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All businesses crave brand value, brand recognition and brand loyalty. Brand loyalty not only provides healthy and growing sales but also ensures your customers stick by you and recommend your products in their social circles. In today’s scenario you have to reach out to your prospects or customers through all the available media platforms. You miss out one opportunity to communicate and you might end up losing a customer to your rival. Online marketing is essential and basic to all new-age marketing strategies and e-mail is the most widely used form of online communication.

A recently conducted McKinsey survey has stated that e-mail marketing is the most effective way of garnering new customers and states that “e-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” Ninety-one percent of American customers use e-mail daily and the sway e-mail marketing holds is reflected in the business it generates as well. The average order value is 17% higher when compared to that generated by social media.

Let’s have a look at how e-mail marketing helps simplify and maximize your business process.

E-Mails Reach out to a Massive Audience

Facebook and Twitter might be the new kids on the media-marketing platform, garnering lavish attention and publicity. But the truth is that a Facebook ‘like’ for your page does not necessarily mean your customer would keep track of your updates or is interested in knowing about them. A person clicking on your e-mail has found your subject line relevant or useful and in all probability would read and evaluate your message carefully. Not everybody on your mailing list will open your mail but the numbers are still in favor of e-mail as compared to other forms of communication. If you take a look at the statistics, according to the Radicati Group there were a whopping 2.9 billion e-mail accounts worldwide in 2012, a number which is estimated to touch 3.8 billion in 2014. All the daily posts on Facebook and tweets on Twitter combined would make up just a measly .2% of the total e-mails generated in a day. So to get the maximum reach, go for e-mails.

Spam-filters are all-pervading and you need to adopt the best practices to evade them. You can market your products via e-mail only after you’re given ‘permission’ by your customer. If your message holds something for your user like the ever popular ‘free’ samples or informational newsletters, permission would be easy to procure.

E-Mail Marketing Helps You Personalize Your Message

The success of any marketing campaign depends on how personal and engaging you get. Customer-centric messages and marketing strategy help you inch closer to the inner sanctum or the personal space of your prospect or customer. Once your advertising lands in that treasured territory, you can be assured of genuine interest and engagement on the part of your customer. Customer-centric or ‘personalized’ message does not mean that you place the customer’s name in your greeting. True customization and targeting abilities require concentrated effort and dedicated infrastructure from the part of organizations. It is a transformative process which involves your whole marketing strategy. Sending unique mails to each target segment demand specific capabilities and knowledge of market data. It is not as easy as blasting off mass mails to e-mailing lists with thousands of mail IDs. But targeted and customized marketing drives real returns and increases sales almost immediately. Your message should be relevant to the recipient’s need and history. If you are selling investment analysis tool to traders you have a very niche target of customers. Your prospect should be active in online stock trade, and you can send him a newsletter on economic data and your top stock picks for the month. This will build his interest in your product due to the personalization of your message.

E-Mail Marketing Builds Brand Value

E-mail helps you stay in regular touch with your target market. This increases your brand recognition and brand recall value. It is important that you include your company’s logo, tagline and brand graphics in your communication. If there is a color palette for your official brochures, pamphlets and advertisements, employ the same for your e-mail communication also. Constant association with your brand elements help in building brand awareness.

Consistent and quality interactions go a long way in building your relationship with customers. Your content should be relevant and useful to the recipient. If you have been consistently delivering high quality, value-added experience to your user your credibility increases and you will earn his trust and confidence. This makes it easier for you to promote and advertise your products and services.

E-Mail Marketing Helps Promotion

E-mail is a link in the chain of interactions your brand has with your customers. Your message should have clear and concise description of the offers, services, products or programs you are promoting. If you are giving a link back to your website make sure it’s not to a generic landing page. The click should take your customer directly to the product or offer. This has been found to significantly help drive sales. Marketers need to keep in mind that many of the e-mails are read on mobile phones. The customized landing pages should be designed responsively so they look great on all reading platforms. The call-to-action should be obvious to any hurried reader and easy to act on. A properly executed sales strategy results in a spike in sales immediately.

E-Mail Marketing Is Not Expensive

One of the biggest reasons for the lasting popularity of e-mail marketing is its cost efficiency. You can reach out to your existing customers, prospects, clients and subscribers interested in your field of activity at costs which are negligible when compared to the alternative forms of marketing. Marketing budgets zoom through the roof when you focus only on popular media channels. E-mail marketing helps you keep budget in control while reaching out to your target group and keeps communication channels open. The most popular tool of e-mail marketing, e-mail newsletter, is read, saved, shared, liked and clicked if it has managed to strike the right balance of education, information and promotion. Since this is user-driven, a one-time investment in an attractive e-mail sales strategy drives sales with no further investment from your part. The ROI in such cases is really big and can positively impact your business.

B2B marketing can also benefit from the above mentioned strategies. But for optimal B2B communication e-mail marketing needs to be combined with direct mail marketing as well. Direct mail companies help you integrate your marketing strategies and maximize all communication channels.

Conclusion

E-mail marketing may be the grand old dame of online advertising. But she still has a lot of fight left in her. The influx of social media has not dimmed her zeal or weakened her hold over the netizens. There is a multitude of ways in which businesses can benefit from e-mail marketing and in the coming years this relationship will evolve to be more dynamic.

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