Email Marketing

Email Marketing Campaigns Email marketing is an ideal way to stay in touch with your current clients, or to expand and market to a large range of potential clients. There are five primary steps to any good email marketing plan:

Decide what you want to promote.
Are you releasing a new product? Do something change in your business process that would help distinguish you from your competition? Do you simply want to promote your entire business? There are 101 potential ideas to promote, but you need to narrow it down to one primary focus for the marketing campaign.

Select your email list (who are you going to send to).
There are a couple ways to do this, one of the easiest is to purchase your mailing list from a 3rd party company. Another is to export your list of current clients, and use that as your email list. Often times people have gone to networking meetings for years (Chamber of commerce, Rotary, etc) and gathered a large amount of business cards; you can scan these cards and generate a mailing list. Note: Spam filters get better and better everyday, and the rules for email marketing keep changing, so the best list is one that all the people on the list have voluntarily elected to be on. Simply scraping the internet for email addresses is not a good way to generate a list.

Generate the content, for your email and website
For most affective email campaigns, you are going to need copy. Either someone on your team needs to generate it, or you need to hire a copywriter. You need to generate content not just for the email campaign but also for your website landing page. A landing page is where you will link to from your email campaign allowing readers who want to learn more to go to your website for more information. The landing page is just as vital, if not more so than the campaign itself. Once you have captured a potential lead, and they come to your website, you need to ensure the content they see is directly related to your email campaign. It would be wrong to tell your user about a specific product in your email campaign, but then when they follow a learn more link you take them to the homepage of your website. The content in the email and the landing page need to be synergistic, all working together to solidify the client exception and relationship.

Select a mailing program, and send your campaign.
There are numerous email marketing programs on the market, ranging from free to several thousands of dollars. When selecting your program, you want to make sure the software is sufficient for you and meets your budget. Programs like Mail Chimp provide a free email service, but the free version includes a text ad in your email. Constant Contact offers affordable paid service, but they limit the amount of access you have to your template. Then there are programs like Interspire, that allow you full access to your templates and complete control over the code. However, unless you are a developer, managing the program can be a bit cumbersome. Depending on your particular needs, we will work together to find the right email program for you. NOTE: Please do not conduct email marketing via Outlook! I do not care how many or few people you are emailing, one sure fire way to get yourself labeled as a spammer is to send to more than 25 people at a time from Outlook.

Analytics – The overlooked final step of any campaign.
So you sent out your email campaign, breathed a huge sigh of relief when your boss got the email, but now what? Many campaigns stop at this step, and they simply believe their task is complete. Well certainly if you are only going to send one email campaign, and never plan to do so again, then you can just leave it alone. However, if you plan to continue email campaigns, analytics (statistics) on the success of your campaign will be vital. How many opens did you get, how about bounces, what was your click through rate, did anyone from a Hotmail email address open your campaign? The more you can garner from your analytics program, the better prepared you will be for your next campaign, not to mention more successful.

Long story short, email marketing can help your company in many ways, but unless you know what to look for, your campaigns may fall short of your expectations.

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