When most people think of email marketing, they think of unwanted and irritating spam messages to be deleted. What most don’t realize is that there’s a right and wrong approach to email marketing; the right approach will make it into a very effective promotional tool. By building a list of target customers who are interested in your company’s latest news, you can easily turn these customers into long-time loyal buyers who will recommend your brand to others on a consistent basis. While email marketing may not seem as trendy as other types of digital marketing, it is an established promotional practice with a great deal of versatility.
How Email Marketing Can Work For You
One main advantage of email marketing is that it can reach a large number of subscribed readers quickly without the need for you to invest in expensive new software or other technologies. Automated software for organizing, scheduling, and bulk-sending your email newsletters and campaigns can be purchased for a reasonable price, and these programs also have tools to help you grow and track your subscriber list.
Depending on your target audience and their demographics, your email marketing campaigns will be effective if the content is meaningful to those customers. Your messages in those emails can be as simple as the announcement of a new product or service. They can alternately be more complex, with multiple eye-catching articles directly related to your brand. Some of the most popular content gives a persuasive demonstration how purchasing from you will help solve a specific problem for your customers. This tactic will help you build up a long-term relationship with your subscribers.
The Importance of Subscriber Lists
Before you can send your email newsletters to your business’s target audience, you need their permission to do so. Hence, the importance of the subscriber list they need to join in order to receive those marketing emails. One of your crucial and often most challenging tasks as a chief marketing officer is to give them incentives and good reasons to sign up.
Once those customers have signed up, they’re signing an agreement to receive these updates regarding your business. Not using an email marketing subscriber list is also known as spamming, and there are fewer quicker ways to harm your company’s reputation. Building a solid subscriber list of good sales leads takes time and patience, but the effort pays off in the long run.
Managing the Subscriber Lists Churn Rate
Every 12 months, 30% of your contact data becomes unusable. Unless you keep it current and up to date, you will end up sending coupons, gift cards, and news to the wrong people or wrong addresses. Alternatively, you will be wasting money connecting with the same person more than once, thinking that you actually have more than one person in front of you. Beyond the inefficiency cost involved in such operation, you are risking being penalized for spam.
In contrast, verifying, cleaning and consolidating your data using Data Operations tools such as RingLead will save you time and money chasing customers who will never respond. The key is to manage the email lists’ churn rate carefully by level setting your data once and continuously protecting it from invalidity and decay.
Creating Relevant and Timely Email Marketing Messages
Once you’ve researched your target audience and successfully added a healthy number of them to your subscriber list, now’s the time to decide on the content to include in your marketing emails. Successful email marketing messages set up your readers’ expectations and then meets them. Influential email newsletters contain a strong call to action that prompts your subscribers to take some additional step, such as clicking through to your company website.
Email marketing campaign management software includes tools to help you keep track of how many subscribers follow through. Lower percentages of this action indicate you may need to make some changes to your marketing messages. The next important decision to make is how often to schedule sending your email newsletters to your subscribers. A good thumb rule is, at least, one several times a week, but no more than one email sent per day.
Despite the perception of spam, email marketing can have the opposite effect as a tool for building your customer base and therefore your company’s profit margin over time. Provided you have the right approach and the dedication to growing a good subscriber list, you will end up seeing excellent returns on your relatively small investment in adding email marketing to your overall promotional efforts. As a CMO, formulating a solid email marketing campaign is well worth the time, work, and even the temporary setbacks that are common with this type of marketing effort.
by Shai Alfandary, Business2Community