Email marketing campaigns are inexpensive, quick and more effective than print mail campaigns. Of course, you have to do it right. If done wrong, you could suffer far more damage than a direct mail campaign could inflict.
This page comes under the section E-Commerce and Small Business.
So how do you do email marketing campaigns, and what are the issues you should be careful about? That's the topic of this article.
If you send unsolicited emails to all and sundry, not only would you be wasting your time and effort by not targeting real customers but you could also land in serious trouble if people file spam complaints to your mail services provider. The mails are also not likely to be opened and acted upon.
So the way to proceed is to get permission from email recipients to receive mails from you. How do you get such permission?
| Create a Great Image for Your Business through Press Releases, Articles,... |
 |
The best way is to build an opt-in email list yourself. Provide a subscription form at your website that interested readers can complete. If your website provide top value tips and help, many readers interested in your topic will subscribe. You can also increase the subscription rate by offering some incentive that is of value to this group of readers. If you surf the Web, you will find plenty of examples of such incentives. Look at how the effective ones manage to create a desire in readers' minds.
Another way to reach a targeted group without inviting trouble is to get mailing list owner mail your campaign to your target group. Mailing list owners build opt-in mailing lists of people interested in different topics. You can negotiate with them to send your campaign mails to your particular target group. However, this option might be far less effective than building your own dedicated mailing list. The people in such a dedicated list already know you, and have opted to receive mails from you in particular.
So the first rule of an email marketing campaign is to build a permission based list of email addresses of people interested in your kind of offer.
Decide at the outset what you want the campaign to achieve. Do you want it to be a direct mail campaign to sell a product or service? In that case, you would be drafting the mail more as a sales copy, with a link to your website's order page. Selling need not always be the objective. Listed below are some other major objectives.
Your mails should be purposefully designed to achieve the intended objectives.
You can send mails in text or HTML format. That latter is more interesting to view, and can also contain live links to your site and other locations. On the other hand, HTML mails cannot be read by all email programs, and are slower to download because of larger file size. Let the reader choose the desired format at the time of subscribing.
Personalize the mail to the maximum extent. Start by greeting the recipient by name. Adopt the tone of a friend and talk informally without getting too intimate or frivolous.
Attend to certain important issues that enhance the effectiveness of the mail. Use an attention-catching subject line that is also emotionally appealing to the reader. Be careful not to use phrases that can trigger spam filters (you might need to do some research to identify these phrases). Avoid attachments to email; attachments arouse the fear of viruses.
Include unsubscribe instructions, in case the reader wants to do so.
You can get mailing software that will take the addresses from a mailing list and create mails addressed to each recipient, including greeting them by their names. Such software can send out thousands of mails in little time, once the needed information has been provided.
What we have given above is only an overview of major issues. Before you actually do a campaign, take the trouble to learn the details. There are many mailing software vendors who would help you enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Return to Section Main Page How E-Commerce Benefits Small Business
Researchers estimate that by 2008 e-mail marketing revenues will surpass $1.8 billion dollars annually. Are you getting your share? According to Jupiter Research, 93 percent of U.S. Internet users consider e-mail their top online activity. E-mail is a fast, inexpensive, and highly effective way to target and address your audience.
Keep yourself informed on small business issues and technologies. Subscribe to Small Business RSS Feed