So how has all this affected the power of email marketing? Well, firstly there has been a significant change in the way smart marketers are using email. There will always be the spammers, happy to spew out millions of emails a week with completely non-relevant subjects to every possible address on the planet. However, new technology and greater access to it now allows everyone the opportunity to harness email as it should be used, following that well-worn marketing mantra of Right Message – Right Person – Right Time.

With a stronger move towards the powerful concept of Permission-based Marketing, good marketers out there are looking for ways to get appropriate messages in front of potentially interested customers. More than this, we can learn about our customers too.

Email marketing, used properly, can become a cornerstone of a solid marketing strategy. It can be used to attract new customers, as well as maintain effective contact with existing ones. It allows us to deliver the right message in a timely way and, most importantly, to the right individual.

Other reasons why email marketing is still among the top tools for SMEs include:

Speed; there really is no other way (with the exception of SMS Marketing perhaps) of getting a marketing campaign running faster. You can release a campaign in the morning and start making sales in the afternoon. You also get very fast (real-time) statistics that allow you to fine-tune your marketing campaign as you go.

Split-testing; I can’t believe there are still people out there who continue to run the same adverts week after week, month after month, with no plan to test them. This really is CRITICAL and split testing is the easiest way to achieve this. If you’re not aware of how to do this, FIND OUT and stop wasting your money (look out for a blog on this soon!).

Return on Investment; because email marketing can be so much cheaper than other forms of marketing, if you USE IT PROPERLY, you’ll see an amazing ROI. It’s no longer about ‘spray and pray’ it’s all about getting the mix right and being highly targeted.

So what is the magic mix? Well I’m going to give the game away at my next seminar on Email Marketing but here’s a sneak preview of the elements that I’ve found have a massive impact on results:

Get good data – This really is rule number 1. You will want to collect and source data in the right way and if you’re buying/renting data then use good suppliers, there are many out there. Quite simply, no other factor will increase results as much as good/relevant data.

Use a good email system – Forget about trying to manage your emails through standard applications like your Outlook account, you’re wasting your time and money. A proper email marketing tool will give you amazing power and control over your campaigns and help you to build progressively. Try the PUSH Email Marketing System (see www.nialadams.com)

Know how to play the game – Understand how email marketing works and what the ‘rules’ are. These are really quite simple (when you know them!) and will help you double, treble or more your campaign results.

Get strategic as well as tactical – Ensure that you build your email marketing into your overall sales and marketing plan. It will never work effectively for you if you just do it occasionally and with little thought or attention.

And lastly…

Always remember to use email to appropriately – It will help you to build your community and maintain contact with it. Stick to the guidelines and you’ll ensure your emails are seen as positive communication, not intrusive and annoying.

Many organizations are utilizing email marketing as part of their internet marketing strategy.  There are numerous email marketing services provided that support all types of businesses such as: Emma, ConstantContact, Aweber, etc.  In today’s environment, businesses are sending emails to promote products & services, cross-sell additional services, inform customers, and provide discount coupons.  The question is: Are businesses leveraging email marketing to support multi-tactical internet marketing campaigns?

In most cases, businesses are not leveraging email marketing to drive successful campaigns.  Marketers continue to see email marketing as a single tactic that has a limited impact on the goals of their campaigns.  The biggest example of this is the lack of integration between databases, website, and email marketing campaigns.   A local business owner has a limited amount of hours in a day and a limited amount of resources.  However, most of them do not streamline the lead acquisition process to work together.  If the systems were integrated, a similar scenario can be applied to large corporations that employ or utilize 3 different employees to do the job of a single email marketing professional. Simply put, the website form does populate to the database, and neither of these automatically feed to the email marketing system.  In general, this is a manual process that costs businesses time, resource, and money. 

How can effective Email Marketing Help Your Business and Drive Results?

