product or service is the most difficult part.
Every email marketing campaign involves testing, learning from mistakes and revamping old strategies. The End result provides newest set of ideas for fruitful steps to shift from quantity to quality.
Email marketing is considered to be the most dynamic platform and effective strategy of all online marketing activities. It requires consistency; therefore, all email marketers should keep the recipients updated delivering the personalized and more relevant messages, products reviews, various services, technologies, and different beneficial factors. In a nutshell, email marketing pulls prospective customer from content platform, makes them familiar with products and services and converts every recipients into a potential customer.
The year 2010 witnessed the effectiveness of Email Marketing as well as Social Media as online marketing tools; and proved that there could not be any better and cheaper way to communicate with customers online or offline. It acted like a game that grabbed opportunities despite of various challenges on how ingeniously marketers engage customers in conversation through emails and social media and ultimately make them a part of their business family. It irrevocably changed the business landscape.
In 2011, email marketers can develop more effective strategy for their marketing campaigns taking advantage of the umpteenth opportunities to win prospective customers, explore the wings to expand the business prospects and revitalize the relationship with existing customer and make more fans to assist them spread the word about their businesses. In addition, they can take some additional steps to show up their massive web presence.
1. Send shareable newsletter so that, the recipients can also spread the message to their closer accompanies. Make sure you add sharable button or url links in your newsletter.
2. Make sure that the newsletter subject is posted in twitter, facebook and other relevant social platforms. It will increase the number of viewers and there will more and more people getting familiar with your product and service.
3. It is considerably important to mention about the new and hot discussions on various social media platform in your newsletter. It persuades the readers to visit and open the conversation channel with prospects.
Email communication is undeniably significant to broaden your reach to existing customers and an effective tool to target potential customers. This year you need to be doing everything that streamlines your email marketing experience. The most positive aspect of email marketing is the fact that people have started welcoming informative mails in their inbox. All you have to do is you have to engage them into a two way conversation. If done properly and effectively, sales are bound to shower in.
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/email-marketing-strategy/
http://www.kcfreepress.com/news/2010/mar/19/business-coach-how-use-email-marketing-effectively/
http://www.cheetahmail.com/corp/news_articles.html
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/email-marketing-strategy/optimizing-your-email-in-three-steps.html
http://jobfunctions.bnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=1857715
Email marketing is one of the most successful marketing tools, which is capable of snaring recipients; provided it is executed properly. Knowing appropriate fundamentals is important to enhance the response rate. The success through email marketing depends on the variation of subject line. As an email marketer, you can never fall short of information: There are several relevant activities ranging from ongoing events in your company to launching new products or services. You can also ask your customers to share their opinions on your products or services. Provide relevant information systematically so that you can track their needs and communicate with their situation.
To accomplish the goal of email marketing, it is vital to pay attention and improve the first metric of email marketing-open rate. Remember, your objective is not complete until, recipients open your email, whether it is meant to educate them about your brands, generate awareness or sell products or services. Even if the recipients do not show their interest in purchasing, the open rate matters. It helps to create awareness about your brands and promote the importance of your existence.
People always prefer to purchase something from familiar sources. If you communicate with them frequently, they recognize you and would like to buy from you. Email marketing enhances sales from existing customer.
Email marketing has incredible power to enhance sales and promote brand recognition. Among all greatest techniques to accomplish the higher open rate, coupon emails are most effective that draw maximum attention and generate better open rates.
Industry experts have revealed that coupon or complimentary gift emails achieve 7% more on Return on Investment. Moreover, higher open rate simultaneously increases click rates and boost conversion rate. Some of surveys reveal that 80% of online coupon mailings have experienced higher transaction rates and transaction-to-click rates than non-coupon campaigns. In addition, 78% of the coupon mailings made huge profit per email. In past three years, the use of online coupons has increased by 46 percent. A majority of marketers say, “It leads the way to email marketing success.”
“Understanding the purchase drivers and triggers along with the channel preferences of unique customers is an essential element in building loyalty and engagement. Today’s consumers are multi-channel and marketers that acknowledge this will see greater return on their marketing spend,” said Matt Seeley, president of Experian Marketing Services.’ The increase of coupon email expands has positively influenced the purchasing decision of individual customer.
