The Power Of Email Marketing Unleashed!

I decided to do some research of my own into the effectiveness of email marketing and stumbled upon (rather appropriately) an article that was posted on StumbleUpon, highlighting some research that was conducted just last year by Sosemarketing.com.

Here's what they reported:

Email marketing returns 42 times your investment Internet Search SEO returns 22 times Social Media returns 12 times Newspaper Ads return 12 times Mobile Marketing returns 10 times Magazine Ads return 10 times Direct Mail returns 7 times Broadcast TV returns 7 times Trade Shows return 1.5 times

I fully admit that I was surprised at the results. The findings suggests that email marketing offers a better return on investment (ROI) than any other media channel.

Additional Benefits Of Email Marketing

As if bigger returns on your investment aren't enough to fuel your interest in email marketing, I also came across a host of additional benefits in support of this often underrated method of reaching your target audience.

Less time. Just consider the amount of time and effort needed to produce a paper-based direct marketing campaign, organise a telesales operation, or coordinate the many facets required for SEO and/or social media. With an email campaign it's possible to put together and send out a campaign that reaches thousands of people in just a few hours. Less cost. No print costs, no mailing costs, no telephone call costs, little or no outsourcing, the list goes on. Email marketing is without doubt one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching your customers. More personalisation. Not only can you personalise your messages with the recipients' name and job title, you can also customise messages to ensure that they reach different sectors or client bases. Segment your database. This basically means that you can divide your customers by geographical location, product or service offerings, size of business, annual spend or a host of areas relevant to your business. The result? By segmenting customers into smaller lists you can communicate with your customers in a very personalized and intimate way that just isn't possible with other channels. More dynamic messages. Got something to sell or say? With email marketing, once the groundwork has been done it's possible to put out a message the very same day. Test messages. Unsure about what message has the greatest impact? With email marketing you can easily test different messages by splitting them up into groups and creating a test matrix for fast feedback about your most powerful communication. Communicate more regularly. The speed and ease of sending out emails means that you can plan, create and send out messages far more frequently. This also enables you to gauge the success of your campaign and gather that all-important feedback. Better customer engagement. There is no better way to track and respond to messages. As a result it's much easier to work out what works, what doesn't and be able to respond accordingly.

Planning, Creating And Converting A Successful Email Campaign

Now that you know the benefits of using email marketing to reach your customers, it's time to turn your attention to how best to plan a email campaign that works!

Mailing Lists

To start with you need to ask yourself: who I am I going to mail? I would advise you to start as you mean to go on by dividing recipients into easily identifiable groups such as:

Existing Clients - How to stop clients from being ex-clients? Treat them like new clients! These are your most important targets and should be the first to receive offers, discounts and introduced to new products and services Hot Leads - Personal referrals, leads gathered through networks and trade fairs Warm Leads - Casual enquiries, competitors' clients and ex-clients that you wish to entice back into the fold Cold Leads - Bought lists, contacts gathered through online research, telephone directories etc

You can also segment recipients according to geographical area, products or services of interest, in order to be able to easily identify which people to send your email to both now and in the future.

If you are going to buy into mailing lists, remember quality is far more important than quantity! Invest in a reputable company that offers verified mailing lists that are focused and, most importantly, regularly updated. Below is a list of some of popular and recognized mailing list companies:

datahq.co.uk marketscan.co.uk businessmailing.co.uk marketingguru.co.uk

Mailing Software

In an ideal world, you would send every email individually personalized and one email at a time, thus avoiding most spam filters and greatly improving the chance of your emails being opened.

If you are talking about small numbers of recipients (say below 50) it's still possible to use your existing email software and simply create a number of different groups in order to identify and segment your target audience.

Obviously this would be unfeasible when you are talking about large numbers of recipients, in which case you might want to use one of the many email software packages available, many of which are open source and therefore won't cost you anything.

Below are just some of the most popular email marketing software packages available to you:

mailchimp.com email-unlimited.com emailmarketinggold.com sendblaster.com mailpro.com resultsmail.com getresponse.com

I've personally used Mailchimp and Getresponse. Mailchimp has a great free package to get started.

Next week I'm going to share some tips on creating email messages that hit the mark.

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