How can email marketing drive your business?

“Email marketing gets a lot of positive press. But strip away the PR, and what are the real benefits to a business like yours? Our first clinic has the answers…”

Ronen Yaari, OpenMoves
Questions? Drop me an email or call!

According to the DMA, $1 spent on email marketing in 2007 produced an estimated $48.56 in sales.

That remarkable return on investment explains the huge interest in email marketing as a revenue source for businesses large and small.

But what exactly is email marketing? What can it do for your business? And how do you set up a successful email marketing system?

As the name suggests, email marketing is the use of email to send marketing messages to your customers or prospects. The two most common forms are direct and relationship email.

Direct email and its benefits

Direct email aims to get an immediate response to profit your business.

This response might be to request more info on a service, register for an event, purchase a product, download a white paper, etc.

Common examples are:

• Promotional emails—You send a specific offer to a list of customer or prospect email addresses (the electronic equivalent of direct mail).
• Ads in other people’s emails—You place your advertisement or offer in emails other people are already sending to their own lists of email addresses (equivalent to an ad or insert in a magazine or newspaper).

Relationship email and its benefits

Relationship email is intended to impact and influence people in the long term.

A regular email newsletter, rich in content useful to the reader, is an excellent way to reinforce customer loyalty, strengthen customer relationships, and build customer trust.

In fact, online guru Jakob Nielsen has described starting such an e-newsletteras “probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence.”

Email's advantages

Email is more than just the online equivalent of direct mail, a print newsletter, or a newspaper ad. Done right, it's much more efficient and effective. Why?

• Email is low-cost. It’s not free, as some would have you think. But it’s vastly less expensive than, say, printing and mailing out a direct-mail piece — so it’s a low-risk investment.
• Recent surveys by Forrester Research found that email produces retail sales at an average cost per order of less than $7 (compared with $26.75 for paid search, for example).
• Email is measurable. When you send out an email through a low-cost delivery service, you get back loads of actionable data on how well you're doing.
• Email enables targeting. This data allows you to refine your strategy and content to get even better results next time around.
• Email supports your other marketing activities. You can use email to send event invitations, coupons, sales reminders, and other messages that help your existing sales and marketing efforts.
• Email goes directly to the customer. Websites, magazine ads, and other marketing methods rely on your customer finding you. Email lets you deliver your message straight to the customer.

What’s the catch?

We know email marketing brings great returns through both direct and indirect revenue. But as with any marketing technique, these returns depend on the right kind of application.

The email marketing world has its own special characteristics that you need to account for.

So just how do you set about building a successful email marketing system for your business?

We’ll cover the required tasks in subsequent clinics, but here’s an overview…

Task 1: First, you need to understand the different email marketing approaches you might take. How do you decide which works best for your business?

Task 2: Next, you need to find the right people to send your emails to—not just any people, but those who will respond best to your messages. How do you build and manage an email address list?

Task 3: Now it’s time to produce the kind of email content that gets the response you want. What copywriting principles work best in email?

Task 4: This content is only part of the package. You must also create the right “email envelope.” What layouts and formats give you the best chance of impacting your audience?

Task 5: You have your emails and a list of addresses. Now you need to manage the delivery process. How do you ensure the emails you send get in front of the recipients?

Task 6: Finally, you need to evaluate your results and adjust your approach accordingly. What numbers should you measure, and how can they help you refine your system?

Our last clinic (#8) will explain how to manage the development and application of this system to produce a winning email marketing system.