Nigerian Entrepreneur

What is email marketing?

Email marketing simply put is the use of Email (Electronic Mail) for marketing. It is a form of direct marketing strategy whereby a marketer or advertiser communicates information to current or potential customers. Email marketing is one of the oldest online marketing strategies that successful entrepreneurs employ in acquiring and retaining customers for their businesses. Email marketing, has been and will continue to be for a long while, an effective marketing tool.

There are different types of Emails and marketers send them for different reasons. For example advertising messages inserted as footnotes in ordinary emails. You find a lot of such short advertisements you in emails sent to you by friends especially those using free services like Yahoo, Hotmail etc. Many corporate organizations also add little advertisements as auto-signatures to their corporate emails.

Email Marketing Strategies

The various types of Emails and their goals can be easily classified as follows:

1. Direct Email – This involves sending a promotional message to customers or prospects. For example, an announcement of special sales.

2. Retention Email – These are emails meant to retain and encourage customers loyalty. They usually take the form of regular emails and are popularly refer to as newsletters. A newsletter even though it may carry promotional messages focuses on providing value to the recipient in the form of valuable information or entertainment. Its main goal is to establish a long-term relationship between the entrepreneur and the recipient.

3. Rented Email List – Sometimes, online marketers rent other peoples email list for their advertisement. For example, an entrepreneur who is just starting can put his advertisement in another online marketers Newsletter in other to reach a wider audience than he could possibly do by starting his own newsletter. There are many well established online marketers that sell advertisement space in their newsletter to other entrepreneurs.Emails composed and sent with the purpose of establishing, fostering, retaining or encouraging customer loyalty or patronage.

In several corporate organizations, email marketing is preferred to orthodox marketing tools such as Direct Mailing, Print Newsletter and Placing of advertisements in subscription magazines and newspapers. The reason for the preference is not far-fetched.

Benefits of Email Marketing

1. It provides an entrepreneur the ability to communicate with a large audience at a relatively low cost.

2. The entrepreneur has the opportunity to communicate specific details to a targeted audience.

3. The delivery time is short.

4. The effect or performance of the email marketing campaign can easily be tracked.

5. Unlike a website that requires the audience to visit, Email marketing delivers the message to the audience.

6. More than half of internet users spend more time checking their Emails than any other activity online.

7. It affords the entrepreneur the opportunity to interact with potential customers. Messages can be structured in such a way that upon request by a potential customer, a predetermined series of responses are delivered automatically to the potential customer.

So what’s holding people back from using Email Marketing?

1. It takes some effort to design captivating email messages. Crappy email advertisements or newsletters don’t produce results.

2. It takes some effort to ensure that your email is actually delivered to the intended recipients. Email marketing is the most abused form of online marketing campaign. So there are lots of software that have been created to ensure that unsolicited emails, SPAM, don’t reach the intended recipients. We will talk more about this later.

3. It takes some effort to track the performance of email marketing campaigns. As an entrepreneur, you need to know for certain the return on investment from the marketing campaign. You want to know if the emails were actually read by the recipients.

4. Finally there is the danger of violating spam laws such as the United States CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) and the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003.

So, what can an online marketer do? If the Email Marketing System provides such fantastic benefits, there must be a way to overcome those hurdles. Well, there is a way.

Opt-In Email Marketing System

The Opt-In Email Marketing System provides ready solution for each of those hurdles listed above while retaining all the benefits of a traditional Email Marketing System.

Opt-In Email Marketing is a system whereby potential email recipients are requested to give permission that commercial emails should be forwarded to them from an online marketer. The email recipients will be requested via an opt-in form (squeeze webpage) to voluntarily fill in their names and email address in order to be added to the mail list of the online marketer. Once such request is made via the opt-in form, a confirmation link will be sent in an email to the email address filled into the opt-in form. The email will request that the recipient confirm that he or she requested to be added to the email list. If the confirmation link is not clicked by the recipient, no further emails will be sent to that particular email address. However, if the confirmation link is click, then the recipient will be added to the marketer’s email list for future correspondence.

The Opt-In Email Marketing System eliminates the issue of your emails being considered SPAM. Also, the Opt-In Email Marketing System ensures that each email sent to customers have embedded an unsubscribe link that will enable the recipient unsubscribe from the mail list. I recommend that you use an Opt-In Email Marketing System provided by a reputable company like Aweber or Getresponse. Even though the service will cost you money, it is better than getting involved in a lawsuit for unsolicited email.

Two Quick Tips For Your Email Marketing Campaign Startup

To avoid getting your Email Marketing Campaign classified as crappy because of poor design or message, get a reliable professional copy-writer to design each email message. He will ensure that the design and content of the email message is professionally done. That will reduce to the barest minimum the risk of your Marketing Emails being deleted without being read by the recipients.

Secondly, get the service of a reliable firm like Aweber or GetResponse to handle the delivery and tracking of your email marketing campaign. They will ensure that your email marketing campaign will be based on Opt-In Email Marketing System.

Ok, the post is getting too long. I will stop here for now and continue the discussion in future posts. If you have any comment or question, please drop it in the comment section. You can get free future updates and more tips on Email Marketing by subscribing to my RSS Feed. It is based on an Opt-In Email Marketing System. You can be assured that you will never get an unsolicited email from me. Cheers 😉

Tags: Advertising, Aweber, Business, Direct Marketing, Email Lists, Email Marketing, Entrepreneur, GetResponse, Internet Marketing, Marketing Campaign, Opt-In Email Marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur, Investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.