Reach your public to create a reach for your product or services

Email marketing is, as the name suggests, the use of email in marketing communications. The term covers email you send to a customer or potential customer. In general, though, it’s used to refer to:

• Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again
• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship
• Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people

You can think of these three main forms of email marketing as the electronic equivalent of:

• Direct mail
• Sending people a print newsletter
• Placing advertisements in subscription magazines and newspapers

There is, however, one extremely important difference – the issue of permission. That is known as “opt-in” which comes from someone who options to receive communication from you. Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission.

Essentially, you need an email address owner’s permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don’t have this permission, then the recipients of your mail may well regard your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email.

An example of permission is when your customer buys something from your online store and also ticks a box marked “please send me news about product updates via email”. You now have “permission” to send that person product updates by email, provided you also give them the opportunity to rescind that permission at any time.

Why is email marketing so popular?

64% of users check their email regularly during the day. 34% check it at least six times a day. – Gartner Report

Email marketing is so popular because:

• sending email is much cheaper than most other forms of communication
• email lets you deliver your message to the people (unlike a website, where the people have to come to your message)
• email marketing has proven very successful for those who do it right

Let’s review the three types of email marketing:

1. Direct email

Direct email involves sending a promotional message in the form of an email. It might be an announcement of a special offer, for example. Just as you might have a list of customer or prospect postal addresses to send your promotions too, so you can collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses.

You can also rent lists of email addresses from service companies. They’ll let you send your message to their own address lists. These services can usually let you target your message according to, for example, the interests or geographical location of the owners of the email address.

2. Retention email

Instead of promotional email designed only to encourage the recipient to take action (buy something, sign-up for something, etc.), you might send out retention emails.

These usually take the form of regular emails known as newsletters. A newsletter may carry promotional messages or advertisements, but will aim at developing a long-term impact on the readers. It should provide the readers with value, which means more than just sales messages. It should contain information which informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.

3. Advertising in other people’s emails

Instead of producing your own newsletter, you can find newsletters published by others and pay them to put your advertisement in the emails they send their subscribers. Indeed, there are many email newsletters that are created for just this purpose – to sell advertising space to others.

This is part of our HIGH IMPACT, MULTI-CHANNEL RESPONSE PACKAGE