Rule1: Give a value to email marketing
Email marketing should have a value. Under the pressure of getting maximum response in one hit or getting a big sale at one try, marketers frequently make mistake of sending messy subject line or misleading mails to recipients. Once they form negative perception about your mail, they will continue to delete every email even if you offer them genuine product or service.
Rule 2: Build trust
It is important to let you recipients feel that you are a trusted source of information. Betrayers are everywhere; they have already built a misconception about emails by taking advantage of digital age. Therefore, conveying a clear message from the same identifier is highly crucial. People today are educated and aware of spammers.
Rule 3: Don’t use big and surprising words
“There is a big surprise waiting for you” or “you have won a new car” are known as spammy and betraying vocabularies that don’t really work now. These words evoke poor performance and you might consistently loose subscribers; so please avoid them for God sake.
Rule 4: Use reliable data
Take those email addresses that usually have a confirmable opt-in status. The response rates of such email addresses are 10 times higher that opt-out.
Rule 4: Track everything
It is important to track emails received, open rates, telephone and faxes received and clicks to the website from emails. These need to be monitored effectively, so that necessary changes can be brought accordingly to make email campaigns more successful.
Rule 5: Broadcast of various occasions
Email marketing should not be taken as a mere tool for marketing or selling products. One has to necessarily appear on multiple occasions and give consumers as feeling of a treasured guest. Research reveals that response rates increase on how frequently you have appeared in front of customers and how much they are familiar with your company or products.
Email marketing is the most cost-effective and eminent tool for drawing attention of audience from across the world. In reverse, it is a quite difficult task to convince people for anything through email. They seem remotely interested for anything outside of their knowledge for which they need trustworthy recourses. Drafting an email requires relevant information as well as some discounts or beneficial coupons for customers. The conversion rate from email marketing entirely depends on how intelligently marketers take advantage of this digital channel. According to a recent survey, three recipients out of five complain that marketers fail to express their messages accurately.
Another important factor is to offer the right thing at the right time. If email campaigns meet the expectations of users, it generates higher conversion. A recent research of email marketing has revealed that 45 percent customers are more likely to respond to the emails that contain discounts, special offers, gifts and free trial. Moreover, they responded positively to the reminder emails.
The success of email marketing also depends on initial trust that a company establishes with customers. Initial trust confirms the further growth of the firm. So, keep something interesting to share with. The more one offers trustworthy and interesting subject line, the more open rate one receives and gradually they take a bright place in customers’ inbox.
Some fundamentals:
Give special attention to the headline, which should be the combination of four vital elements: unique, specific, relevant and interesting.
1. Offer them something unique and remarkable
2. Create your headline context in such as way that recipients feel urgency to open your email.
3. Promise something that is reliable, practical and within the reach of the recipients.
4. Don’t send the same email more than once a month; it offends the recipients and it is quite likely that they spam your mail.
Marketing is the foundation of any business’s existence. With the advancement of technology, business has taken a new form and medium of expression. In this digital age, e-mail is one of the most significant aspects of e-commerce activities. In spite of proclamation and prediction of its extinction, email marketing continues to play the most important role of progressing business ideas and provide whole value to it.
Therefore, while drafting an email, some important points should be kept in mind in order to make it standard and effective.
1. Give a clear introduction so that recipients can scan the purpose of communication and feel that the message is worth spending their precious time. Otherwise, they will tend to pay less attention and escape at the soonest.
2. Make your email very informative, relevant, and definitive.
3. Careful customization is required. Don’t over personalize your emails to make an authentic relationship with customers; otherwise it will draw result in reverse way.
4. Ensure that the email is beneficial for recipients.
5. Use every single word cautiously, the purpose would not be to sell rather spread awareness about the company and get a click to optimize your business.
6. Try to offer something that fulfils the specific need of your customer. It generally draws more attention and generates considerable revenue.
7. The length is another important part. Keep it precise and shorter. Shorter is the better, as it will be beneficial for recipients and you also.
8. Every line in email should be given an equal important. The content should be written in simple and concise language. Do not use any jargons or unnecessary words or leave any bit of teasing point in it. Otherwise, readers will consider the rest to be the e-garbage.
9. Every customer invests his or her valuable time on reading email. If they feel the subject to be interesting and helpful and initial time to be appealing, they will definitely read it out and get motivated to click on the links.
10. Above all, do not make a promise that you can’t afford to offer; instead, focus on the different features of your product or service and the benefits that they bring along.