Effective Email Marketing – Creating a Relevant Email
Email marketing for some businesses has always been the task that has been left to the end. The task that you want to do but just don’t quite get round to it and before you know it weeks have past and you still haven’t got round to it. When considering an email marketing campaign there are a number of questions you will ask yourself. The first question is quite an obvious one: Why should I?
Email Marketing is a great way to keep your customers informed of your business activities and potentially gain more website visitors. Sending your website audience an email re-assures your them that they have not been forgotten about. Perhaps you want to send them an email that is simply informative about promotions, recent activity, company expansion etc. The email reader will interpret this as an active website that has real people behind it that makes the effort to keep the reader interested. If the email content is of interest and attracts the reader to continue to the website then you have succeeded in gaining more website traffic. But don’t get lazy.
Always remember why you are sending an email and what you expect to get out of it. If you simply want to inform the client of recent business activity then you would expect that a person will open and read the email and possibly venture onto the website. If you want to promote a product then do exactly that. Send an email with the promotion, grab the readers attention and attract them to visit the site to buy the product. There are many companies that use email campaigns that don’t meet their expectations because the email is has no relevance to the desired goal. Misleading emails can put readers off and you will be a potential customer down. Your email content must give the user a reason to visit the webpage that it references. Amazon is a great example of effective email content. I recently bought new guitar plectrums from Amazon and since I am a loyal Amazon customer I received follow up emails. These emails were interesting to me as they listed related items that might be of use to me. It listed guitar tuners, guitar strings, guitar stands etc at great prices. It turns out I was looking for a guitar stand therefore the email was relative to my previous purchase and Amazon benefited from another sale. This is effective email marketing in all its glory.
The Amazon example above illustrates a thorough and complex email marketing plan that is based on customer tracking, order history and customer trends. Not all email campaigns will be as complex as this.
Email Marketing is an effective marketing method and if used correctly then you can achieve great results. Always keep in mind the customer and make your email content relevant to the customer.