How you ask?  Well, let’s start with efficiency.  The ability to integrate your website with your business’s database, website forms, and email marketing services tools may cost additional money upfront; however, in the long-run you will not need to use manual processes that require more resources.  At DaBrian Marketing Group, we provide businesses will the tools to connect website forms to an email marketing system and eliminate the database itself.  In our client’s case, the email marketing system or email marketing service is the database.  In addition, you can use event or email triggers to confirm opt-in email addresses after receiving a contact submission form.  In less than 30 seconds, you have populated your form into a specific list with the email marketing tool, confirmed an opt-in email, and responded to a prospect with relevant content.

 Email triggers can be a useful and impactful tool for customer acquisition & lead generation.  We live in a society of instant gratification so being able to deliver relevant information or set the expectation to receive a response to a question is critical.  This can help to separate your business from the competition.

The ability to reduce the resources used for an email marketing campaign will reduce the campaign cost.  If implemented effectively, email marketing can position your business to be on your customers’ minds and reduce your overall acquisition cost. The bottom-line is Return-on-Investment. 

 Testing to Drive Results & Revenue?

Once you have become proficient with your automated process, it is time to start testing your email campaigns.  There are a number of different tests you can do with a single email campaign.  These tests include A/B, A/B/C, and multivariate testing of headers, subject lines, layouts, landing pages or calls-to-action.  The more successful your business is at getting customers to open emails, the greater the probability that the customer will respond to your call-to-action. Usually, better open rates and click through rates translate to better ROI. 

Conclusion

The truth is that just about every business uses email marketing to communicate with customers.  Unfortunately, not every business takes the time to evaluate opportunities to integrate technologies, test, or measure their results.  These are simple fundamental businesses practices that should be gone.  The ability to establish internal processes and best practices are critical to every business’s success. 

 The fact that you have an email marketing tool does not mean that what you are communicating is relevant to customers, or even driving results.   It is our recommendation that businesses start to take a holistic approach to all internet marketing strategies & tactics.  Continue to push the envelope for maximum results that will lead to maximum returns.      

A list is your asset because it allows you to drive traffic and sales on demand. With a click of a button, you can access to a group of targeted audience instantly. Although email marketing sounds simple, it is not. Many email marketers make mistakes that spoil relationship with their subscribers and destroy any chance of getting sales.

Now, let me share with you 4 deadly email marketing mistakes that you must avoid:

1. Sending emails too frequently to your subscribers. If you send emails too frequently to your subscribers, they will see you as a spammer. The frequency is really dependant on the type of list that you are collecting. For example, if your list delivers a daily forex course, it is perfectly fine to send an email daily. If people join your list for updates, then a weekly or bi-weekly email will be good.

2. Poor content. If every email is a sales pitch or promotion, you will not get results from email marketing. You must deliver some real value to your subscribers. Send them free gifts, industry information and updates. When you are writing the content of your email, remember that your readers do not care so much about you. What they want to know is what’s in it for them. Your email should have more “you” than “I”.

And When you are writing the content for your email, avoid words like Free, Make Money, Million Dollars, etc. These words will trip the spam filters and prevent your emails will not get delivered. Therefore, it will be wise for you to use a spam checkers to go through your email message. Look at the spam score that it gives you. If the spam score is over 5, you should go back and edit the content again.

3. Poor subject line. Your email open rate is directly influenced by its subject line. If your subject line cannot capture your visitors’ attention, they will not open it. When you are preparing an email campaign, always come up with at least 10 subject lines so that you can choose the best one for the campaign.

4. No call to action statements in emails. This is the most common mistakes made my many email marketers. If you want your readers to click on your link and visit your website, you must include call to action statements in your emails. Just putting a link in your email is not enough. You must tell your readers what to do next

1. Make the recipients open your mails

Many recipients will find their Inbox loaded with tons of emails daily. Make your subject lines attractive, to-the-point and yet sufficiently informative so that recipients will open your emails. Use text symbols, space your text creatively and ask questions that will arouse strong interest.

2. Speak the Truth

Not only must you ensure truthful statements in your subject lines, your email content must only carry claims that you can subsequently honour. Never attempt to make promises you cannot keep. Make genuine and valuable offers to your recipients.

