By Laura Smith
Email. When you hear the word, you may think of the stress-inducing madness that infiltrates your inbox every morning. Well think again. Email marketing is still one of the top ways to reach clients.
There are a few different ways to communicate with your clients through email. One way is through email newsletters. These direct emails are sent out regularly to provide updates, news and insights to your list. Transactional emails include those primarily for B2C users to confirm payments, send receipts for a product etc. Direct emails are used to promote a message or announcement.
Why is it so effective? Well for one thing, it’s fairly cheap. Most email providers charge one flat rate per year based on the number of sends. For clients with minimal recipients on their send list, the cost isn’t much at all. For another thing, emails sent through marketing platforms can pass through spam filters that would normally send an email with multiple recipients straight to the spam folder.
Also, emails can be easily customized. With providers such as MailChimp, design is as simple as dragging and dropping text, photos and images into the template you choose. Some email providers are a bit more complex. Those such as Silverpop allow users to create a customized email or e-newsletter using HTML code to create one-of-a kind templates.
So you’ve designed your email. What now? The great thing about email marketing is it allows you to target your sends to specific people, states, companies, interests and more. Want to send an email to all your clients in Florida only? No problem. Geo-targeting allows users to target to clients who live in specific places. Behavioral targeting does the same, but allows users to reach recipients who have a specific interest.
One important thing to remember before you send your email is that the recipients on your list MUST have opted in to receive your messages. If it is a first- time email, you can rent the list, but make sure to include a note that it is a one-time email and recipients can either opt in or opt out by clicking the included corresponding links. If you don’t do this, it is against the law in accordance with the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act.
Now that you’ve sent your email, you probably want to know how successful the send was. Email marketing software allows you to measure the ROI by recording the number of emails that were sent, how many bounced, how many opened, what links were clicked and so forth. From here, the user can decide on the next step they want to take in terms of sending a follow-up email out. Now that process is a whole other blog post in itself we will get into later…