Email Marketing is a great way to reach your audience without spending a lot of money.
Although the ways of communication in Social media are now expanded such as Twitter, Facebook etc., email still remains more efficient.
It is mainly aimed at professionals and those who have a business who want to win more customers and increase their sales.
Here are 3 basic steps to get your Email Marketing engine going.
1. Make your list.
To send email – you will need to have a list of email addresses to send to.
Care is needed here. We always send emails to people who have given us permission to do so (opt-in). It is a mistake to buy ready-made lists. There is a risk of seriously damaging your company’s reputation with email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. causing them to send all your emails to spam (even if they don’t deliver them).
Build your list by asking permission. Here is a clever way you can use. Give something free on your page in exchange for the email (ethical bribe).
For example an e-Shop can offer a discount coupon by asking for the email.
The idea here is to offer something for free – that will bring the visitor one step closer to the solution they are looking for (and found on your page in the first place).
2. Sign up for an Email Marketing Platform.
By registering on such a platform you have a number of tools and features (that Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. do not provide you) such as for example to create registration forms for your page, to send automated messages (auto-responder ), see how many people opened your emails, how many clicked on a link, and many other statistics and tools that will help you improve your messages, the interaction with your audience, and of course your sales.
3. Follow-up. After you get the Email?
The real Marketing has begun. Your goal is to make the (unknown) visitor get to know you, find interest in your services and products, and ultimately trust you.
You will achieve this by regularly following up with a series of emails. Be careful though. Don’t send one offer after another, as this will have the opposite effect.
These are the 3 basic steps of a Strategy that will help you start or improve your business’s Email Marketing.
At this point let’s see the reasons why someone should use Email Marketing for their business.
1. It is effective with little cost
Email Marketing compared to sending by mail or contacting by phone is several orders of magnitude cheaper (communication costs, man hours, etc.) and certainly more effective based on the number of people one can contact. Its effectiveness increases as long as your contact list is targeted and the content of your emails relevant and interesting to the recipients.
2. It’s quick and easy
Sending emails through an Email Marketing platform can be done very quickly and easily. The CLEVER NET platform has ready-made templates that you can use and adapt to your own needs or add your own ready-made template.
3. It is personalized & targeted
The more data you collect about your contacts, the easier it is to personalize your emails and make them more targeted. You can e.g. add the recipient’s name to each of your emails making them more immediate. You can also exclude contacts from your list based on specific criteria. For example, an offer that only concerns the city of Athens does not make sense to send to people who live outside of Athens.
3. Provides Statistics
With Email Marketing you can track the course of a campaign in live time. You can, for example, track how many recipients opened your emails, which links were clicked, which recipients no longer want to receive your emails, etc.
4. Gives immediate results
While other marketing tactics take time, even months, to show results, Email Marketing is immediate. Emails are sent directly to your list and you don’t have to spend days or weeks to reach your recipients or even wait for them to reach your site through search engines, advertising banners, blogs or social networks.
5. It automates your Campaigns
Unlike mail or other forms of marketing, Email Marketing can be automated, planning and organizing your campaigns weeks or months in advance. This means that you can prepare to send your emails and schedule sendings at future times.
6. It can increase your sales
Used correctly, Email Marketing can increase your sales, which is your ultimate goal. Either by gradually building your company’s brand, or by directly selling products.
The Risks of Using Email Marketing
1. Be branded as a spammer
One of the biggest risks and common mistakes made by first-timers in Email Marketing concerns the recipient list. To build a proper list you need patience and usually those who use Email Marketing want to quickly and easily find a large list of recipients, thinking that this way they will get immediate results. As a result they are driven to wrong ways of collecting emails (eg buy or rent) without regard to whether the owners of those emails actually want to be recipients of your emails. However, someone who does not want to receive your newsletter may not use the unsubscribe link, but simply mark it as spam. If this is done by many recipients you may end up being labeled by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) as a spammer, with all the negatives that entails.
2. Burn your list
One of the most popular reasons to unsubscribe from a newsletter service is emailing too often. Someone who is on your list may also be on other businesses’ lists. So imagine each of these businesses sending 3 or 5 emails a week to one email account. This account is bombarded with informational emails and while some of them may be interesting they end up going unread for days, getting deleted without even being read and eventually becoming spam.
3. Break the laws
Greek law allows you to send newsletters to multiple recipients, provided that the full details of the sender are clearly visible, as well as a link to unsubscribe from the list in case the recipient does not wish to receive further newsletters. CLEVER NET can make sure for you that your emails go out according to these rules.