3. Not too high; not too low Discounts

Do not attempt to offer too substantial a discount such that it will eat into your profits drastically. Otherwise, your email marketing effort will be futile. Yet, you need to balance the expectation of your customers. Anything that is perceived as too little (discounts) will not attract them.

4. Bundle with some Events or Conferences

Though we encourage emails to be short and sweet, take the opportunity to throw in some Events, Conferences or Seminars that will require RSVP. With ample intervals, reminder emails may be send thereby keeping your customers in constant contact yet you will not be seen to be overly pushy.

5. Forum marketing.

Participate in forum discussions actively. Most forums allow you to place a link to your website in your signature. Contribute something useful to the community and build your reputation. When people find that you have something useful to share, they will check out the link in your signature.

6. Create a squeeze page to capture visitors’ email addresses and names.

Your squeeze page should be straight to the point by offering visitors a free gift in exchange for their emails and names. The headline of your squeeze page is very important as it is the first thing that captures the attention of your visitors. Do not put other things on your squeeze page that distract visitors from opting in to your list.

7. Offer a free gift in exchange for emails and names.

There are many things that you can offer as a free gift to entice opt-ins, some examples are: e-book, whitepaper, voucher, video, audio and email tutorial course. People always like to receive free stuff. Therefore, offering a freebie on your squeeze page is a good way to entice them to opt in.

8. Promote your squeeze page aggressively.

List building is a number game. The more traffic you drive to your squeeze page, the more opt-ins you will get. There are many ways to drive targeted traffic to your page, some methods are: blogging, pay per click advertising, forum marketing, social networking, social bookmarking, search engine optimization, blog commenting and article marketing.

List building is all about relevancy and relationship. If you can offer something that people want, they will opt in. Once they opt in, the next step is to build a strong relationship with them and profit for years to come.

In email marketing, content is key. A professional looking email with banners and dynamic content is more likely to get read than something that was generated with a simple web mail program. Many email marketing programs include mechanisms which allow you to include autoresponders so you can include surveys and other tools which will guarantee a high response rate. Surveys are a good marketing tool and can help you learn about your customer’s needs and opinions on your products, your marketing message and even what your competitor has to offer. Integrating surveys into your email is a smart way for you to gauge the response rate and collect valuable demographic information on the customers to whom you have sent out the email. Survey responses can help you craft follow-up emails and help you plan future email marketing efforts. They can also help close the deal by asking questions that are designed to make the customer want to buy the product or service that you are offering.

Trust is critical in email marketing. If your prospect Customer, who opt-in and become your ‘subscribers’, believe in you, they will respond positively to your product offers, provided you are selling something of value and not trash! Most marketers agree that a prospect must receive a pitch on average 7 times before they actually respond.

Did you know that whether your business is offline or online, 60% of your sales will come from your existing customer base – this is a fact! So the greatest value in marketing is that of repeat customers. You can market different products to your email ‘subscribers’ over a period of time. However, this will only work if you’re able to identify your ‘target market’s’ problems and create products or services with their answers and solutions. Failing to do this, will result in unhappy subscribers and a cold list of unresponsive subscribers.

Building a relationship with your list takes time, effort and maintenance involving regularly providing information that your subscribers are likely to want. This is the cardinal rule of marketing – the ‘I want’ factor, not what I need!

Tip: Even though it’s not a good idea to ‘sell’ too soon in your campaign, there’s no harm in subliminally promoting your product in your signature at the end of each email by inserting a link back to your pitch page that answers or solves the problem!

Here are 14 ideas for email promotions:

1. Announce weekly “specials”
2. Host “Customer Only” events
3. Send appointment reminders
4. Follow-up with your hottest leads eg word-of-mouth referrals
5. Offer electronic “loyalty coupons”
6. Send follow-up offers
7. Develop relationships by offering free information eg newsletters, reports, downloads, trial versions of software
8. Encourage referrals eg send to a friend
9. Deliver your product electronically
10. Sell your knowledge
11. Promote an ‘educational’ course
12. Survey your subscribers or customers
13. Offer a bonus
14. Give away free tips, reviews, reports or audio recording