Using E-Mail Marketing as a long term marketing activity

Marketing and creating a positive presence in your past, current and future client is vital in this highly competitive and cluttered world.

E-Mail marketing is probably the cheapest most flexible and most targeted advertising medium that any company has at its disposal.

However, many people are disappointed when they first start to use E-Mail marketing. They complain and worry about the low level of “opened mail”, the low level of click through and the low level of conversion.

Businesses are right to worry about these aspects of their marketing but the usual reaction to stop email advertising is wrong for three main reasons:

§  Most products and services are bought not sold: That is to say that people buy when they need something. At that time they are open for messages and go to known brands. Therefore ensuring that your brand is remembered in the right context at the right time is important. This is only possible by repeated, regular and positive marketing.

§  E-mails are seen even if not opened: The concept of opened is when the message is either clicked on or left open for 60 seconds. All e-mails are seen at least the sender and the topic line, so even if not opened a marketing message has been sent (try to avoid going in the Junk folder however!)

§  E-mail marketing gives you direct live feed-back: The performance, or lack of performance gives you an immediate feed-back of how attractive your offering, how good your marketing and how close your customers are to you and your brand. Even from the lowest of base you can improve, and need to improve.

Giving up when things are bad is the worst possible approach as it stops you trying new things and seeing what you need to do to improve. This is why one off bulk mailings are often a waste of money.

So although poor metrics from email marketing is upsetting and can be demoralising you should not use these as a reason for quitting. On-line marketing, contrary to traditional forms of marketing is characterised by rapid trial|feed-back|learn|change|try again loops. Key is to act upon these and improve your performance.

In the past we have seen some remarkable remarkable impact of small changes:

§  A change in topic line increased open rates 10 fold

§  Changing the content or format changed the click through 4 fold

§  Repeated sending of emails created a “warm” lead with potential customers whom our clients never talked to but had received emails for a year or more

There is also an increase use of A/B testing, provided by some email tools that can help to test which email message had a greater impact, thereby allowing you to send the best email to your email list. Segmenting your email lists within your email tool without manually reimporting contact details too have enabled more targeted email messages to be delivered.

If managed and tested well with effective messages delivered to the right readers, email marketing can be an effective tool for your marketing activities in the long run.

Please email us on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to see how we can help you start this two way communication with your existing and prospective customers.

Created: January 8th, 2014