Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics available to small and medium business. It helps companies maintain strong relationships that translate into long-term customer loyalty and increased sales revenue.
Nurture campaigns keep your brand and your services top-of mind, making it more likely for your customers and prospects to buy from you than from your competitors.
Sending an email is just the end result of successful email marketing. Your campaigns depend in equal part on:
- A permission-based list
- Data quality & segmentation
- A targeted, well-crafted message
- Measuring and fine-tuning for optimization
Unless you apply this level of preparation and planning, why bother? You’ll end up with disappointing results and wasted time.
Permission-based email: it’s not just the law, it’s just common sense. Unwanted email goes straight to trash, spam, or junk. How you obtain and maintain your list is essential.
For most businesses, their customer and prospect database is one of their biggest assets. The usefulness (and thus the value) of a database diminish in direct proportion to how complete, detailed, and recent the contact information is.
In order to target your emails successfully, you’ll need to maintain the database and include sufficient detail to segment contacts by logical categories (industry type, demographics, purchase history, etc.).
Your email message must be based on the value to the recipient for them, not about your need to promote an offering. It must be timely, relevant, contain a clear call to action, and be measurable.
Email marketing analytics are required to evaluate what’s working – and what’s not – so you can revise, refine, and regroup. The right analytics help identify where prospects sit in the marketing funnel, thus helping you determine the best next step.
Consider email service providers (ESPs) such as Constant Contact and Swiftpage Email, who provide marketing capabilities beyond basic emailing. Additional features include integrated video, polling, landing pages, event planning, nurture marketing campaigns, surveys, and integration into CRM systems (including Sage ACT! and Salesforce.com.
Each ESP does different things well and should be evaluated based on what features best fit with what you’re trying to accomplish. Naturally, they also include reporting tools to measure effectiveness. Continue to analyze for optimization, no matter how well you think your campaigns are performing.
Why settle for good when great could be around the corner?
Learn how to avoid the Dirty Dozen Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes, courtesy of HubSpot and MarketingSherpa.