Email Marketing

Definition

Email marketing is defined as the use of email to promote products and/or services. In its broadest sense, any email sent to a potential customer or a current customer could be seen as email marketing. Email marketing often takes place in order to compete for new customers, encourage customer loyalty, attract repeat business and promote brand awareness.

Advantages of Email Marketing

• Opt-In: By using an email marketing campaign that allows recipients to opt-in and unsubscribe at any time, you can be sure that your audience is genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
• Targeted Marketing: Target your clients using custom-build lists based on their age, geography, income, business type and other customer specific attributes.
• Repetition: Often it takes multiple views of your brand or website before a customer will trust you enough to interact with you or buy from you. Think about how often have you visited a new restaurant after driving past it on your way to work, or how often you saw an advertisement on television which led to you purchasing that product in a supermarket. Research suggests that a shopper can take up to nine visits before they make a buying decision and email marketing gives your prospective buyers the opportunity to see your brand, products and services multiple times.
• Repeat Sales: It can be extremely expensive and also hard work to gain new customers. Often businesses focus their efforts on attracting new customers instead of keeping and generating repeat business from existing ones. Email marketing allows you to keep in touch with existing customers, remind them of the products and services you offer and this can result in sales which are many times more profitable than the original purchase. A well executed email marketing strategy will result in repeat purchases from existing customers.
• Global Reach: Your email marketing campaign will allow you to reach potential clients anywhere in the world.
• Personalised Marketing: Email enables you to greet every person you target and personalize the message to the recipient's needs.
• 24/7 Marketing: Schedule emails to be sent out when you have left the office for the day, during the night or when you are on holiday.
• Lower cost: Research suggests that email marketing is approximately 8 times cheaper than direct mail marketing. Costs such as digital proofing, printing and binding are completely eliminated. Production and mailing costs and vastly reduced.
• Faster response: Direct mail generally takes in excess of a couple of weeks to receive a response whereas email responses are usually received within 1 to 3 days. In addition, responding to an email is less cumbersome than paper mail and a digital history of the conversation is maintained.
• Link Building: Email marketing is a fantastic way to draw people to your website by incorporating your website URL in the message.
• Up-sell and Cross-sell: The classic example is McDonalds asking "Do you want fries with that?". Another would be a shoe shop asking if you wish to buy a protective spray at the same time as you are paying for a brand new pair of shoes. Email marketing is a very effective way to up-sell to your customers by offering additional products and services.
• Promotions: The majority of email users say that they have in the past made a purchase as a direct result of receiving an email promotion.
• Return On Investment: According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has a ROI of £43.62 for every pound spent on it in 2009. Therefore, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined.
• Interaction: Graphics, videos, animations, music, quizzes and games can be used to interact with your potential clients and grab their attention.
• Feedback: Unlike Face-to-face contact where recipients have a tendency to shy away from speaking their true feelings, email is a great format to receive honest feedback. You can use this strategy to determine who to target and what products and services to provide at what cost.
• Overall Effectiveness: Forbes Media commissioned an Ad Effectiveness Survey in February/March 2009 and this revealed that email marketing is the second-most effective tool for generating conversions.
• Measurable Results: Analytic tools are available to accurately measure click-through rate, conversion rate, what website a person came from etc to help you adapt your email marketing campaign to be more effective.

Abipo Web Design Northern Ireland can help you with your Email Marketing campaign. Contact us for a no-obligation quotation.