Why Email Marketing?

Email marketing offers a great way to keep in contact with existing customers and to find new ones. Mass mailing is both inexpensive and unlike most other methods of marketing it is completely measurable. It is worth looking in a little more detail at what it can offer and how email marketing works:

Compared to other methods of marketing, email marketing is relatively inexpensive

Over recent years, due to global economic circumstances thousands of businesses have switched from printed advertising to email marketing, primarily because of it’s cost. Email Blaster UK offer monthly mass mailing packages for £8.99, as the system is entirely web based there a no further costs for production, print costs or postage. Email marketing costs are completely transparent and the spend can be broken down to costing as little as half of one pence per email sent. When compared to direct postal mail this offers a saving of being nearly forty times cheaper.

Email marketing works!

With email marketing you can proactively keep your customers up to date with your latest offers, you can also start profiling your mail recipients by analysing the results of each mailing and looking at how various groups of people respond to various offers. This means that over a relatively short period of time you can start to build sub groups of customers who respond to different approaches. For example if one email marketing campaign contains a price related offer and you can see that 30% of your database clicked the links to this offer - then this group could be targeted with a specific email campaign that highlights their area of interest. Alternatively you could have a percentage of customers that prefer a sifter more consultative approach - again this group could then be targeted with a campaign that is less ’sales orientated’ and more advisory or service based. Using these methods to profile your email marketing customers will have a dramatic effect on your return on investment (ROI), meaning email marketing will quickly become your most effective method in your marketing mix.

Email marketing is instant

Email marketing is probably the fastest and easiest way to get your offers out to the market place. When compared to placing an advert in a magazine, or a direct postal mail campaign, email marketing really has no competition. If your business has physical stock or time based offers you need to get out to the market place before the competition, speed of marketing communications will also have a significant effect on your stocking charges. From confirming your customer offer, you can market this to your database via email marketing literally within minutes. Choose your newsletter or sales document template, add any images or text you need to, select your customer database as the mass mail recipient and click send. No more being tied to inflexible print deadlines or organizing logistics to print and stuff 10,000 direct mail letters and flyers.

It is measurable

Unlike any other method of marketing, email marketing is completely transparent and measurable, through online statistics and analytical tools it is a simple operation to calculate your return on marketing spend. When you send an email marketing campaign, the online software allows you to see how many people opened your email, the email addresses of people who opened it, did they then visit your website. It also shows you the failures, which email addresses failed or were incorrect. This offers an unrivaled ability to filter your clients into sub groups depending or their reaction to various methods of contact; as discussed earlier price or service related, different people respond positively to varying approaches. In trying economic times, marketing budgets are under greater pressure to provide a quantifiable ROI (return on investment) - often with magazine adverts and similar you are reliant on your sale staff recording the source of the lead and in reality this is rarely 100% accurate. Email marketing stats are completely automated, not reliant on staff recording the information and reporting it. This means that email marketing offers an instant report offering unrivaled accuracy.

Email marketing software is really easy to use

The Email Blaster UK online software is really easy to use and can be quickly picked up by staff of all technically proficiencies. It does not require any knowledge of HTML or other coding languages. The Email Blaster UK software processes some very complicated procedures in order to offer the ultimate marketing tool, all of this is automated and processed behind the scenes. The user interface is very intuitive and everything will look familiar and logical. It uses the same icon based operation as many of the standard popular PC word processing software packages. When you first fire up the system you will see a horizontal navigational bar, the idea is that you start on the right and work your way across in a small number of steps: start a new campaign > design the template > select which list of people to send it to > hit send > look at the results. The Email Blaster UK software even has an inbuilt library of email newsletter templates that are ready to use, you can add your own company logo and change the text within minutes via the online editor interface. This is a great way of hitting the ground running and sending out your offer quickly and easily. You can of course also design your own template from scratch, again this does not require any prior knowledge of HTML, simply upload any images you’d like to use and the online email newsletter editor to arrange your layout.

Legal requirements

In late 2002 the European Union introduced a new directive relating to email marketing: The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. The directive established the ’opt in’ regime, where unsolicited emails may only be sent by prior agreement of the recipient. This is can be done by asking potential recipients to register their interest via your website. Many sites nowadays will use a text entry box allowing visitors to add their address to your mailing list. It must of course clearly display that by doing so, visitors will receive periodic email newsletters at pre-defined intervals. In the U.K the directive has been law since 2003 and applies to all organisations that send out marketing by any form of electronic communication.

Its all about relationships

It is well known that sales to loyal customers are both easier and generally more profitable, the beauty of email marketing is that over time you can cultivate your list of subscribers into a loyal customer base. Once your email marketing recipients are happy to receive communications from you, with each mailing you will become a trusted source. Your email marketing newsletter can easily be personalized for each recipient, it will use use correct salutation and be addressed to your recipient directly. Small touches like this really help your viewer feel valued. Once your relationship has been established your subscriber database will, with every mailing be more included to use your services on a regular basis. Large lists can be distilled down over time to an extremely valuable source of business.