Email marketing is an essential element of your digital marketing strategy. So many companies get caught up in the hype of social media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and rich media publishing that they forget the basics, email marketing. Email marketing is a low cost activity that you can control the results and outcome. As long as you avoid SPAM and provide quality content to a quality list, you will get predictable email marketing results every time. Here’s how:
Email Marketing List
Build your list by “handshake”. Every time you exchange a business card, let the person know that you have a monthly email marketing newsletter and offer to send it to them. Don’t purchase lists, as they will only lower your overall campaign results and put you at risk of SPAM violations.
Content for your Email Marketing
Commit to publishing your email marketing newsletter at least once each month. If you include quality content from your blog, news about your company or other media links you will get consistent open rates from your email marketing newsletter. A couple of well written articles (300 words) will help position you as a thought leader with you customers and prospects. It’s OK to include other information about offers, events and promotions within your email marketing newsletter. Don’t go overboard with sales offers, as it may hurt your open rates and retention rates in the long run.
Track your Email Marketing Campaign Results
Most email marketing tools provide some sort of tracking. You can use your open rates, click through rates and opt-out rates from your email marketing campaigns to predict the type of results you can consistently expect. For example, if you have a 20% open rate on a list of 500 quality email customers and prospects this means your message is being read by 100 customers or prospects with each send. If you get 5% of your list to click through that means 25 visitors went to your website to read more or take advantage of your offer.
If you are not maintaining an email marketing list and sending to it with consistency, you are missing out on an opportunity to create awareness about your company. It may take up to five marketing interactions to turn a suspect into a prospect, so why not use email marketing as an essential component of your digital marketing strategy?
We send a lot of e-mails out weekly and it is some what successful.